Stephanie M. Kim

My friends and I visited Boston, and I was immediately taken by the T-stations. Small, vibrantly colored tiles lined the intermediary passageways between the entrance and the platform. This photo was taken at Downtown Crossing, and I matched the bright orange tiles on the left with the same color for the originally grey tiles to my right (Figure 1). At the platform, there were single-seated marble benches that were both functional yet overly decorative.

I focused on the transitional space because it totally strips the passengers of their individuality, becoming bodies moving up or down. My stylistic choice of the TV static image with the train ETA was partly inspired by the title cards of Jean-Luc Godard, known for his French New Wave films and his “anti-cinema” credo.

A couple of years ago, when I first ventured into art house cinema, Criterion’s popular recommendation was Bande à part (Band of Outsiders). After watching the film, I remember being super disengaged from it, but its title card of the faces and the eyes switching back-and-forth for ~45 seconds was so salient to me. Every now and then, I’d revisit the title card again and again. Even though I had not been a fan of his films, I would obsess over his title cards for their astonishing typography.

During a winter break, I revisited the classics of French New Wave films (François Truffaut, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, etc.), and I reluctantly switched on Godard’s debut, Breathless (1960). I think my prefrontal cortex must have expanded by then, because after that film, I was so perplexed yet so intrigued by his films. When I had initially watched his films years ago, I was so wired to seek out linear, straightforward narratives, but now I was at a place where my brain didn’t cling onto that pattern anymore. I admired the way he challenged narrative conventions at the time, especially when cinema was the predominant technological medium that immersed spectators into its reality; they were unable to separate themselves from what they were viewing. He often played with sound-image misalignment, sense of time, and disrupted continuity. Oh, and he looooved typography!

This animation is a small tribute to Godard’s style. I often think about this cognitive detachment that audiences had with cinema then, and now, how we autopilot throughout public spaces. The perspective is a diagonal bird’s eye view, concentrating from the top of the stairs, house right. Initially, it can be assumed that it’s the POV of someone’s eye, but it’s more detached.

I created title cards that mimic the subway countdown clocks, signaling something’s broken. Instead of watching passengers progress from this liminal space to the platform or exit, it traps them in this repetitive loop to repeat the same action over and over. Yet at the same time, I reject the idea of linear time because their movements are indistinguishable from those of the past.

Btw, here’s the free font that I downloaded, a recreation by the design firm Carvalho Bernau: Jean-Luc.