The Titlebar Archive: Gattaca

Architecture While we await the moment BBC Four give Victoria Coren the budget to complete her documentary about corners, Jonny Morris offers up this quite interesting blog post about staircases in drama:

The staircase can even be seen as a metaphor for death. It is a ‘stairway to heaven’, a place of execution, a sequence of evenly-spaced horizontal wooden ledges rising upon the diagonal that connect stability to instability, the known with the unknown, the past with the future, the living with the dead, the ground with the first or second floor (depending upon whether or not you are American). Within each step lurks the inevitable threat of violence, of the step giving way, of an ankle twisting, a foot slipping, a neck breaking, a crash—zooming, and a corpse lolling with wide open eyes on the hard stone floor. To me, the staircase functions in a liminal space, a space fraught with danger, serving as a metaphor for the series as a whole. "

There's only really one response to this:



One of my favourite staircases in films continues to be the symbolically superb spiral in Gattaca.