This fall, UA architecture students will look to a familiar medium — film — for design inspiration. The weekly School of Architecture film series will debut at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 24, with a screening of Robert Lepage’s 1995 film “Le Confessional” in Vol Walker 103. The films will be introduced by guest speakers and are free and open to the public.

Other directors featured in the series are David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky and Pedro Almodóvar.

Aaron Gabriel, an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Architecture and a project designer with the School’s Community Design Center, organized the series to sharpen students’ observation skills.

 “I have selected films that embody a particularly strong spatial and temporal structure,” Gabriel said. “They will get the students thinking about space and time in a new way. Good designers are always looking, and the allied visual arts always bear fruit in terms of new ideas.”

A combination workshop and seminar, the course will draw on interdisciplinary readings in film studies, philosophy, architecture, and architectural theory.

“The readings will provide a framework for students to perceive and understand the spatial organization of particular films,” Gabriel said. Following each screening, the students will discuss and sketch the spatial logics in each film. 

“How do you untangle all of the narratives and draw them? And what role do architectural spaces play in the film — for example, the church tower in Hitchcock’s 'Vertigo’? These are some of the issues that the students will investigate this semester,” Gabriel said.

Each student will produce a publication-quality pamphlet of the semester’s work, which will focus on a multi-media mapping of the spatial structure of a single film. Students also will help to organize the series by preparing a film poster and a public introduction to at least one film during the semester.