Taj Mahal. A beautiful mausoleum that in popular culture, in poetry and in cinema, has come to embody deathless romance. Princess Diana on her much celebrated visit to India posed alone on a bench with the Taj as a backdrop just to rub her loneliness in and to make the absence of her spouse obvious . Less famous men and women stand before the monument and for a few moments try to imagine what it is about love that drove a king to make this flamboyant gesture towards his dead wife. There is something about marble, moonlight, human-craftsmenship and the investment of collective emotion that has made the Taj into more than just a heritage site.
It is more than just overblown architecture. It is a symbol of the human desire for permanence that sent Shakeel Badayuni and Sahir Ludhiyanvi into a romantic-socialist poetic debate about whether it was a universal emblem of love or a King’s arrogant sneer at those who could not afford to build marble edifices for their wives.
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There is nothing anywhere in the world that comes even close to the romantic lore of the Taj but to understand why certain buildings become emblematic of romance is hard to judge. Or even why they come to represent emotion more than just brick, metal and mortar. Consider the Empire State Building. There are taller buildings in America and perhaps even more spectacular in scale and design but popular culture has invested in this structure, a certain amount of drama and cinematic sub-text.
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It all began when in the 1933 film, King Kong, our giant hero climbed in desperation atop the Empire State building to defy death but after being attacked by airplanes, fell to a spectacular end. To commemorate the 50th year of the film, in 1983, a 90-foot, inflatable King Kong was placed above the observation deck. Some of us will remember the 2005 remake of the film with a similar climax. Disaster films like Independence Day have gleefully destroyed the building, knowing very well, the emotional impact of the act on the audience.
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One of the prime movers of popular culture, Andy Warhol made a silent film on the building in 1964. It was simply called Empire and was a eight-hour long, unbroken shot of the Empire State Building at night, in stunning black-and-white detail. From tragedy to romance, the building has come circle.
In the 1939 film Love Affair, the building was turned into a backdrop of a romantic reunion when a couple decide they will meet each other here after sorting their lives.
The film was remade in 1957 (An Affair to Remember) and it starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, and was directed by Leo McCarey. This film turned the Empire State Building into a narrative of longing and wistfulness because of the way Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) and Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr) negotiate their complicated love life with the building at its centre. After a life- changing cruise the couple agree to meet at the top of the Empire State Building in six months’ time till an accident alters their lives.
Such was the resonance of this story that in the 1993 classic Sleepless in Seattle, both the Empire State Building and An Affair to Remember, played key roles in bringing together two mismatched individuals. A widower with a child and a woman engaged to another man.
One of the most striking scenes in the film is when Meg Ryan’s Annie has decided that she is chasing an illusion but then on the evening of Valentine’s Day, sees the Empire State Building light up to create a glorious red heart and takes this as a sign to give love another chance. And meets her soul mate on the observatory deck.
There is dramatic and cinematic potential in any building if you look closely. Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code and later a film based on the book speculated on the mythology of The Louvre Pyramid (Pyramide du Louvre), a glass and metal structure in the main courtyard of the Louvre Palace in Paris.
From world-famous landmarks to Gaudi’s quirky apartment building, Casa Mila, architecture has been used as a cinematic backdrop many times. Casa Mila was used to great impact by director Michelangelo Antonioni in his 1975 Jack Nicholson starrer The Passenger. In India, buildings are often used without a emotional reference as in the Vijay Amritraj production Jeans where a song was picturised across almost all the famous architectural wonders of the world.
Many Hindi film songs have been picturised with the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop. Tere Ghar Ke Saamne (1965), one of the few films made about architecture in India had a memorable song picturised in the Qutub Minar.. just to emphasise the fact that space is a narrative and architecture, an intrinsic part of the never ending human story.
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This story was earlier published in the student edition of The New Indian Express, Chennai
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is a mother, an RJ , an artist. She runs Unboxed Writers from a rickety computer , edited Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, authored Perfect Eight and earns a lot of joy through her various roles and hopes that some day working for passion will pay in more ways than just one. And that one day she will finally be able to build a dream house, travel around the world and look back and say, “It was all worth it.”