The Trojan Cinema: A Confabulation of AlKhayam

Abstract

In 1956, the premier of the film, Helen of Troy, took place in the newly finished building complex of Al Khayam; a 1,500 seat cinema engulfed by a hotel located in Baghdad, Iraq. The opening of the cinema happened to fall at a time where the tale based film had just recently come out, it was perhaps an innocent choice that fortuitously predicted the trojan horse-like quality of the architectural vessel. The theater’s witnessing of and adaptation to political events has revealed its double consciousness; it at once houses a spectacle and is one itself. “To be afflicted with confabulation is to be of two minds, to be in two places at once, to experience, counterfactually, simultaneous irreconcilable truths.” Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney in Confabulation: Storytelling and Architecture. The Trojan Cinema inverts the use of architecture as a weapon or a trope in an attempt to create a confabulated place of positive suspension. Architecture … The Trojan Cinema, was simultaneously weaponized and destroyed. And in both cases, through the gift of giving, or a given gift. By examining and utilizing the relationship between storytelling/myth and the sustainment of place/architecture, this project attempts to create a cinema of convalescence; a space of celebration of the abject through incantation. The oscillating confabulated space is presented through analogical layering, creating and engendering an epic of sailing shadows.