“Consider what the ruin has meant, or might mean today: a reminder of the universal reality of collapse and rot; a warning from the past about the destiny of our own or any other civilization; an ideal of beauty that is alluring exactly because of its flaws and failures; the symbol of a certain melancholic or meandering state of mind; an image of equilibrium between nature and culture; a memorial to the fallen of an ancient or recent war; the very picture of economic hubris or industrial decline; a desolate playground in whose cracked and weed-infested precincts we have space and time to imagine a future.” (Dillon 2014, 5)

From Trümmerfilm to Andrei Tarkovsky, from Italian Neorealism to science-fiction, cinema has entertained “a century-long obsession with the image of ruins,” due partly to “cinema’s and the ruin’s common function to visualize time and history in modernity.” (Moltke 2010, 396) Fiction films have tended to portray ruination as imposing remnants of defunct empires or regimes, the rubble left behind by warfare, or dystopian skeletons of bygone civilizations.

In an era of “an intensified and renewed awareness of the ruin and states of ruination” (Cairn and Jacobs 2017, 182), documentaries, hybrid, and experimental films meditating on dilapidated architecture have been proliferating (films by Patrick Keiller, Patricio Guzmán, or Dane Komljen, to name a few). Since the ruin spatializes time and temporalizes space, it is no surprise that filmmakers’ heightened interest in history and abandoned symbolic spaces has found a privileged figure in the ruin.

The complex temporality of the ruin wrestles with the specific temporality of cinema, whereas its fragmented spatiality grapples with the fragmentation of the film frame and editing. Filming and observing ruins – not merely as a setting, but by foregrounding their phenomenality, historical importance, and symbolism – acknowledges that something is “deficient or lacking in original unity” (Ginsberg 2004, xvii). The sight of a ruin acts as a rip in the fabric of the film image, undermining its purported unity from within by its very configuration.

“Ruins merrily transgress and collapse a whole set of binaries: transience/persistence, nature/culture, attraction/repulsion, power/vulnerability, potential/purposelessness, abandonment/appropriation, presence/absence, aestheticization/abjection.” (Edensor and DeSilvey 2013, 479) When these binaries are preserved rather than resolved, the peril of a fetishizing ruin gaze, reactionary ruinophilia or ‘ruin porn’ seems to dwindle. Like landscapes, ruins remain dynamic as long as they elude fixed representational patterns, and the ethics and aesthetics embedded and merged in them are incessantly reflected on and remapped. Producing a sense of out-of-placeness, simultaneously instituting “disorder and semiotic and material excess” (Edensor 2005, 62), dynamic ruins thwart notions of fixed identities and territories in favor of fluid and ever-transforming relations with the historical world.