Halden Prison

Invited by Wenders to direct one of the architecture documentaries in the series Cathedrals of Culture, Michael Madsen included Halden prison, to remind us that prisons are also cultural realities.

Although Danish artist and film director Michael calls his films documentaries, they are treated as art projects from the very start. The documentary element lies in their focus on real places and strongly political themes.

Halden Prison, or the nuclear-waste bunker of Into Eternity, are real places that can be classified as phenomena – something that can be directly observed in their entirety. Madsen strives to provide an objective and non-judgemental portrayal, achieved by being both extremely precise and as abstract as possible. Every parameter of the expressive medium is meticulously pondered to create an abstraction inspired, says Michael, by Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni.

Madsen hopes that this will allow it to break away from the restrictive concept of video as a medium that portrays true reality and increase public participation. The abstraction process allows the audience to form a new relationship with the object explored and stimulates levels of interpretation not necessarily linked to recognisable values, prejudices or common slogans.

Michael describes the space and via this the people who inhabit, use and endure it in a way that steers the conversation to the subject of architecture. He believes that, if he were an architect, he would share Frank Lloyd Wright and Jørn Utzon’s obsessive and painstaking attention to detail and the elements that construct a space; if he were dean of a school of architecture, he would ask each student to design a park or garden because a project that takes decades to come to completion raises issues that go beyond the immediate representation of the present.

Michael Madsen, <i>Halden Prison</i>, Halden, Norway — Michael Madsen, *Halden Prison*, Halden, Norway

The Holocaust memorial in Berlin is one of his favourite works because it is an abstract landscape devoid of anything that literally resembles the events it wishes to remember. Despite this, it manages to represent people present, past and probably future. It works on a communication level that is timeless. At the end of the conversation, Michael seems to agree with Peter Eisenman, wondering whether it is possible to imagine buildings less directly connected to their time and so less intent on interpreting and reproducing a specific social and power system.

It is perhaps this love of observing the world that prompted Wim Wenders, in 2013, to ask him to direct one of the architecture documentaries in the series Cathedrals of Culture. Michael Madsen suggested Wenders include a prison among all the other buildings that more obviously celebrate culture: museums, theatres and libraries. His project was a reminder – had we forgotten – that prisons are also cultural realities.

The prison building is the expression of a vaster and more general modern rational culture that has become more sophisticated over time, to the degree that it now hides behind the domestic and accommodating appearance of Norway’s Halden Prison, the “world’s most humane prison.” At the same time, the cathedral of culture chosen by Madsen is an expression of a Norwegian and Northern-European culture that has taken the very notion of rationality to the extreme.

The film camera pans over and through all the prison spaces: the rooms, corridors, sports grounds and the walkways, control/inspection rooms, mini-supermarket, isolation cell, chapel and family-visit house. Every space has a role and function in the rehabilitation technology.

Michael Madsen mainly shows the groups of individuals and their physical/mental states via the background spaces. The people and space are portrayed with the same degree of abstraction because, basically, they are both substance of the same power machine and together they make it possible to decipher the phenomenon the documentary set out to represent in its entirety.

The building itself is the narrating voice, one that is both informed and naive. It asks what life is like on the other side of the concrete wall– the last scrap of monumentality and brutality left in this very domestic Halden. It declares its ignorance of the “real” world and “normal” society, that same normality to which the prison rehabilitation aspires and from which it is inevitably segregated. The institution is asked to mould its inmates in the image of the standard Norwegian citizen and paradoxically this is achieved anachronistically. All is revealed not by the structure of the custodial sections but by the house used for family visits. The spatial organisation and aesthetic of the house are straight out of a “manual on the happy Northern-European family home” and reproduce a domestic environment designed for the nuclear family – mother, father and two children – which certainly does not reflect today’s far more diverse Norwegian society. As a result, observers feel alienated before an institutional entity that is torn between an attempt to (passively) emulate a society it does not know and an attempt to build that selfsame “normal” society via rational action on the individuals it hosts and must rehabilitate.

The way the documentary explores the building empties the journalistic definition of the “world’s most humane prison” of its meaning, not because it is not true but because the all-encompassing representation of Halden Prison as a phenomenon questions the very notion of humane. This “humane” (and consequently the very notion of “humanity”) prison that seems so familiar and the opposite of calculating and rational brutalism hides but does not exclude a violence that is congenital to humans and institutions created to maintain social order.

Are we still in the Foucault eddy? Are we still trapped in that sense of impotence that the modern intellectual cannot overcome before a spatial machine that is a failure even when tending towards perfection, as in the case of Halden Prison, and striving to express the best possible intentions – the factory of virtue – because invested with a power system that has become self-regulatory?

Since 2010, Danish artist and film director Michael Madsen has written and directed four documentaries: Into Eternity: a Film for the Future (2010); The Average of the Average (2011); Halden Prison (2014) and The Visit (2015).

Halden Prison

Invited by Wenders to direct one of the architecture documentaries in the series Cathedrals of Culture, Michael Madsen included Halden prison, to remind us that prisons are also cultural realities.

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