Escher’s “Relativity” has been recreated in mass-market movies as well, for example, the room where the final confrontation scene in Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” (1986) takes place, and the moving stairs scene in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” directed by Chris Columbus in 2001. In Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception” two episodes evoke and attempt to explain the Penroses’ “continuous staircase”, and characters climbing the stairs recall Escher’s“ Ascending and Descending”. Escher’s stairs also appear in the cartoon series “The Simpsons” and “Futurama” among others.
Staircases play key roles in the plots of many Alfred Hitchcock movies, notably in “The Lodger: a Story of the London Fog” (1927), “The 39 Steps” (1935), “Vertigo” (1958) (V1, p. 176) and “Psycho” (1960). The director used stairs to manipulate the viewer’s reaction and create a rollercoaster effect. As Hitchcock’s heroes go down and up stairs, their movement reflects the waxing and waning of suspense.
Barber of Seville, 2018, Boston Lyric Opera, set design by J. Noulin-Mérat
Probably the best-known staircase scene in the history of cinema is the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”. Cameraman Eduard Tisse recounted that he used sharp light and shadow to create drama in the frame. The film crew found more and more expressive opportunities as filming progressed on each of the 120 steps. The abstract idea of oppression is embodied in the drama of steps turned symbol of national pain. The scene is a tragic plea for revolutionary action, a metaphor for the confrontation between good and evil.
Penrose Steps in the movie Beginning, 2010, directed by Christopher Nolan
Here one specific episode became the emotional embodiment of the entire epic of 1905. […] One part took the place of the whole. […][9]
The stairs in Rene Magritte’s 1936 painting “Forbidden Literature”, which addresses the duality of the world and the transition to another space, play a completely different role. Here among multiple absurd elements, only the stairway, based on that of the artist’s Brussels apartment, represents “this side” of reality, symbolizing a familiar part of our surroundings. This juxtaposition of prosaic biographical detail with mythology and text is what gives Magritte’s works their strange surreal character.
Frame from the film Battleship Potemkin, 1925, director Sergei Eisenstein
In the Chapuisat Brothers’ multi-story architectural installation “Hyperspace” (V1, p. 249), created in 2005, the stairs fill their original function. They connect various levels of a large-scale (over 2150 square feet) art labyrinth, in which the viewer is invited to explore the internal structure of imaginary space.
Unlike his predecessors, the German artist Art van Triest completely rejects both the functionality and the symbolism of the staircase in order to focus exclusively on its “skeleton”. Most of his sculptural works, installations (V2, p. 206) and drawings (V2, p. 174) from the 2010s are based on a simply drawn outline of a staircase with broken and deformed steps, twisted into a Moebius band so that the ends meet. Studying the physical properties of this simple architectural form, van Triest perceives “first principles”, discovering what Schopenhauer called:
“…those ideas, which are the lowest grades of the objectivity of will; such as gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, those universal qualities of stone, those first, simplest, most inarticulate manifestations of will; the bass notes of nature; and after these light, which in many respects is their opposite.”