A bit late

Neat Freaks

Herbert Matter for Knoll Inc. (via Bard Graduate Center, which has a Knoll Textiles show in May)

Watching  the new documentary, The Visual Language of Herbert Matter, only reinforced my idea of Things Organized Neatly as a continuation of the 20th century design project. Matter’s work, particular his postwar work for Conde Nast and Knoll Inc. organized things neatly over and over again. The Bertoia chairs become fabric swatches, the fabric swatches a pinwheel. Or one sees the knives and forks and plates (in the film, I couldn’t find an image online except for these paintbrushes) as a sort of troop movement across the table. A grid is always latent. The hangover from Matter’s early photocollage work (Switzerland, snow, skis, diagonals) is in the layering of those grids to create shallow depth. Obvious in the painters cover above, less so in the Bertoia chair ad where text, upholstery and wire chair all float on separate-but-aligned planes.

The documentary is screening this spring (dates available here; next U.S. shows in Richmond TONIGHT and Pasadena 3/31) and will be available on DVD in the fall.

Read the rest here.

On Knowing Where The End Is

I showed my NYU architecture criticism class the recent documentary on Julius Shulman, Visual Acoustics, last week. (Shulman died last year, and this Fast Company slideshow was one among many tributes to his work.) I had to stop the doc before it was done, I got so restless. While the material was fascinating, and Shulman, along with his follow 90-year-olds, charming, the film seemed uncertain in intent and baggy in construction. We never paused for long on any of the photographs, so gorgeous in their stillness, so active in the recession of the lines. I could have spent all morning at Case Study House #22, by architect Pierre Koenig, the site of Shulman’s most famous image and (at the time of the film) still inhabited by its original owners. Instead the photos swooped by in timelines, swishing the 1920s into the 1930s into the 1950s into the 1970s, Schindler and Neutra and Case Studies and gas stations and Lautner. We got jazzy fragments of animated history, Adolf Loos as a cartoon character, the world’s shortest account of modernism, and a too-brief diagram of what might have made Shulman’s photographs special (one-point perspective). Talking heads sitting, not moving, in front of tableaux of famous chairs. Tom Ford, looking far too handsome for such a crowd, gets the best line: “The houses never look as beautiful in person as they do in Julius’s photographs.”

By the time we came full circle to the Disney Concert Hall, past the bad old days of postmodernism, when Julius couldn’t bear to shoot, past an infomercial for the Taschen Shulman book, I was done. And so were my students. The end was nigh… but where was it? The film had no shape, it just went on and on. It didn’t really tell me the secret of Shulman’s success, and it didn’t let me dwell in Mad Men-era nostalgia. It was neither informative enough technically or gorgeous enough visually to hold my attention for more than an hour.

That restlessness was a familiar feeling, and I realized it is one I often get reading online. There is a point soon after you begin reading any long blog post where your screen is filled with an uninterrupted column of text. On either side there may be landmarks to indicate how far you have come or how far you are going (link lists, Twitter feeds, ads) but eventually, as your eye flicks past 1000 or so words, there will just be the text and nothingness.This tends to make me nervous. I should really be writing something myself. How long have I been reading? How long is this going to go on? Do I get another picture?

When you read a magazine you always have some sense of the end (except in the New York Times Magazine, with its infuriating multiple jumps). Maybe you always flick through to see the whole layout before you start reading. Maybe you just know, in New York Magazine, it can’t be more than eight pages. You have expectations and the physical magazine gives some shape to the experience. The iPad must solve this problem to a certain extent, by reorganizing text on a page, but will people virtually “flip” before they start reading? Or will some other visio-spatial icon let us know how much focus we need to bring?

When I have written long I have often divided my points into three parts (that’s just the way my mind works) in hopes people would keep going, knowing I as writer was heading for a conclusion. But stream-of-consciousness blogging (or stream-of-consciousness-style blogging) doesn’t really give you that sense of security. Paradoxically, knowing where the end is, at least for me, makes the middle more interesting.

All Rubble Is Not Alike

I watched Manufactured Landscapes in the weeks before Christmas, and it was just too depressing to post about in the run-up to gift day. Want a new digital camera? Watch as e-waste pollutes the rivers and consumes the lives of Chinese villages? Want something beautiful from abroad? Watch as tankers go to their unquiet rest in Bangladesh, torn apart by men and boys in flip-flops, slipping in the crude.

The documentary, based on the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, is much more disturbing and depressing than his photographs. Those large-format prints make a sublime beauty out of the most desolate landscapes, the strata of polluted soils showing as flaming highlighted hills, the hills of discarded tires beautified by the tolling of the O shapes in your eyes. Burtynsky says in the film that he tries to make his images devoid of commentary—he is not a documentary photographer, but an art photographer—in order not to turn anyone off. But the film, which loosely covers his taking of the photos in the series, at a string of locations in Asia, with brief inserts of his TED talk, can’t be anything but political. Watching a series of young Chinese women perform repetitive assembly tasks in a vast, gorgeous, color-coded (part and people) factory makes you feel crazy inside. And the cyclical end of those products, also in China, makes you feel sick inside.

Burtynsky’s formalism, and the repetition of specific forms across his many projects, creates some categorical problems. There are a lot of mountains. Many of them might be described as piles of rubble. But all rubble is not alike. Some rubble is circuit boards, some is tires. End-of-use, pollutants, in China they are made and to China they will return. So far so good. But what about the hills of polluted soil, stained by iron ore or coal dust? What about the hills of bricks of towns being taken down for the Three Gorges Dam? I suppose you could argue that these are all bad hills, negative hills, but in one case the hill needs to be saved, in another not produced elsewhere, in another not in place.

And what about Shanghai, where the rubble has been cleared away and replaced by shiny buildings. Is that better? I felt unsettled by the film, but also irritated at it and its subject’s refusal to engage with the cultural context for the images in any depth. It opens with Burtynsky saying that he realized man was making new landscapes on the planet and wanted to document them. OK, fine. But it feels a little too late for this observation to be interesting.

In a F.O.G.

Image of DZ Bank, Berlin, by Manuela Martin

The fall semester is not yet over, and I have been plunged into spring semester planning. I am teaching architecture criticism again, this time to undergraduates in NYU’s Urban Design and Architecture Studies program. I am thinking of adding films for the first time, partly as a fill-in for days when written critiques are due and few students actually do the reading assignment (2.5 hours is a long time when no one has anything to say but me), partly as a way to show a different form of architectural criticism, partly to give them something else to critique. The problem may be in keeping my mouth shut.

I started my pre-viewing with Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack’s 2005 documentary. I have been avoiding this film for years, not a Gehry fan, and I thought I might not make it through the first five minutes, so saccharine was the tone. I calmed down, and so did the hagiography (for a while), but I can’t say I learned a thing. It is deeply strange when a film about a contemporary architect never mentions any other living practitioner of architecture; uses only friends of Frank, all artists, buddies, clients (or all three), to comment on his work; and treats the only living architect most people have heard of as an embattled revolutionary figure. Maybe that was true of Gehry in 1975, or even 1985, but it is not any more, and after years of group therapy, he should know it. (As a side note, when Gehry’s therapist mentions that other architects have come to him hoping to be head-shrunk into geniuses, I couldn’t help but think of my husband’s former boss, also a group therapy habitue, and also someone who thinks of himself as an embattled revolutionary figure.)

Sketches plays like what it is, a noodling side project for a couple of old friends (Pollock is on camera half the time, and we often hear him agreeing with whatever Barry Diller, Thomas Krens et al. are saying in praise), tanned, leather-jacketed, successful. Gehry’s aw-shucks act is only eclipsed by Pollock’s, in a scene where he acts as if he has no idea why Frank asked him to make the documentary, and hasn’t the least idea how to do it.

But maybe he doesn’t. If the adulation hadn’t gotten to me, the lack of any brilliant scenography would have. The good thing about a film about architecture occasionally making it into theaters is the opportunity to expose more people to the thrills of buildings far away. The experiential and emotional qualities that the late Herbert Muschamp (also on screen praising Gehry above all others) was so good at dramatizing can be shown. But Pollock only tells, largely shooting the outsides of Gehry’s buildings in no particular order. The inside shots are static overviews with busy people. We never follow a ramp, discover titanium around a corner, get blinded by a reflection. We never get down on the ground, so one of the most interesting and controversial aspects of Gehry’s work, its urbanism, is totally lost.

I could go on: about the punch-pulling inherent in using an academic critic like Hal Foster, with whom no viewer will ever identify, as the lone negative voice; about the vague and invidious rejection of unnamed other architects’ work as “white cubes”; and so forth. But I won’t, because the way Gehry and Pollock set it up, I can only sound like a stick-in-the-mud unable to accept change.

White Columns

My friend Ben, who has been working as a preparator at the new Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco, and who is known to make a corset or two in his spare time, recommended Valentino: The Last Emperor to me when last we met, probably when we were talking about our mutual Project Runway love. What the PR contestants make wild stabs at, Valentino has been doing for the last 45 years, and the glimpses into the process of making his collection that this documentary provides are so fun. I can’t say I have ever liked Valentino’s clothes (his dresses can make even a young starlet look like a nipped-and-tucked Euro heiress, his “muses”) but his vision of Woman comes across loud and clear.

I found myself wishing we could spend more time spent with the pinched, sassy seamstresses in their white room, and less at Valentino’s various yachts and villas, seeing how it is really done. The one dress we follow through the documentary (desultory as a piece of film-making), is a pleated column of white, with a flat, ribbon-like bodice. This dress is beautiful in all its incarnations, from that ultra-modern base, to a version with just two added vertical ruffles, to the ultimate full skirt of frills, to sequins on the edge of each wave. Valentino being Valentino he had to add and add, but these sequences show the trick is in getting the structure right so the sequins are merely icing, not the whole cake.

The secondary pleasure of Valentino was watching architecture so firmly put in its place. In Valentino’s world there’s no difference between the Romans, Richard Meier, and dunes of semolina sand. A 45th anniversary exhibition of Valentino gowns takes place in the Ara Pacis Museum, the controversial contemporary Meier structure in the heart of Rome. Valentino’s partner Giancarlo Giammetti scouts it, and you can see him looking right past the august contents, and even the glass-and-travertine frame, and seeing the vanilla-hued space as backdrop. The same way inhabitants of Meier houses try to warm them up with cushions and plants, Valentino warms up the museum with dresses. The mannequins and the people who love them are the population necessary to make the architecture come alive. The Colosseum, too, looks refreshed by its encounter with Valentino’s fairies of fashion.

Between Buildings

We just watched Man on Wire, the Academy Award-winning documentary about Philippe Petit, the man who walked between the World Trade Center towers. The film is only so-so as a documentary, but Petit’s personality, the idea of the wire walk as art form, and the stunning images of his three major walks in Paris, Sydney and New York are not to be missed. The best moment architecturally was when he sketches those walks on a piece of exposed drywall at the under-construction WTC. In that moment you see the way he looks at architecture. For him, Notre Dame, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the WTC are the same thing. I have always know that people see buildings differently, but this was a wonderful snapshot of Petit’s form of architecture criticism.

Battle Lines

Perhaps this blog is too schizophrenic, but so is our Netflix queue. Of an evening I crave entertainment but am usually disappointed by the ersatz fun of comedy and romantic comedy, so after a few irritating evenings with the stars, we return to better films, usually from abroad, and usually depressing. Waltz With Bashir was one of these. I read the reviews, I was interested in its use of animation, my mom recommended, but did I want to watch it of a Thursday night? Not really. And this may be why independent cinema has it so hard nowadays.

The bottom line is, Waltz With Bashir is excellent. Everyone should see it. If I became restive in the middle, it was partly out of my own ignorance, for without knowing the history of the Lebanon War, I did not know what the big reveal would be. There is no way for me to say anything terribly intelligent about this movies, as it is one of those documentaries that brings home my ignorance of other parts of the world.

What I can say is that director and protagonist Ari Folman makes amazing use of animation to tell a most unfunny tale of recovered memory and national guilt. After Maus, it is not a complete surprise to see tragedy in comic form, and as a story about contemporary Israel, it is also no surprise that the Holocaust enters in. In Maus, the transformation of Nazis into cats, Jews into mice immediately altered our expectations of the story. In Waltz With Bashir, the dogs stand in only for other dogs, but the animation gives you much more to look at than your average documentary, with stylized shifts in space and time, saturated colors, and thick black lines always lapping at the edges of faces and landscapes.

Since the movie is about a dream, and mostly consists of flashbacks, the animation also makes structural sense, since no man is seeing anything in real time but in his mind’s eye, and the mind tends to stylize, reorder, edit. Folman’s psychologist friend in the fim basically tells that dreams, evasive or not, are still real. So the animation puts flashback, dream, repressed memory, narrative all on the same plane.

My only question was whether what’s happening in the now of the film, mostly Folman’s interviews with people that were with him in Beirut on the nights in question, June 16 to 18, 1982, the nights of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, should be “real.” There are a few awkward segments where a talking head, sitting PBS-style against a blank wall, has been animated, and it seems strange to have such a dull and obviously documentary shot animated. But at the same time, the animation relaxes and detaches you, so that in the final moments we and the Ari Folman of today, see what he saw in 1982 in grainy amateur video, it makes it that much more powerful, cutting through the aestheticization of film-making.

Child’s Play

Apologies for the hiatus. I went away for the weekend, and managed not to consume any media for three days. Imagine that.

When I returned, the red envelope that awaited me contained Nursery University, a documentary about getting your child in to preschool in New York City. This year we did just that, but not in the manner of the anxiety-ridden Manhattan parents showcased in the film. We looked up all the preschools in our area, and found only one accepted toddlers who were 2 in August. We called the day after Labor Day for an application and tour. We sent in a deposit. In March, they called to say we were in. That, obviously, would not make a good documentary. And despite showing four families having everything but our experience, NU is not a good documentary.

The topic would (and has) made an excellent New York Magazine story, full of snark and class rage, allowing the reader to pleasure in over-educated and over-compensated people not getting what they want, kids being used as accessories, lots of money being thrown at the problem. And if NU’s directors had a satirical bone in their bodies, they would have focused on Heidi, the hot blonde mompreneur (she starts a business called Maternal Fitness, preying on the same parental anxiety before birth that the preschool consultants she scorns prey on after birth, during the film) who, when she is put on the waitlist at City & Country, loses her shit and tries unsympathetically to pull rank as an Ivy Leaguer. She also ends up leaving Manhattan, pregnant with her second child (and wearing a tight black strapless dress on moving day), for the more accommodating climes of Lexington, Concord or Brookline.

Instead, they go soft and broad, spreading their hour and a half between five families looking for very different things in a preschool: the artsy downtown parents who can’t believe there are lotteries for applications; the rich uptown parents who stand over their child, in a rictus of fear that she not know her numbers, at her Epiphany interview; America’s oldest mother, Aleta St. James, and her twins, one with a delay; and the non-rich parents of Kieron, who just want to give him a better start than they had. The most painful scene in the film in when Kim, Kieron’s mother, attends an open house at the Mandell School. She seems to be the only non-white, non-networking person there, and her sadness as she stands on the sidelines is palpable.

Aside from Heidi, the designated witch, the only other person who holds our interest is Gabriella Rowe, the head of school at Mandell, who for whatever reason let the cameras in to their application process. The scenes of her sitting on the floor, sensibly dressed in an L.L. Bean sweater, determining the fates of another lawyer’s or investment banker’s offspring, are fascinating. What we really want to know is how they decide, how can you decide between one 2-year-old and another. For a moment it seems like we might find out, but then we cut away. NU is not revealing enough for New Yorkers, not terrifying enough for the rest of the country. I’d like to see what the Real Housewives producers could have done with the footage.