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Emigholz's houses
Aug. 10th, 2007 09:56 amIt seems to be film week here at Click Opera! Which is odd, since I'm supposed to be someone who hates film culture. But I love films that also, in a sense, hate film culture.
Today I want to tell you about a filmmaker I admire a lot: Heinz Emigholz, Professor for Experimental Film Design at UDK (the main Berlin art school). German, and born in 1948, Emigholz could in a certain way be compared to Wim Wenders -- he's obsessed by filming American landscapes with a particularly German eye, as Wenders did notably in Paris, Texas. In Emigholz's case, though, you get the gas stations without the melodrama, the buildings without the actors, "utopia without dramaturgy". Emigholz's main subjects -- his main characters -- are space and time, and particularly how buildings exist in space and time. He's developed his own genre: architecture as autobiography.
I've just rented three videos (from Kreuzberg's great Amerika Gedenk Bibliothek) of early experimental films by Emigholz entitled SCHENEC-TADY. They're structural films, landscapes shot in Europe in the early 1970s but inspired by a retouched 1930s postcard of the American town of Schenectady.
The Emigholz film I know best is 2003's Goff in the Desert, the life -- in 62 buildings -- of Bruce Goff (1904-1982), a little-known, somewhat mystical architect with a string of otherworldly suburban houses to his name. The lack of voice-over narrative, and the excellent sound design, gives this work a sense of time and space which films very rarely convey (I've seen it both on DVD and at the Kino International on the Karl-Marx-Allee -- obviously in the kino it's better). "Liberated of allocations of meaning, things can speak for themselves again," Emigholz told Camera Austria. "Film can go back to just showing, and must allow itself to be measured by what it portrays and how it does so."
That "just showing" is key; it sounds so simple, but "just showing" is difficult to achieve because of the way the demands of entertainment (plot, character, action) and academia (concept, system, language) structure most films. It's the undue dominance of the word which most impoverishes the image.
This year Emigholz released Schindler's Houses, a study of the American buildings of Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953). It's the 12th installment in Emigholz's Photography and Beyond series. I can't wait to see it, and will certainly rent the DVD or see it on a big screen when I can. For the time being, though, torrents of the film are apparently avaiable via this page. If anyone succeeds in downloading the film -- torrents are really not something I've worked out yet -- perhaps they could let me know in the comments section.
Today I want to tell you about a filmmaker I admire a lot: Heinz Emigholz, Professor for Experimental Film Design at UDK (the main Berlin art school). German, and born in 1948, Emigholz could in a certain way be compared to Wim Wenders -- he's obsessed by filming American landscapes with a particularly German eye, as Wenders did notably in Paris, Texas. In Emigholz's case, though, you get the gas stations without the melodrama, the buildings without the actors, "utopia without dramaturgy". Emigholz's main subjects -- his main characters -- are space and time, and particularly how buildings exist in space and time. He's developed his own genre: architecture as autobiography. I've just rented three videos (from Kreuzberg's great Amerika Gedenk Bibliothek) of early experimental films by Emigholz entitled SCHENEC-TADY. They're structural films, landscapes shot in Europe in the early 1970s but inspired by a retouched 1930s postcard of the American town of Schenectady.
The Emigholz film I know best is 2003's Goff in the Desert, the life -- in 62 buildings -- of Bruce Goff (1904-1982), a little-known, somewhat mystical architect with a string of otherworldly suburban houses to his name. The lack of voice-over narrative, and the excellent sound design, gives this work a sense of time and space which films very rarely convey (I've seen it both on DVD and at the Kino International on the Karl-Marx-Allee -- obviously in the kino it's better). "Liberated of allocations of meaning, things can speak for themselves again," Emigholz told Camera Austria. "Film can go back to just showing, and must allow itself to be measured by what it portrays and how it does so."
That "just showing" is key; it sounds so simple, but "just showing" is difficult to achieve because of the way the demands of entertainment (plot, character, action) and academia (concept, system, language) structure most films. It's the undue dominance of the word which most impoverishes the image.
This year Emigholz released Schindler's Houses, a study of the American buildings of Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953). It's the 12th installment in Emigholz's Photography and Beyond series. I can't wait to see it, and will certainly rent the DVD or see it on a big screen when I can. For the time being, though, torrents of the film are apparently avaiable via this page. If anyone succeeds in downloading the film -- torrents are really not something I've worked out yet -- perhaps they could let me know in the comments section.