Architecture

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1963’s Salut les cubains is a collaboration with Yves Montand that compiles Varda’s photojournalism from Cuba, ten years after the revolution, into a celebratory ode to the island, its people and culture, and the still-very-young socialist state. The images are striking from a historical standpoint, although they don’t hint quite yet at the more poetic direction toward which Varda’s work will evolve. Her photo-montage style recalls both Soviet revolutionary film and the Cuban documentaries of Santiago Álvarez, whose career was just beginning at this time. Moments are poignant, such as seeing Cuban director Sara Gomez cutting up around the ICAIC studios shortly before her death. But Salut les cubains’ dominant impression is one of boundless energy and the nation’s great hope in trying to forge a new way of life.Read More »

“Wim Wenders was bitten by the 3D bug when he made his 2011 dance docu, “Pina,” and he expands the possibilities of the format still further with “Cathedrals of Culture.” Giving all new meaning to the expression “if these walls could talk,” this conceptual six-part omnibus invites half a dozen international helmers to imagine the personalities of various cultural institutions, lending voices to their unique designs while allowing cameras to explore the buildings’ unique architectural features in all their multidimensional glory. Such an overlong and only intermittently absorbing project wouldn’t suffer in the slightest if broken up across several nights for non-3D arts TV, where the otherwise taxing presentation will likely find its broadest audience.Read More »

A Machine to Live In is a hybrid documentary linking the cosmic power structures of the state to the mystical architecture of cults and utopian cities in the remote hinterlands of Brazil.Read More »

Carl is having trouble writing. As the film progresses, his novelistic character develops into a real person who intervenes in his life with increasing menace. The lector Roy supports Carl but is marked by a severe illness. To escape his difficulties, Carl accompanies Jon and Liza on an architectural journey. Bela and Fred remain behind with Roy and are confronted with his approaching death. For his friends, his death becomes the motive to reconstruct their life spent together.Read More »

The films of pre-eminent documentary filmmaker Heinz Emigholz present the most important architects of the 20th century not through explanation or biography, but by using the camera to reveal the structures that define their art. From Bruce Goff’s churches to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villas to Robert Maillart’s bridges, each exploratory and contemplative film is dedicated to the work of a single architect; taken together, the series shows us some of the most beautiful buildings of our time.Read More »

I am concerned with the cinematic recreation of the immediate experience of spaces, with the most accurate possible portrait of these spaces and its details in cinema.
Heinz EmigholzRead More »

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Before the Panama Canal was dug in 1911, Valparaiso was one of the main seaports on the passage around Cape Horn. Over the centuries, the city fell into the hands of different conquerors, and natural violence repeatedly destroyed it for the greater part. In cooperation with the university of Santiago de Chile, Joris Ivens made a semi-documentary about the daily life in Valparaiso, where the contrasts between poor and rich immediately strike the eye. Ivens chose realistic, but also poetical images. The abrupt shift from black-and-white to colour in the film marks the transition from the initial pessimistic part to the later, more hopeful images.Read More »

The first film Joris Ivens made when he returned from Eastern Europe is a film poem about Paris and Parisian life on the borders of the Seine river. The film follows the flow of the river through the city of Paris, making a portet of this city and its people living, strolling, sun-bathing, fishing, working, swimming, loving and laughing beside the Seine. The poem written by Jacques Prévert gives the film an extra dimension, and the music, with the recurring theme of a children song, gives it a melancholic touch.Read More »

This captivating exploration of Alver Aalto, the defining figure in Scandic design and one of Europe’s greatest modern architects, focuses on his remarkable and loving partnership with wife, Aino. Theirs was a profoundly humanist vision that put people at the centre of design, and ranged from work in furniture design through to huge architectural projects. They mixed with, and influenced, major figures of modernist art and design including Le Corbusier, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Come on a cinematic tour of their iconic buildings all over the world, from a library in Russia, a student dormitory at MIT, an art collector’s private house near Paris, to a pavilion in Venice. Narrated by experts in the field and featuring never before seen archive footage, Aalto tells the love story of an extraordinary couple with a great passion for human scale architecture.Read More »