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Except during earthquakes, or when being demolished to make way for something new, buildings don't move. This stubborn fact about architecture is something most documentary filmmakers feel they have to overcome. You probably have seen the result of this effort in television specials about famous architects and their work: sweaty pastiches of restless jump-cuts, pans and zooms, frequently interrupted by old portraits of the architect, all of it lumbering along under a running commentary intended to give yet more "drama" to the decidedly undramatic stuff of architecture.
Now for something entirely different: German avant-garde director Heinz Emigholz's new film Schindler's Houses.
First screened locally at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and now available on DVD, this serene, adroit, 99-minute documentary brings to vivid life 40 houses and other projects by the Austrian-born architect Rudolph Schindler, a pioneer modernist active in the Los Angeles area from the 1920s to the early 1950s.
The visual rhetoric of the film is very simple. Apart from a brief introduction, it consists entirely of meditative shots of Mr. Schindler's exteriors and interiors, compiled into a leisurely sequence of very still images. The fact that Mr. Emigholz's camera is always static — never zooming, never panning — gives his film a very attractive, peaceful seriousness that is almost always absent in ordinary architectural documentaries.
The Rodriguez House in Glendale, California, constructed in 1942. The home exhibits Schindler’s frequent use of reinforced concrete as his preferred building material. (TIFF)
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Nor is there any voice-over: Instead of the usual descriptive chatter about whatever building the camera is panning over, the soundtrack merely reproduces whatever big-city noises happen to be happening at the time of filming — the low whine and swoosh of car tires on nearby streets, the wail of distant police sirens, phones jangling. By means of this subtle but effective gesture, Mr. Emigholz moves the viewer right into the thick of L.A., making us feel we are right there, standing in a Schindler house and quietly gazing at a room while the world goes its busy way outside.
Unlike conventional architectural photographers, Mr. Emigholz refrains from glamorizing the buildings scrutinized by his lens. Some of Mr. Schindler's houses are dilapidated from long neglect, and the director's camera reveals them to be the weather-worn (and people-worn) things they are. Many of the architect's projects are now crowded by newer construction, and that fact is also faithfully noted.
The result is a work that allows, as the director intends, Mr. Schindler's architecture to speak for itself, to tell its own story without being drowned out by the cacophony of architectural criticism and popular controversy that has evolved on its margins.
That story is interesting. The architect went to Los Angeles in the early 1920s to supervise the building of Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Hollyhock House — he was working for Wright at the time — and he stayed on there to establish an independent practice. Residential commissions soon came flowing in, all from enlightened clients taken by Mr. Schindler's stylishly daring modernism.
The houses Mr. Schindler created for such customers are refined translations into brick and plaster of the most advanced design ideas abroad in America's modern movement in architecture. These ideas include strong solid geometry, no pitched roofs, an emphasis on clear spatial flow, and the use of large glass walls to open interiors to sunshine.
Yet he also brings a distinctive California sensibility to his work. Though indebted to the machine-age aesthetic of the Bauhaus, his buildings have a relaxed, high-style art deco urbanity that is very L.A., circa 1940. They were popular projects, and Mr. Schindler's stylistic moves quickly made their way into American house design, thence into suburban banality. But his houses are embodiments of the ideals of the modern movement when they were young, vivacious and vital.
Schindler's Houses is Mr. Emigholz's 12th contribution to his majestic, ongoing series Photography and Beyond, begun in 1984 as a panoramic investigation of architectural works in Europe and the United States. So far, he has filmed Louis Sullivan's bank buildings, the wonderful concrete bridges of Swiss engineer Robert Maillart, and the oeuvre — ranging from gas stations to museums — of the obscure Midwestern American architect Bruce Goff, among other topics.
In each of these films, Mr. Emigholz proposes a creative, critical relationship with the built environment that could be a model for the way anyone writes up or photographs architecture. His art is deeply respectful of what it depicts, never invading or disfiguring the architectural object to score an ideological point. His manner of filmmaking cleanly abstains from manipulating the viewer, opting instead to allow its subject to appear as exactly what it is, warts and all.
In Schindler's Houses, no sentimentality intrudes on the director's gradual revelation of the architect's beautiful work. And, Mr. Emigholz has mercifully, strictly excluded any show of artistic ego or willfulness from his encounter with this work.
Mr. Emigholz's is an art of freedom and mercy, and every contemporary artist and writer — and every person — has much to learn from it about a right relation with the things we have inherited from the past.
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