Architecture and Film I

Sat 12.04.
19:00

Cinema

Akademie der Künste

Sullivans Banken

SULLIVANS BANKENshows the last eight buildings that were built and furnished by the US architect Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) between 1908 and 1920. He unfailingly and freely designed curtain walls, which no longer had a load-bearing function. From building to building, he varied a modular ornamental design made of bricks, steel, plaster, terracotta, glass, ceramics, mosaics, marble, reliefs, wood and metal. “All the buildings that ever were and are the physical symbol of the psychological state of a people. Every building stands for a social action” (Louis H. Sullivan, ‘What is Architecture’, 1906). Though in 1926, Sullivan's work was exhibited in a central hall at the AdK's “Exhibition of New American Architecture”, Frank Lloyd Wright's teacher was not considered capable of theory in Europe.
“It is not Sullivan's famous skyscrapers that attract Emigholz, but the man's old work, his banks in the Midwest, in which simplicity and playfulness are wonderfully balanced. Here, too, the space is not the object but the subject of the film, the room is not read but dictates the images. Precisely because Sullivan's banks are neither ostentatious nor pretentious, their ornamentation, which is not decoration but a statement, albeit not one that exhausts Sullivan's democratic doctrine, is seductive. The organic nature of the ornament, which grows out of modern business life, the drifting, twining, blossoming, bursting, releases erotic ingredients. It shows, precisely in the indifferent place of the universal equivalent, the non-exchangeable, the presence of an imagination working in secret. Emigholz surrenders to the architect's passion by following the lines of force inscribed in these last buildings of his life.” (Stefan Ripplinger, 2001)

The Fountainhead

Referring to King Vidor's THE FOUNTAINHEAD, which was based on a book by Ayn Rand and starred Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, Heinz Emigholz said: “An experimental masterpiece of commercial film that was a flop in its day and today is all but erased from Vidor's and Cooper's filmographies, the film tells, consciously or unconsciously, the flip side of a myth. What started out as democratic construction ends up as a case of bitter egomania. There is nothing right about this movie. In analyst training, one would say that the super version was missing. Which is precisely why we love it. Thanks to Vidor's practical intelligence, the logic of his non-functioning and the limited logic of the ideas raging in the film are presented to us in an act of disinterested pleasure. The commissioned work becomes a mirror of a modernity immersed in intellectual passions that has lost its system of reference.”