It's the Holidays: Time for Gaudi! Sagrada x 2 at the Gene Siskel Film Center

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Holiday traditions?  Sure, the Music Box's always kicks of the season with it's Sound of Music Sing-a-Long.  (And not to be outdone,  U of C's Doc Films has now launched their own Sing-a-Long-Alban-Berg's-Wozzeck.) But how many Christmas traditions revolve around architecture?  Not just in, but about it?

I know of at least one.  The Gene Siskel Film Center has made it it's own holiday tradition to show  Hiroshi Teshigahara's mesmerizing 1985 "cult" documentary, Antonio Gaudi from Saturday, December 20th through Tuesday, the 30th.

And this year, the Siskel is upping the ante with the local debut of Stefan Haupt's new (2012) documentary, Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation, which opens with 6:00 p.m. showing this Friday the 12th, with showings through Monday, December 29th.
Both films foncus on the ongoing construction of architect Antonio Gaudi's masterwork, Barcelona's Sagrida Famila.  While work began all the way back in 1882, it remains unfinished, and while a report several years ago speculated on a completion date of 2026 (the centennial of Gaudi being killed by a streetcar in 1926) or 2028, it remains unconfirmed.  Still, much has been done since Teshigahara's film came out nearly 30 years ago, as can be seen in the difference in the images of the structure between the two films.  A roof was finally over put in place in 2000 with the completion of vaulting over the nave.  Pope Benedict consecrated the church in 2010, but an arson-set fire in April of the next year set back the construction schedule even more.

As the work has progressed, controversy has mounted.  Back in 2008, a group of Catalan architects argued for a halt in the construction to preserve Gaudi's original vision, which many claim has been corrupted, moving further and further from Gaudi's original vision the closer it gets to completion.  It's become a cross between a holy site and a theme park, with 3 million tourists paying over €30 million to take the tour each year, a crush that will inevitably increase when Sagrida Famila's 550-foot-tall sixth tower, complete with elevator to wisk tourists to the top, is finished sometime in the future.

Haupt's film has been getting mixed reviews, but for any architecture buff it remains a must-see, telling many fascinating stories of both the building and the people working on it.  If nothing, seeing the images of the building in both films is the best way, other than in person, to experience Gaudi's grand, crazy work at something closer to the scale at which it can be fully appreciated.

The Gene Siskel Film Center is offering a discount for those buying tickets for both films.  Check out all the details and showtimes on the Siskel's website, Antonio Gaudi here, and Mystery of Creation here.

Beyond Superhighways and Supertalls: Jan Gehl's The Human Scale, at the Siskel Saturday and Wednesday

Saturday is filling up.  Yesterday, we reminded you of tomorrow's 11:00 a.m. open-to-public ceremony for the 2014 Richard H. Driehaus Award to Italian architect Pier Carlo Bontempi.  Now we've got another great event.  Late that day, Saturday at 5:30 p.m., the Gene Siskel Film Center will be presenting the first of two screenings (also April 2nd at 6:00 p.m.) of the 2013 documentary The Human Scale . . .

The future of Earth is cities, but which future will we choose? 50% of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, with 80% expected by 2050. Using the ideas of visionary Danish architect Jan Gehl as a jumping-off point, this lucid and engaging documentary investigates the possible scenarios offered by cities around the globe, from Bangladesh’s car-choked Dhaka to pedestrian-friendly Copenhagen to New York’s recently transformed Times Square to earthquake-leveled Christchurch. The results are varied, but the film’s case is compelling and convincing: the suburban, car-oriented culture of the past is a dead end, and the road to a sustainable future lies along bike paths and walkways.

Gehl has spent his career remaking cities and their public spaces to be attuned less as engineerings for circulation and development and more for human needs, as reflected in the title of his first book, 1971's Life Between Buildings, carrying through to his latest volume, How to Study Public Life.  His firm has prepared studies on urban interaction for cities from Christchurch to New Zealand, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, New York  and London, with the reclaiming of urban streets for bicycles and pedestrians an ongoing theme.

The Human Scale's Rotten Tomatoes rating is 56% from critics, and 81% from the public.  Even the film's advocates describe it as  being a little dry, so don't go in expecting an urbanistic thrill ride, but as a visual portrayal of Gehl's ideas, it looks well worth checking out.

Retro Saturday - Dramatic Masterpiece Edition: Beale's Adams, Taymor's Oedipus, plus Lola and Lulu and Hugo

This month, the Gene Siskel Film Center is running a series, The Future is 4K: High-Resolution Digital Movies, which showcases what is currently the highest quality means of projecting movies.  Only one of the movies being screened, 2011's Samsara, was actually shot in 4K Digital.  The others are 4K scans of films as diverse as 1939's Gone With the Wind, to both Godfather I and II, Visconti's The Leopard, and Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  One of the 4K showings is actually of a film in black-and-white, and one, Lawrence of Arabia, is in 70mm, the decade-long standard for superior image quality for which there may now never be new prints again.  See the full schedule here.


You may have noticed we often write about the intersection of movies and architecture in pieces such as Divergent's Abnegation Village (photo below), or the building of the temporary structure that was the title character of the Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves romance, The Lake House.

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Sometimes, though, we go completely off the ranch with some observations on film, opera and shadow puppets.  So today we feature a quartet of past writings that we hope will tempt you into checking out some often overlooked masterpieces of acting, theater and film that you may have missed - or not even have known were out there.

Founding Father Rescued from the Waxworks
When I first encountered Simon Russell Beale playing John Adams in dramatized vignettes as part of a 2006 PBS documentary version of David McCullough's best-selling biography, I admit I had no idea who he was, much less that he is perhaps the foremost British stage actor of his generation.  But, no disrespect to Paul Giamatti, Beale's portrayal so vividly captures Adams's complex mix of irascibility and grandeur, intellect and courage, that you feel you could reach out and touch one of the most original - and quintessentially human - characters in American history.

Julie Taymor's Brilliant Oedipus Rex
Long before the phenomenon of the  Broadway version of The Lion King or the backstage melodrama of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Litigation, I came across what remains the most remarkable production of an opera I've yet to encounter, a perfect match-up between three dead Europeans, - Sophocles, Cocteau, and Stravinsky - and Julie Taymor's highly original direction of their Oedipus Rex.  Part of the work's ground rules is that the narrator should speak in the language of the place where the opera is being performed, and so in this production with the Saito Kinen Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa, the narrator is not only Japanese, but a woman, which adds still another layer to this amalgam of antiquity with the avant garde, and stoic reserve with the intimation of most violent passion.

As I said in my article, if you don't buy into Taymor's concept, you might dissolve in giggles over the symbolic headdresses and Mickey Mouse-like hands she assigns to the lead characters., but if, like me, you find yourself hypnotically drawn in, you'll find this well-known tale assuming a power often buried in more academic encounters.  With Philip Langridge as Oedipus, a stunning Jesse Norman as Jocasta, and a young Bryn Terfel as the messenger, this is a production that is both pinpoint apt to the intentions of playwright and librettist, and a poetical expression of amazing eloquence.

Lola Lulu Chicago

While the restraints of Sophocles characters in Oedipus derive from them being archetypes, those of Max Orphuls' film Lola Montes and Alban Berg's opera Lulu derive from society's propriety.  In all three cases, however, those restraints prove no match for anarchic recklessness of human desire and its consequences.   Actually, if you take it a step further, Lola and Lulu are also archetypes, the femme fatale projections of both their suitors and the artists who imagined them. In the case of Lola, she was also an actual historical personage, and while her story can't match the emotional intensity of Orphuls' sumptuous masterpiece, the contrast is an arresting mapping of the place where reality and our dreams intersect.


The Invention of Dreams - the Themes of Martin Scorsese's Hugo - Part I

. . . the place where reality our dreams intersect.  That's just one of themes of Hugo, which was swept at the Oscars by the less durable but more ingratiating The Artist.  Never mind - it also happened to Citizen Kane.  You may wince at my comparison, that I dare place the all-the-world's critics' pick as the greatest movie ever, Citizen Kane, with Scorsese's big-budget kid pic.  I'm not saying Hugo=Kane, but I do suggest, without apology, that Hugo has layers few so far have cared to even contemplate, as well as an emotional depth Kane never chose to attempt.  I suggest that, in a career overflowing with astonishing work, Hugo may, after all, prove Martin Scorsese's greatest and most mature masterpiece.

You'll notice my first appreciation inferred a Part II, but I wrote and I wrote and still couldn't get my hands fully around everything I've found in this film.  Maybe this wrap-up will be my incentive to go back and try one more time.  You'll have a chance to judge Hugo for yourself when it plays on August 20th at A. Montgomery Park as part of the Park District's Movie in the Parks for 2013.  Or just get the DVD, Blue-Ray or download.  (3-D TV?  Better yet.)

More on the Movies (all profusely illustrated):

Jeanne Gang's Cinematic Space at Columbia College

• Time Regained:  West Side Story in 70mm
• How to Build a Great City for under $350 million, or: Cleopatra conquers the Roman Forum in 70mm spectacle, by way of Seattle  
• Hey, Deceps:  Who's gonna clean all this up?  Loveable Transformers trash Chicago.

World's Only Architectural Comedy?  A Look at Jacques Tati's Masterpiece, Playtime. 

• Holy Motors - drunk on the power of architecture.
• The Death of Variety and The Supply-Chaining of the Magic of Movies
• New Red Shoes - Must-Have Items, only available through Thursday.
• Two must-sees: Gatsby (if only for the architecture); and Chimes at Midnight - Welles' greatest masterpiece?
• Portrait of a City at Warp Speed: The Eight Greatest Film Ever?  Man With a Movie Camera
• Mickey One: smoke and flame at Marina City.
• The Unexplored Power of Architecture in Film

Movie Lovers Paradise or Cornucopia Hell? 70mm at the Music Box, Leos Carax at the Siskel

A long time ago, 70mm represented the highest possible tech for making films. Capturing four times the image of a 35mm print, and projected on massive screens with state-of-the-art surround sound, 70mm films, especially when shot by a master like Freddie Young, created images as beautiful as anything you'd find at the Art Institute, 24 times a second.  The visceral kick of a masterwork  in 70 cannot be replicated on a home theater system, no matter how large the screen.

With few exceptions, the era of 70mm died forty years ago, when exclusive downtown bookings were replaced with wide releases in thousands of theaters simultaneously.  In the current era of high-res digital scans, rumors persist that the studios will be longer be distributing their remaining 70mm prints, and, at a cost of $50,000 on up, won't be striking new ones.

So this week's 70MM Film Festival at the Music Box could one of your last chances to see these films in the format for which they were made to be shown.  There are a number of omissions: no Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, Ryan's Daughter, Sound of Music, or Mad, Mad, World, but there's still Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (Saturday, Sunday and Thursday),  Hitchcock's Vertigo (Sunday and Tuesday), West Side Story (Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday), and, for the masochists, Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang (look it up - I'm not going to encourage you.)

There's the rare opportunity to see Richard Brooks' Lord Jim, reteaming Lawrence of Arabia's Peter O'Toole and Freddie Young, Jacques Tati's masterpiece Playtime , , ,

 Branagh's visually splendid Hamlet, and a real oddity, Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce.  The festival will also offer the first opportunity to see Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master in 70mm since its sold-out preview at the Music Box last fall.

The Trib's Michael Phillips has a great overview of the festival and films here. You can view the entire schedule here.  This is is something not to be missed.

The Star-Crossed Visions of Leos Carax

As, in some kind of act of astral punishment, this very same week the Music Box has a festival of 70mm,  the Gene Siskel Film Center is offering up  a rare retrospective of the work of Leos Carax,  one of the most unique filmmakers of our time.  As I wrote about his latest film last November . . .

Holy Motors is, in turns, pretentious, incoherent, disgusting, sensationalist, raw - and all the better for it. . . .

We must disenthrall ourselves," Abe Lincoln said.  "Étonne-moi!" added Diaghilev, upping the ante. The curse of CGI is to make the fantastic as mundane as the every-day.  Says Leos Carax, "The problem is to find again that primitive power of cinema, that first shot of the train in La Ciotat. It’s harder and harder to do today. You have to reinvent that power, which is almost a mystical power, a magical power. 

In addition to Holy Motors, the Siskel is screening hard-to-find titles as Bad Blood (Mauvais Sang) with Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant, Julie Delpy and Michel Piccoli . . .

. . . plus Boy Meets Girl, and the ineffably, darkly strange Pola X.   See the full schedule here.

Lohan on Mies, Burns on what's under Block 37, plus Architecture and Emotion fuse in extraordinary I Am Cuba

This week, on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events . . . 

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Tomorrow, Tuesday the 12th, begins with the Chicago ACE Mentor Program Lunch, and ends at the Block Museum in Evanston with Dirk Lohan talking about his grandfather's Mies van der Rohe's Legacy and the Chicago Skyline.  Wednesday, the 13th, lunchtime at CAF, Joe Burns of Thorton Tomasetti will provide A Look Under Chicago's Block 37, including structure, foundations, and the unfinished CTA superstation, while in the evening Arup's Chris Luebkeman lectures on Design for the New Normal in the Next Decade for AIA Chicago.  The Structural Illinois Engineers of Illinois has a day-long seminar on Design of Low-Rise Reinforced Concrete Buildings at the UBS Tower on Thursday.

There are still dozen of arresting items to come on the February Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Capturing Architecture as it's Lived:  I Am Cuba

Meanwhile, over at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Tuesday the 12th at 6:00 p.m., is your last chance to see one of the most remarkable films ever made, Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, which transcends its intentions as a propaganda film that made it a flop in both Cuba and the U.S.S.R during its initial 1964 release. 

First of all, I Am Cuba is a time capsule that captures Cuba at the cross point between the decadence of the mob-run luxury resorts under dictator Fulgencio Batista and the evolution into a vassal state of the Soviet Union, the period of hope that saw the creation of a native revolutionary architecture in the never-finished National Arts School, and the descent into the imposed degradation of now crumbling Soviet-style pre-fab housing towers.

It's all captured in stunning, hyper-expressive black-and-white cinematography by Sergey Urusevsky, including two continuous-shot sequences that put even Orson Welles' opening of Touch of Evil to shame.  The result is one of the most profound explorations of a built environment that you will ever encounter, culminating in this amazing sequence in which the camera - in one take - moves down, through, up, in and over the streets and buildings of Havana as it follows the funeral procession of a martyr through city streets.  It is the most amazing intersection of architecture, movement and human emotion as you're ever likely to see.

Next week, a true cornucopia awaits: National Engineers Week, Leos Carax at the Siskel, and films in 70mm at the Music Box.  Stay tuned.

Last The Pruitt Igoe Myth showing Thursday, new competition announced: Pruitt Igoe Now: The Unmentioned Modern Landscape

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We wrote last week of the documentary The Pruitt Igoe Myth, which has its its final showing tomorrow, Thursday, August 11th,  at 6:15 p.m. at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State.  The documentary explores the story of the St. Louis public housing complex whose 1970's destruction was seen as by Charles Jencks as the moment of death for modern architecture.

Now,  there's a new competition, Pruitt Igoe Now: The Unmentioned Modern Landscape, that, in the words of the competition brief, seeks to liberate the site, now overgrown with wild brush and full-grown trees forming small forests, from "a turbulent and mythologized past through re-imagination and community engagement."

A jury is still to be announced.  The advisory committee includes Sylvester Brown, Jr., founder of the group When We Dream Together, Inc., The Myth of Pruitt Igoe's producer Paul Fehler, Kari Grace, President of AIA St. Louis, 5th ward alderwoman April Ford-Griffen,  and Theaster Gates, Director of Arts Program Development at the U of C.

First, second and third prizes are to be awarded, with prizes of $1,000, $750 and $500, plus a number of honorable mentions.  Entries will be publicly displayed in St. Louis in 2012, as well as on a on-line gallery.

You've got some time.  Entries are due by March 16, 2012, with the winners to be selected by June 1st.

More information on the competition's website here.

Beyond the dogma: The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe, at the Gene Siskel next week

It's the Zapruder film of the failure of modernist architecture, playing in a continuous, hypnotic loop, like the razor to the eye in Un Chien Andalous, the imploding, to the music of Phillip Glass, of the buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing complex in St. Louis, designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, looking as they fell more than a little like a Frank Gehry building on the rise.

click images for larger view. historical images: State History Society of Missouri

It's said to be a prototype of toxic architecture, taking residents from hope to despair in little more a than a decade. What could they have been thinking?  What could anyone have expected with those kind of residents? Better to have left them in the slums.

H.L. Mencken once said: "There is always a well-known solution to every human--neat, plausible and wrong."  In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, that applies both to the original conception and its subsequent interpretations.

An acclaimed new documentary, The Pruit-Igoe Myth "debunks the myths and searches out the true causes of the project's failure."  The 83 minute film directed by Chad Friedrichs will have two showings at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State, at 5:15 p.m. on Sunday, August 7th, and at 6:15 Thursday, August 11th.

In St. Louis as in Chicago, the forest of high-rises was not anyone's first choice.  Just as Richard J. Daley had resisted the idea of relying on high-rises for public housing, Yamasaki's original conception was for a mixture of high-rise, low-rise and walk-up buildings.  But in St. Louis as in Chicago, in an early supply chain experiment, the Feds mandated that high-rises were cheaper and more efficient, just as in St. Louis, they decided to save money by only having the elevators on three of the eleven floors of the high-rises, and to "value engineer" by making the units too small to be livable.

In Chicago, as in St. Louis, public housing followed a usual trajectory.  At the start, it was a major step up from the slums, and residents were drawn from all races, a large percentage holding steady jobs.  Management screened applicants, and operated the buildings professionally.

As time went on, management became more political.  Funds for maintenance were at a premium, and not adequate for keeping the buildings in repair.  (The same Federal Government that approved the building of Pruitt-Igoe somehow forget to include funds for maintenance.) People who had good jobs fled as soon as they could, and the projects increasingly become a dumping ground, with screening going out the window, and fewer and fewer residents employed.  According to a review by Chris Barsanti . . .

One particularly harebrained housing authority policy prohibited able-bodied men from inhabiting apartments of residents on welfare; essentially dynamiting the project's family structure. In short order, elevators stopped working, broken windows weren't fixed, and a bleak air settled about the place, followed by the inevitable lawlessness and what one resident termed "a prison environment."

When cheap suburban land and the expressways opened up the floodgates for white flight, the projects re-segregated with a vengeance.

The tabula rasa approach detached the projects from any sense of historic continuity with the city around them.  The massive scale and homogeneity of Pruitt-Igoe's design, 57 acres and 33 11-story buildings, made it difficult for a resident to find anything to cling to.  The buildings were all the same, one after another, a gulag of warehouses where residents became human widgets, stuffed side by side into identical cells,  whether they were a family struggling to build a future, or those already lost to drugs, gangs and crime, rotting the buildings to get through a single additional day.

At the beginning, residents made the projects a real neighborhood, proudly festooning their units with Christmas lights.  Now, as in Chicago projects like Cabrini-Green, as the districts re-gentrify, all evidence that they had ever existed has been clinically removed.  

34 of Pruitt-Igoe's acres remain vacant, overgrown with wild shrubs, and trees that have now lasted longer than the buildings they replaced.

 photograph: Daniel Magidson

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, Gene Siskel Film Center,  5:15 p.m., August 7th, and 6:15 p.m., August 11th, as part of its 17th annual Black Harvest International Festival of Film and Video.  More information here.

What WTTW didn't want you to see: Samuel Mockbee Rural Studio documentary at Gene Siskel this weekend

The documentary Citizen Architect: Sam Mockbee and the Spirit of The Rural Studio had its broadcast debut on PBS August 23rd, but not on Chicago's WTTW.  I'm not sure they ever ran it - probably no room amidst all the rebroadcasts of Change Your Brain and Celtic Thunder.

This weekend, however, you'll have three chances to catch the film at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Friday the 24th at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday the 26th at 3:15 and 4:45 p.m. Also included on the program is the 17 minute film Robin Hood Gardens (Or Every Brutalist Structure For Itself), on Alison and Peter Smithson's now doomed 1972 London housing development both hailed as a masterpiece and assailed as an eyesore.

Not to be outdone, Chicago Filmmakers, 5243 N. Clark, 2nd floor, is presenting Chicago Architecture in Motion, Saturday, September 25th at 8:00 p.m. The seven short films including Equitable Building: Time Lapse from the 1960's, Beverly Willis's Girl is a Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, and Conrad O. Nelson's traversal of Halsted Street, from 1934.