Heinz Emigholz

The film shows eleven slaughterhouses, nine town halls and squares, a school and four monumental cemetery portals which Francisco Salamone and his team built between 1936 and 1939 in the Argentine province of Buenos Aires in the cities of Alem, Azul, Balcarce, Carhue, Colonel Pringles, Epecuén, Guamini, Laprida, Pellegrini, Saldungaray, Salliquelo, Tres Lomas and Vedia.

Filming for the film took place in November 2021 in Argentina.

Brookburg, April 30, 1975, the first day of peace, in the office of memory. A young artist, specialist in the separateness of cultures, tries the analysis of his brutal sentimentality. Intellectual American TV babies practice before his eyes the analysis of their feelings on the medium of soap, which must remain incomprehensible to him because he deprived it as a child. He is left with the isolation of his work.

HOTEL 
(GER 1975/76, 27 min, b/w, silent and original sound) 
The title of the film is an hommage to Jack Smith's shows, such as ‚Lucky Landlordism of Rented Paradise‘ for example, especially however to ‚Horrror of the Rented World‘, his stage performance at Collective for Living Cinema in 1975. The wise insight of those times was the phrase – its proclamation all over the world osciallting between unruly and tender: “I am a tourist here myself.”

THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP I 
(GER 1974-1983, 35 mm, color, silent, format 1 : 1,37, 20 min)

The Austrian-American architect Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953) worked with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright at the beginning of his career. Like Bruce Goff, he is a singularity of modernism and the founder of his own Californian style of building. His turn away from the “International Style” isolated him in the world of architecture for many years. His style is characterized by the use of wood and by the unified design of furnishings for entire households. His own home, built in 1922 in West Hollywood, is considered an epochal masterpiece.

Adolf Loos was one of the pioneers of European Modernist architecture. His vehement turn against ornamentation on buildings triggered a controversy in architectural theory. The development of his “spatial plan” launched a new way of thinking about spaces to be built. His houses, furniture for shops and apartments, facades, and monuments were built between 1899 and 1931. LOOS ORNAMENTAL captures the buildings in their present surroundings in Vienna, Lower Austria, Prague, Brno, Pilsen, Nachod, and Paris.

An archeologist and a weapons designer – who, in a prior life, knew each other as a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst – meet at an archeological excavation site in the Negev Desert and begin discussing love and war; a conversation they continue in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva. The film then proceeds with changing actors in changing roles; a round dance that takes us to the cities of Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong and São Paulo.

There are streets, paths, motorways, alleys, boulevards and promenades. And there are life paths, intersections and dead ends. Two men sit on the shady raised platform of a brick building somewhere in Montevideo. They are submerged in a conversational marathon that never ceases throughout the entire film. The younger of the two is an analyst; the older man his analysand. Their nationalities are unclear; they speak a simple, internationally understandable English.

HOTEL 
(GER 1975/76, 27 min, b/w, silent and original sound) 
The title of the film is an hommage to Jack Smith's shows, such as ‚Lucky Landlordism of Rented Paradise‘ for example, especially however to ‚Horrror of the Rented World‘, his stage performance at Collective for Living Cinema in 1975. The wise insight of those times was the phrase – its proclamation all over the world osciallting between unruly and tender: “I am a tourist here myself.”

The films of the MISCELLANEA series can be seen as vessels for collections of film shots, footnotes, remarks and references, to be regarded as vanguard and memory. For example, the films EL GRECO IN TOLEDO and ON BOARD THE USS TICONDEROGA emerged from two scenes of the film THE HOLY BUNCH from 1991, in which the images appeared only marginally as a component of the story. Yet the necessity to examine them more closely lived on beyond the limited time of a feature film. MISCELLANEA IV-VII form an independent series named A SERIES OF THOUGHTS.

GOFF IN THE DESERT presents 62 buildings from the American architect Bruce Goff (1904-1982) – from the smallest cottage to an impressive museum pavilion – and is the only cinematographic collection of almost all of his buildings still in existence. Bruce Goff is considered to be one of the ”greatest unknowns“ of American architecture. As a determined experimenter, his works and designs were often in significant contrast to the ”International Style“ movement, and the controversies surrounding his works have since become legendary.

Starting from the fountains in the Friedrichsplatz opposite, Emigholz’s camera approaches the building complex. A passage leads from the imposing Jugendstil edifice to the 1983 extension by Hans Mitzlaff. The sculptures it was built for seem to be trying to find their place in a space not big enough for them. The architecture isn’t suitable for paintings: it casts light and shadow according to its own whims. In between, Emigholz shows streets that cross at right angles, bridges and overpasses, the city of Mannheim.

A confrontation and comparison of two church buildings, which could hardly be more different, but also a dialogue between various concepts of church and community: the Protestant Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen and the Catholic Cathedral in Orvieto. The cathedral in the central square in the middle of the city of Orvieto, with its visual histories in the interior and on the facade, and the imposing brick building of the church on the edges of Copenhagen, which forms the center of a housing complex of like-minded persons.

The film PERRET IN FRANCE AND ALGERIA presents 30 buildings and architectural ensembles of the French architects and construction engineers Auguste and Gustave Perret. Auguste Perret has masterfully refined concrete construction in the implementation of his projects and instilled in them a classical expression. Working in parallel to the execution of numerous construction projects in France, Perret was building under conditions of colonialism in North Africa. The film traces this division chronologically.

Five people leaf through the notebooks of the deceased editor Roy, who had been their mutual friend, and thereby construct their collective past: the writer Carl; the photographer Liza, with whom he lives; the architect Jon, for whom Liza takes pictures; the comic-artist Fred, with whom Carl runs through scenes for his novel; and the translater Bela who collects Freudian slips.