The civil engineer and architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (*1971), has designed more than 60 building projects in the Bolivian city of El Alto since 2008, which mock the norms of a formulaic modern architecture shaped and enforced with global aspirations by the Bauhaus.
Mamani comes from a humble background and belongs to the Aymara people. His self-taught architecture is a counter-utopia that grew out of local usages and opens up a view of preferences other than sparseness and global stylistic adherence.
Heinz Emigholz
GER 2022, 95 min
GER 2022, 62 min
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.
GER 2022, 80 min
The actor Stefan Kolosko acts as a diver in the sunken city of Epecuén, where he paraphrases a text by Jorge Luis Borges, and as a curator in Berlin's "Humboldt Forum", where he enumerates the crimes of Wilhelm II. The architect Arno Brandlhuber comments on the reconstruction of the "Berlin City Palace".
The film was shot in Berlin, Bolivia and Argentina in 2021.
USA/GER 1982, 109 min
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.
GER/Argentina 2020, 76 min
“There is no Here here.” A character simply named “Old White Male” (John Erdman) holds court in the lobbies of various apartment buildings in Buenos Aires and expounds with measured disgust on death, consciousness, and the state of contemporary human relations. The man’s mostly unsolicited remarks form an unsparing, stitched-together modern-day monologue that alternates between absurd and chilling, reasonable and grotesque.
GER 1975-1977, 56 min
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.”
GER 1972-1975, 142 min
SCHENEC-TADY I (GER 1972/73, 40 min, b/w, silent)
The first part of the SCHENEC-TADY series has been cut to its final length in 1975. The edited pieces were basis for SCHENEC-TADY III.
SCHENEC-TADY II (GER 1973, 19 min, Color, silent)
SCHENEC-TADY II was planned as a film in two parts. The negative of the first part, shot in Hamburg 1973, got lost. The film was then rescored into its present form.
“To be able to think about space we have to represent space, and in film we do that by setting up a media space between image and brain. Two-dimensional pictures arranged in science-fiction-like time structures and soundscapes that represent or contain pieces of reality.”
Photo: Heinz Emigholz at the shooting of "The Last City"
GER 1974-1983 / 1995-2000 / 1986-2004, 94 min
THE BASIS OF MAKE-UP I
(GER 1974-1983, 35 mm, color, silent, format 1 : 1,37, 20 min)
GER 1993-2000, 38 min
Sullivan’s writings and constructions set out central positions of modernism, including its ambiguity. His organic ornamentation, conceived and created in conjunction with modern methods of construction, was barely noticed in Germany. Although Sullivan’s work was displayed at the centre of the “Exhibition of New American Architects” in Berlin’s Academy of the Arts in 1926, Europeans did not consider Sullivan to be of interest as a theoretician, nor his famous credo „Form follows function“.
A 2007, 99 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.
GER 2001, 24 min
Maillart revolutionized with his functional reduction of material the work of bridge building and created his own world of forms. His topics and inventions explored the possibilities of reinforced concrete construction and set new aesthetic standards worldwide in their complex simplicity and elegance of the load-bearing parts. His turning away from solid construction and reduction to the essential lines of force, generated the distrust of the authorities and led to absurd building regulations.
A 2008, 72 min
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.
GER 1984, 84 min
Belgium, 9th October 1979. A cook drills a hole in the door to the camera obscura of his boss, a Persian-American carpet dealer, who lives with two women-friends and a narcissistic drinker next to the bright spaces of his attendants in a gloomy carpet cave. Inbetween professional and private life each one tries to save his deal with love.
GER 2020, 100 min
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.
GER 2017, 95 min
Eladio Dieste’s innovations and alternative construction methods were for a long time more efficient than conventional methods and made it possible to build large spans in a manner never seen before. Today he is regarded as an outstanding construction-engineering artist. His writings on architecture and construction and his ideas on creating form and on the relationship between architecture and art establish him as a profound thinker on social architectonic practice. DIESTE [Uruguay] documents 29 buildings by the Uruguayan architect and shell-construction master.
GER 2017, 132 min
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.
GER/ISR 2017, 92 min
Showing 22 buildings by the Kibbutz architect Samuel Bickels, filmed in Israel in 2015, BICKELS [Socialism] deals with the sediments of the 20th century. Bickels’ buildings are the heart of an idea, an interaction, social and cultural. His architecture reflects a will to create a civilization.
BICKELS [Socialism] is the second part of Heinz Emigholz’ STREETSCAPES-series, which also includes 2+2=22 [The Alphabet], STREETSCAPES [Dialogue] and DIESTE [Uruguay].
GER 1975-77, 56 min
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.”
GER 1972-75, 142 min
SCHENEC-TADY I (GER 1972/73, 40 min, b/w, silent)
The first part of the SCHENEC-TADY series has been cut to its final length in 1975. The edited pieces were basis for SCHENEC-TADY III.
SCHENEC-TADY II (GER 1973, 19 min, Color, silent)
SCHENEC-TADY II was planned as a film in two parts. The negative of the first part, shot in Hamburg 1973, got lost. The film was then rescored into its present form.
GER 1986-2010, 152 min
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.
GER/A 2009, 168 min
42 contemporary architectural projects of Austrian origins. As an independent work, the film emerged from the material for 57 short films that Heinz Emigholz produced for the exhibition Sense of Architecture conceived in Graz. Unlike the exhibition, which grouped the architecture thematically, the film SENSE OF ARCHITECTURE assembles the project into a social reality in which modern buildings were constructed for all areas of life.
GER 2003, 110 min
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.
GER 2005, 52 min
D’ANNUNZIO’S CAVE is the product of a cinematic jam-session held in Gabriele D’Annuzio Villa Cargnacco: four cameramen and film-makers (Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and Heinz Emigholz) simultaneously document the rooms of the villa in their specific styles. The villa is part of the Vittoriale, a museum-like theme park that D’Annunzio himself and his personal architect Giancarlo Maroni spent almost two decades designing and furnishing.
GER 2019, 93 min
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.
GER 2013, 18 min
Two museums compared: The Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel, which Samuel Bickels (1909-1975) built there in 1948, and The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, built by Renzo Piano (*1937) 1986. The method of natural lighting in Bickels’s construction was the direct model for Piano, who adopted for his construction at the request of its patroness Dominique de Menil.
TWO MUSEUMS is the 22. part of Heinz Emigholz’ series “Photography and beyond”.
GER 2018, 36 min
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.
GER/DEN 2015, 29 min
LE CORBUSIER [|||||] ASGER JORN [RELIEF] contrasts the Villa Savoye, built by Le Corbusier in 1931, and Asger Jorn’s Grand Relief, which the Danish painter and sculptor produced in 1959 for the Århus Statsgymnasium. The film makes connections between what does not belong together, at least not according to the ideological stipulations of their creators.
GER 2012, 110 min
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.
GER 2012, 100 min
PARABETON starts with the first still exstant dome built of concrete by the Romans in the 1st century BC in Baiae near Naples. Followed in chronological sequence by 17 buildings of Italian civil-engineer Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979) – inventor, grandmaster of concrete structures and the architect’s architect of the 20th century: among others the Pirelli-skysraper in Milano, the Headquarters of Unesco in Paris, the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin, the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome and the Papal Audience Hall at Vatican City.
GER 1988, 88 min
Clonetown 1974 to 1979: a terrorist defector named Charon sits on the edge of oblivion and comments on the imminent putrification of an abducted car dealer.
THE MEADOW OF THINGS is part of Heinz Emigholz Trilogy of the ’70s. The film contains as a quote an excerpt from SCHENECTADY IV, a series produced in 1975 and the unpublished SCHENEC-TADY series.
GER 1991, 89 min
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.
GER 2017, 88 min
A cinematographic composition of three distinct elements: scenes of the German band Kreidler (Thomas Klein, Alexander Paulick, Andreas Reihse, Detlef Weinrich) at work on their album “ABC” in a recording studio in Tbilisi, Georgia, 26 densely filled notebooks of Emigholz, and shots of anonymous buildings and streets in Tbilisi.
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