TIFF 2007, Part 3: Schindler's Houses

While sitting at dinner with friends, festival-goers, and fellow bloggers at the Ethiopian House on Irwin Street in Toronto, Bob turned to me and asked which films I liked the most up to that point. I replied with several and then expressed admiration for Heinz Emigholz's Schindler's Houses, which I had seen just the night before. A 99-minute series of still shots of the exteriors and interiors of the homes architect Rudolf Schindler designed in and around Los Angeles, this avant-garde film fulfills Emigholz's ambition of situating Schindler's modernist architecture within its surroundings and contexts. It also matches my own sensibilities. I suppose I've always gravitated towards modernist aesthetics, counting Godard and Antonioni among my favorite directors and being fond of the writing of Woolf, Hemingway, and Joyce. Schindler's designs were therefore bound to impress me to some degree, but Emigholz's presentation and sense of composition made them even more palatable. He employs no standard, wide shots of the houses, but, instead, surveys the lines, spaces, and junctures of the buildings at obscure angles within the frame, often tipping the horizon or slanting verticals. Throughout, Emigholz maintains a persistent rhythm by giving each shot a duration between four and ten seconds.

The form of the homes and the form of the film reflect and suit Los Angeles perfectly. Some shots include the vegetation just outside the home or along a street; other shots include cars (the hallmarks of L.A.) parked curb-side; on rare occasions, a wide shot reveals the broad expanse of the haze-covered valley. Los Angeles is the antithesis of the concentrated city, the contrary and modern answer to classical design, and the lines and angles of Schindler's houses jut out in varying directions like the city itself. As the film implies, these homes mark not only the history of an architectural movement, but the socio-economic history of this region. Some of Schindler's homes stand in older, affluent neighborhoods that have been separated by gentrification or other developments from the rest of the Southland, while a dilapidated church designed by Schindler and located in South Central, one of the poorest and most violent areas of Los Angeles, is a clear reminder of other kinds of social distinctions and of long-term change. Most of the homes have not suffered as much as the church, but they too have been altered by time and necessity. Electric outlets adorn stairwells; security systems break the continuity of interior walls. When asked after the film if he thought these changes undermined the purity of the design, Emigholz replied that they did not. Instead, they chart the history of modernism fifty years on; or, as Emigholz said succinctly and acutely of such transformation: "it's life."

One of the reasons I love cinema is that it allows us to make associations even beyond the particulars of a film, and I couldn't help internalizing and then personalizing Schindler's Houses as it transitioned from one image to the next. Given that I have lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles County since birth, I felt somewhat homesick and nostalgic sitting 2,500 miles away in the rows of the Varsity 1 theater. I couldn't recall if I've ever seen any of the homes, but I've traveled through the types of neighborhoods in which they stand, and this familiarity caused an unexpected feeling of longing. And, then, a more abiding external association developed. I thought about a woman I once cared for who, had she been present at the screening, would have loved the film and would have had incisive things to say about it. The very imaginable possibility of that conversation made me miss the imaginable possibilities of other conversations, which in turn made me feel a bit out of joint, made me reflect on the past. In this more personal sense, Schindler's Houses proved to be quite modernist itself, simply because, for all of its particular aesthetic qualities, modernism involves the experiential, emotional process of trying to understand one's place in physical space and, most of all, within the passing of time.

Comments

[Bob Turnbull]

I'm even more curious to see this now...Though I have to wonder how well the 99 minutes of static photos would hold up for me (especially not having the many personal feelings invested in the city), the different angles and focus points of each shot sound like they might be enough to do it. The art of the design can then stand out.

Maybe it'll hit Cinematheque at some point.

[Michael]

Bob, a couple of other things I didn't mention in the post that make the film interesting: though it's hard for me to say specifically, there's a coherence to the images, and each succession of images is as intriguing (or more so) than the last. Also, the sound design adds a great deal to the experience of the film. Emigholz uses a lot of ambient noise, so in addition to feeling as if I were looking at images, I also felt as I were in an environment.

The only downside to the screening at TIFF is that it was very late. I was able to make it through the whole film an the Q&A, but during the last fifteen minutes or so of the film, I had to keep telling myself to stay focused.