Heinz Emigholz

Contemporary cinema’s preeminent chronicler of architecture and its intersection with the ever-present crisis of 20th-century modernity, Heinz Emigholz returns with an alternately mournful and sly treatise on how the presence—and, in some cases, absence—of municipal and communal building architecture is inseparable from capitalist ideology. Focusing mainly on cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia, Emigholz’s latest film is a work of quiet observation and historical excavation. From slaughterhouses in Salamone to the flooded former spa city of Epecuén to the newly built Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the film demonstrates the effect of capital on public spaces, where creation and destruction go hand in hand, and as always, Emigholz makes the journey one of intellectual force and cinematic beauty.

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Lucy, a privileged North American in contemporary Berlin, living a life of post Punk hedonism, roams the streets with her best friend, Derek. Together they use the city like a playground, a stage, and a never ending party. Into their lives enters Galia, a young Israeli woman carrying the promise of a better, cleaner way of living. A tribute to Punk underground films turns into a melodrama in "Saturn Returns", mirroring Lucy and Galia's modulating states of mind. Our and their look into each other's life and culture, becomes an investigation of empty facades. The film was constructed by both improvised and pre-scripted scenes, as required by the nature of each scene.

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This story is told by the boy's father: "My father wrote letters from the front. He didn't come back from the war. In my dream, I saw a hundred thousand letters falling from the sky." The letters are memories and trauma. No one talks about them. The boy knows nothing yet about the legacy of all wars. The setting for this story is a former military airfield and its surroundings.

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In the beginning of the 19th century, Johannes Elias Alder is born in a small village in the Austrian mountains. While growing up he is considered strange by the other villagers and discovers his love of music, especially rebuilding and playing the organ at the village church. After experiencing an "acoustic wonder", his eye color changes and he can hear even the most subtle sounds.

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A German Platoon is explored through the brutal fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad. After half of their number is wiped out and they're placed under the command of a sadistic captain, the platoon lieutenant leads his men to desert. The platoon members attempt escape from the city, now surrounded by the Soviet Army.

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Experimental short film set in a military environment.

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Clonetown 1974 to 1979: a terrorist defector named Charon sits on the edge of oblivion and commentates on the imminent putrification of an abducted car dealer.

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Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

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Documentary on the city of Berlin and a personal essay on alienation and being an alien in that city. Cyn­thia Beatt raises questions and provokes reflec­tion on a wide range of issues concerning language and culture, politics and history.

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Stylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.

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A woman on a train.

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An experimental German film

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Max Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.

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This film is in effect a slideshow of exquisite single photographic images in sparkling black and white, representing Mikesch’s own version of Mary Stuart. “The drama of a woman who attempted a kind of liberal emancipation in a time of upheaval, but got caught in the snares of men,” in her words. Confronted with layers and layers of conflicting information about “how it really was” Mikesch decided not to try to be a historian, but to radicalise the narrative and condense it into striking images of passion, power, love, pain and death.

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Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne’s composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, a passage from William Wordworth’s autobiographical poem “The Prelude,” sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.

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A German TV movie

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Adaptation of the novel "Bartleby the Scrinener: A story of Wall Street" (1853) by Hermann Melville.

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The extraordinary work of the American artist Philip Guston is a milestone in modern painting. Guston is one of the most discussed painters of his time and today a star of the younger generation of contemporary artists. ARTE is showing the documentary on the occasion of the major Guston retrospective at the Tate Modern in London.

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Contemporary cinema’s preeminent chronicler of architecture and its intersection with the ever-present crisis of 20th-century modernity, Heinz Emigholz returns with an alternately mournful and sly treatise on how the presence—and, in some cases, absence—of municipal and communal building architecture is inseparable from capitalist ideology. Focusing mainly on cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia, Emigholz’s latest film is a work of quiet observation and historical excavation. From slaughterhouses in Salamone to the flooded former spa city of Epecuén to the newly built Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the film demonstrates the effect of capital on public spaces, where creation and destruction go hand in hand, and as always, Emigholz makes the journey one of intellectual force and cinematic beauty.

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His buildings are garish, colorful and completely overloaded. Columns and glittering chandeliers everywhere, and way too much of everything. The Bolivian civil engineer and architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (*1971) builds houses in El Alto for a nouveau riche upper class of the Aymara, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Bolivia.

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An archaeologist and a weapons designer, who knew each other in a previous life as a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst, meet at an excavation site in the Negev desert and begin a conversation about love and war, which they continue in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva. A series of encounters with alternating actors in different roles ensues, which leads the viewer through the cities of Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong and São Paulo. Among those appearing are: an old artist who meets his younger self; a mother who lives with her two grown-up sons, a priest and a policeman; a Chinese and a Japanese woman; a curator and a cosmologist.

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The final part of Heinz Emigholz’s "Streetscapes" series is again a triptych. A prologue examines three buildings from the 1930s designed by Julio Vilamajó in Montevideo which could have inspired the work of Eladio Dieste, the subject of the main part of the film. The industrial and functional buildings presented span the period from 1955 to 1994; their organic brick construction is astonishing and inspiring.

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A film director confides in his interlocutor. He talks about the working process, about creative blocks, about artistic crises and expressive forces. At some point, the idea takes hold that this conversation could be turned into a film. And this is the very film we’re watching the two of them in.

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Worn-down pavements, broken paving stones. Trees that jut out of the concrete, casting shadows on to crumbling façades. The centre of Tbilisi in the summer of 2013. Glimpses of side and main streets, over railings and under balconies, of an architectural cacophony. The voiceover spoken by Natja Brunckhorst reflects on the nature of streets and public spaces.

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The ‘Casa do Povo’ cultural centre in São Paulo, an icon of the secular Jewish workers’ movement: a crumbling theatre flanked by staircases, entryways and corridors. Construction noise drones away in the background, clinking crockery, a broom sweeping over tiled floors, an expressive façade of countless adjustable panes of glass covered by a patina. It’s October 2016 and a group of young people are preparing a preview of Bickels [Socialism]. The venue is to form a prologue to the completed film, which tours 22 buildings in Israel designed by Samuel Bickels, most of which for kibbutzim. Dining halls, children’s houses, agricultural buildings, bright structures inserted into the Mediterranean landscape with great ingenuity. An architecture with a sell-by date: That many are now empty or have been repurposed at best is linked to the decline of the socialist ideals they embody.

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In the 21st part of his Photography and beyond series, Heinz Emigholz projects as usual a series of structures into our brains and from there on to the screen: Airports, motorways and bus stops; department stores, market halls and warehouses.

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A Series of Thoughts consists of four shorts: EL GRECO IN TOLEDO, LEONARDOS TRÄNEN, AN BORD DER USS TICONDEROGA and EIN MUSEUMSBAU IN ESSEN.

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The film explores two projects by Austrian artist and visionary Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965): the model for ENDLESS HOUSE (1959) that is currently exhibited at the Kiesler Foundation in Vienna and THE SHRINE OF THE BOOK designed and built by Frederick Kiesler and Armand Bartos in Jerusalem (1959-65).

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Heinz Emigholz, the premiere purveyor of architectural oddities (Sullivan’s Bridges, Goff in the Desert), meticulously documents 15 rooms of the enormous Villa Cargnacco in Lombardy, Italy, designed by proto-fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). The controversial figure spent 17 years designing the Vittoriale, a state museum on Lake Garda, and furnishing the Villa Cargnacco, which is part of the grand complex. This unusual documentary resulted from a photography session in the villa, when four friends—cinematographers Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and Heinz Emigholz—simultaneously filmed the rooms and furnishings of the villa in their own specific styles.

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A meditation on ruins and remains linked strongly to the US chapters of Photography and Beyond. A rumination on a nation and dream in tatters. A cautious reminder of ever-lurking horrors: a glimpse of the warship Puglia, not far from the sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Gabriele d'Annunzio.

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The film shows thirty-eight of Heinz Emigholz's notebooks and sketchbooks from 1996 to 2004: cinematic studies of marble inlays on the memorial slabs in the Johannes Cathedral in Valetta, Malta in 2004; of Skull Rock in Joshua Tree Desert in California, which gave the series its title; of Cerro Castellan in Big Bend National Park in Texas; of a rock shop in Quartzsite, Arizona that sells remnants from the glass factory in Henryetta as "gems from Mexico"; scenes from Bartlesville in Oklahoma; a tree covered with shoes on Highway 62 in California in 2002; and, in Gabriele D'Annunzio's Villa Cargnacco in Gardone, Italy in 1997, the mask merchant's room, the reliquary room, the workshop, the globe room, the Apollinian veranda, the room of the Cheli, and the Zambracca.

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Studies on 35 mm color film from 1988 to 1997.

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Studies on 35mm b/w film from 1988 to 1997.

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Famed Swiss architect and artist Robert Maillart was renowned for his concrete bridges; this documentary examines the elegant design of his engineering masterpieces, which, the film argues, embrace both functionality and aesthetics. Instead of following a traditional journalistic structure, director Heinz Emigholz's spellbinding film reads more like ethereal visual poetry, allowing the beauty of Maillart's work to speak for itself.

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Sixty-nine of Heinz Emigholz's illustrated notebooks from 1983 to 1996, three sketch books from the 80s and 90s, and cinematic studies of his exhibition "Der Untergang der Bismarck" at the Zwinger Gallery, Berlin 1988, a castle moat in Riva, Italy 1997, a casting of Aguste Rodin's "The Gates of Hell" in front of the Kunsthaus in Zürich 1988, an olive grove near Norma in Italy 1995, a magnolia tree in Basle 1996, burnt meat at Cabo de Creus in the Pyrennees 1988, an intersection in Owatonna, Minnesota 1995, and a house underpass in Giesshübelstrasse, Zurich 1996. In addition, there are 184 drawings from the series "Die Basis des Make-Up" as positives and negatives.

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After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

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Agatha is an international lawyer, Jo a filmmaker. The two women are lovers. While Jo is on the road showing her films, Agatha discovers and reads her diaries. Problems ensue as Agatha's transgressions lead to jealousy and a spiraling cycle of sexual obsession.

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Stylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.

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Forty-two of Heinz Emigholz's illustratred notebooks from 1974 to 1983, a notebook of Heinrich Emigholz dated 1941, a sketchbook from the 70s, twenty-four photographs from 100 Hudson Street, 240 President Street, 325 West 11th Street, Kleine Reichenstrasse 2, 36 Sherman Street, 236 Elizabeth Street, 29 John Street and Zippelhaus 6. In addition, there are eighty drawings from the series ›Die Basis des Make-Up‹ as positives and negatives.

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An experimental German film

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The elaborate copying work was carried out in Hamburg in 1975/76. The SCHENEC-TADY films are dedicated to Great Birnam Wood.

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The film was planned under the title CONNEC-TICUT and was to consist of two parts. The negative of the first part, shot in Hamburg in May 1973, was lost in the post. As a result, the project was rewritten as the present film.

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Arrowplane is the multiplication of a one-directional, horizontal 180-degree-panning shot with itself, applied to three landscapes – mound, city and beach.

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Film was 40 minutes long at its premiere in London and was shortened to its current length in 1975. The parts that were cut out served as the basis for SCHENEC-TADY III in 1975.

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