Arsenal on Location: Heinz Emigholz | Architektur und Film | Vortrag und Film | "Sullivans Banken" / "The Fountainhead"

In the organizer's words:

Until the completion of its new cinema hall, Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art is presenting programs in other venues, including the Akademie der Künste, which hosted the first film screenings in the 1960s.

The program "Architecture and Film", curated by Heinz Emigholz, goes back to the legendary series "Experimental Film Design", which he presented at Arsenal in the 1990s.

Program

Saturday, April 12, 7 p.m.

Sullivan's Banks

The film shows the last eight buildings built and furnished by the American architect Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) between 1908 and 1920. He consistently designed curtain walls, which no longer had a load-bearing function, freely. From building to building, he varied a modular ornamental design made of bricks, steel, plaster, terracotta, glass, ceramics, mosaics, marble, reliefs, wood and metal. "All the buildings that ever were and are are the physical symbol of the psychological state of a people. Every building stands for a social action." (Louis H. Sullivan, What is Architecture, 1906)

Although Sullivan's work was exhibited in a central hall at the "Exhibition of Recent American Architecture" at the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1926, Frank Lloyd Wright's teacher was not considered capable of theorizing in Europe. "It is not Sullivan's famous skyscrapers that attract Emigholz, but the man's older work, his banks in the Midwest, in which simplicity and play are wonderfully balanced. Here, too, the space is not the object but the subject of the film, the space is not read but dictates the images. Precisely because Sullivan's banks are neither ostentatious nor pretentious, their ornamentation, which is not ornamentation but a statement, albeit not one to exhaust Sullivan's democratic doctrine, is seductive. The organic nature of the ornamentation, that which grows out of modern business life, the drifting, twining, blossoming, bursting, releases erotic ingredients. It shows, precisely in the indifferent place of the universal equivalent, the non-exchangeable, the presence of an imagination working in secret. Emigholz surrenders to the architect's passion by following the lines of force that she inscribed in these last buildings of his life." (Stefan Ripplinger, 2001)

The Fountainhead

From the introduction by Heinz Emigholz: "An experimental masterpiece of commercial film, a flop in its day and today all but erased from Vidor's and Cooper's filmographies, the film tells, consciously or unconsciously, the flip side of a myth. What started out as democratic construction ends up as a case of bitter egomania. There is nothing right about this movie. In analyst training, one would say that the super version was missing. Which is precisely why we love it. Thanks to Vidor's practical intelligence, the logic of his non-functioning and the limited logic of the ideas raging in the film are presented to us in an act of disinterested pleasure. The commissioned work becomes a mirror of a modern age immersed in intellectual passions that has lost its system of reference."

Sullivan's Banks, D 1993-2000, 38 min, restored version
by Heinz Emigholz

The Fountainhead, USA 1949, 114 min, OV
by King Vidor
Introduction: Heinz Emigholz