Date: 20 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
TWO ARCHITECTURE STUDIES
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
Catalina Niculescu, Along the Lines, UK-Romania, 2011, 16 min
On a trip to her native Romania, the artist’s interest in architectural forms prompted a visual investigation into how decorative and structural motifs recur in buildings from the traditional to the modern.
Thom Andersen, Reconversão, Portugal, 2012, 65 min
Invited to film in Portugal on the occasion of the Vila do Conde festival’s 20th anniversary, Thom Andersen chose to document building projects by Eduardo Souto de Moura, whose work combines modernist aesthetics with traces of the architectural history of his sites. Incorporating local materials with contemporary building techniques, his clean concrete lines harmonise with natural elements and traditional stone walls. Influenced in equal measure by Mies van der Rohe and minimal sculptors such as Judd and Morris, Souta de Moura’s achievements include meticulous linear houses, the Porto subway network, and the monumental Braga Stadium, which rises out of the earth beside a mountain of imposing granite. This leisurely film features 17 such projects and culminates in a conversation between the filmmaker and the distinguished architect.
PROGRAMME NOTES
TWO ARCHITECTURE STUDIES
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3
ALONG THE LINES
Catalina Niculescu, UK-Romania, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 16 min
Following up the artist’s recent journey to Romania, Along the Lines initially started as ‘a study into vernacular elements of Romanian modernist architecture’. In the final project (including a series of collages) the premise is present, recognizable, but is not made explicit. The work deliberately strays from the plan of rigorous study and develops into a visual exercise in which the assumed subjectivity of the artist becomes the mode of argument. The interference vernacular/modernist is not stated or articulated directly but built up on a set of formal associations and visual suggestions. The artist’s approach becomes calm and poetic; free from a precise mission the project embraces the accidental, the deviation, it accumulates discordant elements to produce new possibilities though vulnerable and problematic, the pleasure of the argument comes into play, it disperses from concept into the aesthetic. Comprising a set of chapters, Along the Lines retraces the visual journey of the artist to explore architecture through a meticulous focus on details and geometric shapes. Each ‘chapter’ is preceded by a postcard collage: one geometrical figure is cut out of a natural landscape which literally illustrates the connection idealized by modernists between architecture and natural environment, placing in this way the interest for simple forms into the simplicity of nature. Although at the end of the video you find yourself back to the same landscape, the perception changes, the view is the same, yet your experience is different this time. (Anca Rujoiu)
RECONVERSÃO
Thom Andersen, Portugal, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 65 min
Reconversão portrays 17 buildings and projects by Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto Moura, accompanied usually by his own writings. It is a search for his architecture, without critical commentary. Only the tour guide at Braga Stadium offers generalizations, which fit that work well enough, but it may be the exception not the rule. Souto Moura has the last word: ‘If there is nothing there, I invent a preexistence.’ Technically, Reconversão combines the crudeness of proto-cinema with the hyperrealism of digital cinema, bringing us back to the ideals of Dziga Vertov. Shooting only one or two frames per second and animating the images, in the manner of Muybridge, produces greater resolution, although not necessarily a greater sense of reality, and brings attention to the movements of water and vegetation that generally pass unnoticed. (Thom Andersen)
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