On View> Dara Friedman’s New Film Dances Through City Streets, Now Showing in Los Angeles
(Courtesy Hammer Museum)
Hammer Projects: Dara Friedman
Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles
Through April 14
Miami-based artist Dara Friedman is known for her black and white films of dancers dancing through city streets. For her film Dancer (2011) she used a 16mm camera to examine urban space and individuals within these spaces, filming improvisational dancers in a variety of styles, from flamenco, to ballet, to belly and break dancing, and more. In her work, Friedman also investigates accepted concepts of performance-based art. Her grainy films sometimes capture the sounds of street traffic, and she sometimes dubs music that is not always in rhythm with the dancers’ movements. For her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Friedman has prepared an 8mm film that is a follow-up to Dancer.
Lights, Camera, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro
This weekend’s Open House New York tours and special building openings will end with a special film screening at Tribeca Cinema. The screening will feature a new Checkerboard Foundation Production of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro that highlights the local firm’s two most important projects: The High Line and Lincoln Center.
Checkerboard is well known for their architecture documentaries and this one features DS+R’s recent contributions to New York’s streetscape. The film starts at 7:00 on Sunday and tickets can be purchased in advance.
Breaking Out & Breaking In: Designers, Critics, and FBI Agents
Yale SoA's Jimmy Stamp, Filmmaker Magazine's Scott Macauley, and Retired Special Agent Thomas McShane and Studio-X's Geoff Manaugh. (Courtesy Studio-X)
Bringin’ it back to the old school, to the days of 3D online meet-up spots and avatars, when chat rooms were actual digitally-modelled rooms, “Breaking Out and Breaking In” was a “distributed film fest,” where users watched movies at home and came together in the comments section of BLDGBLOG to discuss the films. It was a blurring of the real and the digital. In partnership with Filmmaker magazine, the series focused on films which were either about bank heists (breaking in) or prison escapes (breaking out), positing them as “the use and misuse of space.” Films were watched during a period of four months, and the festival culminated with a panel discussion at Columbia’s GSAPP featuring two FBI agents alongside designers and critics.
On View> 1976: Movies, Photographs and Related Works on Paper
Still from Pendulum, 1976. (Courtesy the Artist / Paul Kasmin Gallery)
1976: Movies, Photographs
and Related Works on Paper
Paul Kasmin Gallery
515 West 27th St.
Through February 11
British-born James Nares has lived in New York since the mid-1970s, when Lower Manhattan was “a beautiful ruin,” according to the artist. While most celebrated for his large, single-stroke kinetic paintings, the artist has a long track record of documenting his fascination with movement and bodies in motion dating back to the days when he delved into many other media such as films and chronophotographs. The exhibition features five films including Pendulum (1976), in which Nares clocks a large spherical mass swinging from a footbridge, against the industrial backdrop of downtown Manhattan—evocative of the foreboding, dreamlike qualities also seen in Giorgio de Chirico’s surreal paintings.
On View> Tim Burton Descends on LACMA
(Courtesy LACMA)
Tim Burton
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles
Through October 31
Best known for directing films like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, and Beetle Juice, Tim Burton and his work as an illustrator, writer, and artist are being honored with a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This new show celebrates the way that Burton has managed to put his own spin on movies in an industry known for its fear of the unknown. With over 700 items on display, including drawings, paintings, photographs, film and video works, storyboards, puppets, concept artworks, maquettes, costumes, and assorted cinematic ephemera, visitors get a glimpse into the mind of this modern day Renaissance man.
Though the show debuted on the east coast at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the LACMA version of the show, organized by Britt Salvesen, offers its own take on the Burbank native’s body of work. Burton collaborated with the exhibition designers to transform the museum’s Resnick Pavilion into an appropriately “Burtonesque” environment. He also created several new pieces for the exhibition, including what the museum describes as a “revolving multimedia, black-light carousel installation that hangs from the ceiling.”
Documentary Celebrates Burnished Bungalows
Beach-side bungalows are the stars of the documentary. (Courtesy Bungalows of the Rockaways)
With summer weather quickly approaching, it’s the perfect time to kick back and dream about a sweet bungalow by the beach… in Queens. Endangered bungalows throughout New York City have been on the radar for some time now, but documentary filmmaker Jennifer Callahan has focused on the fight to preserve the few bungalows left on the Rockaway Peninsula in her film Bungalows of the Rockaways, which will be screened tonight at Tenement Talks at the Tenement Museum.
What Were You Thinking, Mr. Foster?
The Architect prepares to take off.
Last night, I was lucky enough to enjoy assorted swells (but not very many architects) at the Hearst building for a screening of the enigmatic “How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?”, a film devoted to his lordship’s extravagantly photogenic architecture and life of work. Or so it looks in this approximately 90 minute film which sweeps us from the Engadin Alps where Foster annually plows through a 26-mile mile cross-country ski marathon in tight black lycra with some 14,000 others to his redbrick childhood home quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks in Manchester to his current home in a Swiss villa, spectacularly void of human touches, to his 1,000-plus strong office in London to the early Sainsbury Centre; the Swiss Re gherkin; the British Museum Great Court; the Berlin Reichstag, etc, etc, and of course, the Hong Kong Beijing Airport that is the largest building on earth as narrator Deyan Sudjic intones mellifluously. (The trailor below provides but a morsel of this delight.) Read More
Bucky Comes to Town
The Union Tank Car Dome stood 384 feet wide, the largest structure of its kind when it was completed. (Courtesy theWarrenReport.com)
If you couldn’t make it down to D.C. last month for the Environmental Film Fest, it’s still not too late to catch one of the entries, A Necessary Ruin. The movie tells the story of the untimely destruction of Buckminster Fuller’s Union Tank Car Dome, a piece of railroad infrastructure that was the largest clear-span structure when it was completed in 1958 before being summarily destroyed three years ago. Its epic story will be told tomorrow night next Friday at the Center for Architecture, followed by a lively discussion with Jonathan Marvel, all part of the current show, Modernism at Risk. You can watch the trailer after the jump. Read More
Origami Inspiration
The documentary Between the Folds is a brisk study of the intersection of intelligence and aesthetics in origami. The film, by the first time writer and director Vanessa Gould, gives an overview of the field, looks into the methods of folding, and interviews some of the big paper players of the past 50 years. Even with the film’s minor faults, Gould deserves enormous credit for producing a film that will fascinate everyone from precocious kids to high-minded architects. The film, the first on the subject in English, explores the combination of art, mathematics, diagrams, computational power, inspiration, and raw desire to create held within a simple piece of paper. Read More
Dreaming of Rem
We’ve noted recently the preponderance of architectural documentaries, particularly those concerns the fields “greats”—from Gehry to Mockbee, Kahn to Shulman. Well, now you can add Rem Koolhaas to the list, as Archinect points us to this trailer for a new documentary in the works entitled Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect. The film got a nice little write-up in—where else—the Seattle Times, which explains that the documentary is as much about Koolhaas’ arrival at architecture as the architecture itself. Though that often seems to be the case, especially with Rem. How else could such a famous architect declare: “One of the exciting things about architecture is it gives you so many reasons to be modest. Because there are so many levels on which you can fail.” But at least we get all those cool visuals produced by OMA and AMO of buildings melding and morphing, as though there were a firm better suited to the big screen. After all, he’s a multimedia star, having already conquered music and typography. Read More
Architecture Gets Its Close Up
A home-made dwelling in Portland's Dignity Village, featured in the film "Adapt"
What is SMIBE? Is it a brand of paint? Or maybe a government agency? No, it’s something much more interesting: the Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment. The Los Angeles-based, volunteer-run organization just announced the winners of its inaugural “Story About a Place” competition, which looked for short films (less than 6 minutes long) that “reveal new sides or issues about a place told by memorable characters.” The competition, which launched last fall, received over 90 entries from 13 countries. Read More
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