Mies van der Rohe, Rem Koolhaas and Santiago Calatrava
In that order films about these three architects were shown at the Jasmax Film Festival ‘06 - Celebrating Architecture, here in Wellington.
Mies van der Rohe’s work left me feeling somewhat bitter at the sterility and detachedness he implanted into society. It would have been nice if not everyone had started imitating with varying degrees of success his totally functional and “humble” approach. Too much of this and you get, well, this:
It’s the stuff that makes Monsieur Hulot flip out. God is not only in the details.
The film about Rem Koolhaas’ meanderings through Lagos offered an amazing if somewhat short view on the almost uncontrolled and explosive evolution of the city over the course of 4 years (1998-2002). One notable anecdote was that some market vendors had built their own little prison for detaining local criminals. No need for police and interviewed people seemed quite happy about this. Opportunity moves in mysterious ways.
No real conclusions were illustrated by the filmmaker however, which left some people wondering if Koolhaas and his students had actually reached them or if they had all been lost/negated during the intensity of the trip. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Godspeed, Mr. Koolhaas.
Which leaves me Santiago Calatrava’s work to bombinate about. And oh boy words fail me. All I can say is that if you like the pictures you see on the right and you haven’t yet experienced his work, then go and check it out. I’ve had the fortune of visiting two of his creations, the Gare do Oriente train station in Lisbon and Trinity Bridge in Manchester. Great moments.
Cet homme a plusieurs cordes à son arc!
More info:
48Hours update 2
Fark i’m tired!
Edit: Yes, after being up for 16 hours after a 3 hour sleep and working on the set alongside a - thankfully - professional crew, we got the shoot wrapped up. The editors had edited about two minutes at 10pm and were going for around 7 minutes. I hope it all went well, as I slept right through all that. And now the film has been submitted. Hopefully! I haven’t seen it yet, but from the moment that it’s online I’ll post a link. It features a really great gnome.
48Hours update
The weekend of filmmaking as mentioned in my previous post has now officially started. Each of the 400-odd teams had to pick a genre out of a bag and were each given a name for a character, a prop, a line of dialog and a characteristic of the character. Those are the constraints for the film and a jury will give extra credit to people who incorporate those elements well.
Our team got the genre “Fairy Tale”, which I think is pretty awesome. In any case I’m glad we didn’t get the wonderful opportunity to make a musical over the weekend. The other constraints are:
Name: Robin Slade
Characteristic: eternal optimist
Prop: mirror
Line of dialog: “That’s what I’m talking about”
Our initial brainstorming session yielded a lot of interesting ideas for a story and now a few writers are making them into a coherent plot. We start shooting tomorrow morning at 8am. More as the story evolves!
Write. Shoot. Cut. Survive.
This weekend is film competition weekend in New Zealand.
An initiative called “48Hours” aims to get people out and about making short films - writing, shooting and editing - in, well, a 48 hour time span. It’ll be a weekend of complete mayhem I’m sure, with hopefully a bunch of nice films as a result. And the logo has a gorilla in it!
I’m on one of the teams as a tape logger, so expect a link to our short soon. The 2004 and 2005 films can be viewed online at nzshortfilm.com.
“One of us, one of us!”
Some of you might instantly recognise that quote from the movie “Freaks” by Tod Browning (1931). I recently bought the new DVD release. It had been a few years since I first saw the film and I was pleased to find that it hadn’t lost any of its power. (read on »)