Film Festival Focuses on Architecture

How’s this for the title of a film festival: Wild Walls.

Pique your interest? If you’re at all intrigued by the intersection of architecture and cinema, make a point to visit an unusual 10-day film festival being staged by the USC School of Fine Arts and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

Called “Wild Walls: Berlin/Los Angeles Film Festival of Architecture and Urbanism,” the festival will begin at 7 p.m. Friday at USC’s Harris Hall Courtyard, where Andy Warhol’s acclaimed eight-hour 1964 film, “Empire,” about the building of the Empire State Building, will be screened in an outdoor setting until 3 a.m.

A simultaneous screening of “Elektro,” a documentary by German artist Daniel Pflumm about the destruction of the artist’s first Berlin music club, will also be shown.

The event will feature a live DJ who will evoke both the club setting and Warhol’s recommendations that his film be screened with the sound of two radios tuned to different channels. On Saturday evening, Marcel L’Herbier’s rarely viewed 1924 silent film, “L’Inhumaine,” will screen at the MAK Center at Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood.

Among the other films screening during the festival are Fritz Lang’s 1922 classic, “Metropolis,” on Oct. 15, and James Benning’s “LOS,” on Oct. 17, both at USC.

A Wild Walls symposium featuring scholars and artists is planned Sunday at USC’s Gin D. Wong Conference Center.

Wild Walls evolved from the Raum/Schnitt/Denken (Plan/Section/Concept) festival organized for the German Architecture Center in Berlin. Because Los Angeles is both a film capital and an important locus for Modernist architecture, the Berlin curators wanted to establish a link with L.A. practitioners and document the hybrid landscape of the city.

Festival director David Bunn, a professor of art at USC, said the Berlin curators picked Los Angeles to expand their festival because of similarities between the growth of Los Angeles and the building boom experienced by Berlin since the end of the Cold War.

Bunn said the title for the festival comes from the Hollywood film industry term for a movable backdrop that can be easily put up anywhere.

For more information about the festival, which is free to the public, call USC at (213) 740-2787 or the MAK Center at (323) 651-1510.

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Compiled by Times Staff Writers