These houses are ready for their close-ups
AT first glance, there is nothing particularly spectacular about the intersection of Palm Avenue and Holloway Drive in West Hollywood -- just commercial spaces and billboards that lord over it from Sunset Boulevard.
But German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz begs to differ.
This juncture is the subject of the opening scene of his 2007 architectural documentary “Schindler’s Houses,” screening Monday at REDCAT and April 12 at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater via the Los Angeles Film Forum’s weeklong “Heinz Emigholz Film Series.” (The filmmaker will attend the events; other presentations are at the Egyptian Theatre, Sunday and April 13; LACMA, next Thursday; the MAK Center, April 11.)
In the director’s only verbal address to viewers of this otherwise non-narrative film, he explains that there is a house by Midcentury Modern Austrian architect Rudolf Schindler somewhere in this first frame. Like much of L.A.’s architecture, the structure is hidden amid what the filmmaker describes as “propaganda and urban wasteland covered in haphazard vegetation.”
But the landscape, the film’s progression reveals, is an inextricable part of the aesthetic of the homes, designed between 1920 and 1953. Like cinematic postcards, shots of different angles of Schindler homes in Silver Lake, Westwood, Echo Park, Hollywood and Newport Beach appear with only the sounds of wind chimes, birds, cars and such as accompaniment. The camera lingers almost lovingly over an oddly shaped window, a corner of a staircase or a two-sided fireplace.
“I use the cinema to re-create the experience of being in the space,” Emigholz says from his home base of Berlin.
“The Schindler buildings were all built for the bohemia of Los Angeles,” explains the director, who never had a formal education in architecture but studied drawing in Hamburg. This is apparent from their relatively small size, cubist look, exposed beam interiors, atypical window usage and linear accents.
“They were very cheap,” he adds. “Now they are trophy houses.”
Schindler was once an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright. He was ostracized from Philip Johnson’s movement of modern architects, says Emigholz, as was Bruce Goff, another of his film subjects (“Goff in the Desert,” next Thursday at LACMA). So most of Schindler’s clients were residential, offering more creative freedom. “Through this they could experiment a lot and go in many directions,” notes Emigholz.
In making the film, the director says, he learned a lot about Los Angeles.
“There is something of the spirit of Los Angeles in this film,” he says. “The connection of buildings and landscape seems to be very Southern Californian.”
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‘SCHINDLER’S HOUSES’
REDCAT: 8 p.m. Monday. 631 W. 2nd. St., L.A. $7-$9
UCLA FILM AND TELEVISION ARCHIVE: 7 and 8:45 p.m. April 12. Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. $7-$10
INFO: (323) 386-8482, lafilmforum.wordpress.com
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