Mediashelf

A Constructive Madness: Wherein Frank Gehry and Peter Lewis Spend a Fortune and a Decade, End Up with Nothing and Change the World
Directed by Thomas Ball and Brian Neff
Narrated by Jeremy Irons
Telos Video, 2003, 60 mins., $30.00
In 1986, when onetime Guggenheim chairman and insurance magnate Peter Lewis commissioned Frank Gehry to design a new house, he also hired a camera crew to film the project. The resulting documentary, written by Jeffrey Kipnis, captures various points in the process from its inception to 1995, as Gehry comes up with nearly a dozen schemes for the house (which would form the basis for some of the architect’s later work), only to have the price tag skyrocket to $82 million with eventually no building to show for it. The film features a final gripping scene where client and architect clash over the house’s design.

The Venetian Dilemma
Directed by Carole and Richard Rifkind
Parnassus Works, 2004, 73 mins., $TBA
The challenge facing Venice, according to local vendor Danilo Palmeri, is between “saving the museum-city, or the city that people want to live in.” Since 1950 the local population has dwindled from 175,000 to 64,000, while tourism has exploded from 500,000 to 14,000,000 visitors annually. In the film Palmeri argues that official policies favor tourism—for example, permitting the expansion of outdoor cafés in the same piazza where it’s trying to ban his produce stand. Deputy mayor Roberto D’Agostino wants to save the city by diversifying the economy and building an underwater metro. Though the solution is unclear, filmmakers Carole and Richard Rifkind make desperately clear that unchecked tourism is as big a threat to Venice as the well-known fact that it’s sinking.

Regular or Super: Views on Mies van der Rohe
Directed by Joseph Hillel and Patrick Demers
TVA Films Inc., 2004, 57 mins., CDN$45.98
“When you think Mies, you think ultramodern,” says Margit Kleber in Regular or Super. Set to an original score by Ramachandra Borcar (think Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme song), the recently released documentary opens and closes at one of Mies’s final commissions, a gas station built in 1967 in Nun’s Island, Montreal. Filmmakers Joseph Hillel and Patrick Demers use the location as a jumping point for exploring the legend-ary architect’s body of work from multiple points of view, ranging from those who inhabit his buildings to those who spend their lives studying them.

My Architect
Directed by Nathaniel Kahn
New Yorker Video, 2005, 116 mins., $29.95
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003, this intensely personal film is the director’s attempt to untangle the complicated personal and professional legacy left by his father, Louis Kahn, who died when the filmmaker was ten. The celebrated architect died deeply in debt and shrouded in mystery. Although numerous obituaries listed only a wife and daughter, Louis actually had three families, all of whom lived in Philadelphia within miles of each other, only fleetingly aware of one another. The newly released DVD version of My Architect includes a Q&A with the director; additional interviews, scenes, and historic footage; and an elegantly designed booklet by Scott Kawczynski.