This is the final round-up titles in Wavelengths that have documentary roots. Follow these links to Part I and Part II.

Profit motive and the whispering wind by John Gianvito is an astonishingly elegant and elegiac chronicle of the history of the progressive movement in America told through its cemeteries, plaques and monuments, its symbolic and physical landscape (the one we so often overlook). Propelling us on this journey is a wind of change that summons and gathers the images that lend voice to those who have disappeared from cultural memory. Gianvito has crafted a beautiful landscape film that pays homage to those who fought for their beliefs, one whose underlying force and tensions are compelled by the perfidious acts committed by the current US administration. Recently screened to great acclaim at FID Marseille, Profit motive and the whispering wind is, without a doubt, one of the year?s strongest documentaries, experimental or otherwise.

Even more oblique about its politics, AT SEA by veteran 16mm filmmaker Peter Hutton is a high seas expedition which chronicles, in the words of the director, the ?birth, life and death? of a container ship. Silent and sublime in its photographic beauty, the film transforms reality by no other means than its patient observation and poetic eye as it documents ship-builders in Korea, a trans-oceanic trip and finally, ship-breakers in Bangladesh. The intensity of the sea and its bewitching aura casts a spell upon the viewers and juxtaposes, with compelling tension, the harsh work involved in keeping the naval industry afloat. Hutton is a former merchant marine and knows the sea intimately. The film attests to his awesome experiences.

Lastly, epc 2D: sun by John Price is likely the shortest documentary in the festival, if one will allow that. Price is a Toronto experimental filmmaker whose interest lies in the alchemical possibilities of celluloid. He?s also a home movie documentarian, who uses his two children as subjects for his filmic experiments. A day in the park with his family has yielded epc:2D, a 3 minute film shot with a hand-wound 35mm 1920s Russian camera processed by hand. It?s a page from his family album, but one which displays colour from another world. And that, in a sentence, summarizes the unique power of Wavelengths?s documentaries.

We began to note the crossover of docs into TIFF's Wavelengths section in a post two days ago; and we heard from one of these filmmakers Heinz Emigholz, the director of Schindler's Houses. Here's the second of three installments, highlighting other Wavelengths titles with a documentary impulse:

(Picture: The Butterfly in Winter)

ERZHÄLUNG, which translates as ?tale?, by the Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach, is a silent portrait of 80 year-old Italian sculptor Cesare Ferronato whose life we see, is devoted to artistic process. He seemingly lives sequestered from the world in order to create his works of art. The ordinary quickly becomes extraordinary as Schüpbach carves time, light and darkness with his 16mm camera; we sense the encounter between both artists as ephemeral but somehow everlasting. However understated, the power of art and art-making creates a ?tale? not so much told, but felt, and which lingers far beyond the screen.

THE BUTTERFLY IN WINTER is a poignant mother-daughter diptych made by friends Ute Aurand and Maria Lang.  The film is part of a trilogy entitled HERE IT IS VERY NICE AT THE MOMENT begun my Aurand and Lang in 1981. This final part is a diary of Maria?s daily tending of her gorgeous, 96 year-old mother, shot with impossible intimacy by Aurand. Everyday is the same, but everyday is vastly different as the rituals of waking, washing, eating and sleeping harbour the truths of our own humanity.

A resounding humanism also comes to the fore in Chris Chong Chan Fui?s KOLAM (POOL), which he shot in post-tsunami Aceh, Indonesia. Fashioning a touching portrait of a community attempting to rebuild and heal itself following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that shocked the world, Chong Chan Fui focuses on an unnamed hero who helps the rural children face their fear of water and learn to swim again (in an unused, unattended and abandoned USAid basin), despite having lost everything when the sea came blindingly crashing in. The filmmaker?s quiet observations tell us more than any newscast possibly could.

Similarly, Jean-Marie Straub and the late Danièle Huillet (who died last October) transformed an international news item into an atypical indictment of racial injustice. When they were commissioned to make a film for Roberto Rossellini?s centenary, they instead made a cinetract (protest film in the spirit of May ?68) reminding us of two senseless deaths that occurred on the outskirts of Paris, setting aflame the forsaken banlieus. Two teenage boys were burned alive after they jumped into an electrical converter box, fleeing the brutal hand of the French police. Straub-Huillet took their camera to the death site and recorded a ten minute remembrance of the tragedy thereby transforming Rossellini?s EUROPA 51 into EUROPA 2005, 27 OCTOBRE, the date of the senseless deaths.

Check back next week to read about more docs in Wavelengths.

On the making of  POOL - I'm writing to you from Kuala Lumpur, within the autocratic state of Malaysia, currently celebrating it's 50 years of on-again off-again independence.  While in my time in the big city, I was fortunate enough to have been able to join a researcher on her trip to the province of Aceh, one of the hardest hit areas during the 2004 tsunami that devasted parts of South and South-East Asia. Eighteen months after tragedy, we took a plane from Kuala Lumpur to Medan, Indonesia, and was taken on an 9 hour car ride through the province to the outer tip of the Aceh province where we would end up at a place in the small village of Lampu'uk.  Throughout the trip, markers of 'help' were seen all the way through the province. Whether it be about HELSINKI  where the Memorandum of Understanding was signed, or the presence of the international NGO's, 'help' was definitely here and there was no sparing of signs to show it.

This film was an accident.  I was ignorant of the situation in Aceh but wanted to gain some small insight into a state that had been in a state of war for the past three decades and further punctuated by the diaster of the tsunami.  I packed my camera to help my researcher with recording interviews of Gerekan Acheh Merdeka (GAM) / freedom fighters and the government leaders during and after the war.  But one of the most striking events for me actually was not the rebuilding of the communities, nor the after-life of the freedom fighters who had returned back down from the mountains and began to merge into the greater Aceh community.

The most striking event was the impact of the international aid agencies.

Humanitarian diaster capitalism was a reality that I had never seen face to face.  Why did World Vision and UNDP need to have a logo on the back of every rickshaw?  Why did each community that was 'built' needed to be clearly marked by the country/countries that had given the funds.  Why did each door of each new home need to be clearly marked by the international NGO that gave the money to do so?

Is this proof of help?  Why are we staking territory within diaster/conflict areas?

And finally, why was there a USAID pool being built at the village of Lampu'uk - a beach side village that was 1st hit by the tsunami?  I was temporarily staying in Lampu'uk for almost a month with my researcher, and the pool was built at the back.  What was the purpose of the pool?  And what was the purpose of the oversized tiled branding of USAID that covered the floor of the entire length of the pool?

Morning after morning, I placed my camera on the porch, and watched, as all foreigners do, as the kids in the village use and transform what is made available to them.

From the perspective of the international agency, to the perspective of the village, to the perspective of the filmmaker, everything seemed to have lacked real purpose.  No one knew the purpose of anything.  We all seemed to have just used what was there for our own purpose.

There was no clear purpose.  Just a pool, as it filled and emptied everyday.

A Conversation about "Schindlers Houses" as featured in Wavelengths

Marc Ries: What was your first encounter with Schindler like?

Heinz Emigholz: In 1975, I happened to pass the Lovell  House in Newport Beach. At first sight, the building struck me as simultaneously  strange and well-conceived.  But at that time, as a filmmaker I was working on extremely  time-analytical compositions with no ideas on architecture outside the medium of time. Only later did my film work expand to issues and depictions of space. And I had  forgotten my encounter with the house until I saw it again on our shooting trip in May 2006. Not until the end of the  1980s did I consciously notice a house or two by him in  Los Angeles. A few years later, I developed the plan for the film series "Photography and beyond". After Louis Sullivan and Robert Maillart, Rudolph Schindler, together with Adolf Loos, Bruce Goff, and Frederick Kiesler, were the missing links to  the present ? at least as far as my feeling for space is  concerned. The International Style and its expressionistic High-Tech sections never interested me.

Ries: How do you prepare for a shooting like this one  ? from the catalog to field research?

Emigholz: I don?t work on commission, so I am independent and can pursue what interests me. The decision to ?encyclopedically? explore the work of a specific architect always  began with an intimate experience of space. At least one room he built has to trigger an intense fondness in me; otherwise I can?t do any research. A certain kinship in  spirit in regard to grasping, designing, and experiencing  space is the starting point. From there, I research and extrapolate until I decide to open myself to the work of a  specific person. Then we seek contacts and try to find allies  for the project and to raise production money. In the end we plan a travel route that covers the accessible constructions. It all takes years.

Ries: Does your first on-site visit suffice to find ?the? image?

Emigholz: I believe in first impressions and the analytical power  of the first encounter. It just depends on how concentratedly you work. And with me, shootings are the time when my brain is 100 percent present in the real world. And the point isn?t ?the? image ? some single, representative image ? but a cinematic context, a sequence of individual  images that the editing and the viewer?s memory turn into  a spatial situation.

Ries: Can it be that the Schindler houses display a kind of inner montage that meets the films halfway? The interior space is not divided into separate units, but is usually a larger, convoluted room that presents a wide range of perspectives and thus accommodates the cinematic way of seeing in montage.

Emigholz: It so happened that last spring, around the time of the Schindler shooting, that I filmed almost all still-existing constructions by Adolf Loos. The film is titled LOOS ORNAMENTAL and will be finished soon, 74 minutes long. Of course, the idea  of his ?spatial plan? is also evident in Schindler. The floor  plan no longer plays a big role. What counts is the sphere in which our head moves freely in the space. Planned was  a complex spatiality that interlocks on various levels and  that really can?t be conceived and carried out except on  site. That presupposes an extreme culture of craftsmanship, on which Loos, Schindler, and Goff could still count  in their life-times. Incidentally, Loos? "Villa Müller" in Prague, which is the most elaborated project in this regard, is stuated on a steep slope ? like most of Schindler?s houses, as well.  Views and perspectives of and from the house are built on the foundation of a complex natural situation. This is the opposite of formula architecture. The two films together will show how Schindler could carry out and further develop in freedom what Loos had conceived so consistently and the degree to which Loos had to land in a dead end here in Europe.  Of course, with both I?m fascinated by the complex spatial  situations, which open up countless perspectives. I work in  this same direction as a cameraman ? away from the falsely postulated clarity of space.

Ries: Was it difficult to film all the houses you found?  Do you gain access everywhere?

Emigholz: There are good and different reasons not to let film teams into your home. Especially in Hollywood, where everyone knows that film teams destroy every place they enter. Or the residents are ill or on a long trip. Or a star doesn?t want people to know where he lives. Or a punk band doesn?t want it to be known how luxuriously their members live. And for many people in show biz,  social contacts carry the risk that one might end up with  the ?wrong?, rather than the ?right? people. House-hopping and up-scale mobility on the real estate market are  primary activities there. I respect that. A home is something very private. When we filmed, there were only three of us. May Rigler spent months in Los Angeles building  relationships of trust with the people living in the houses.  Where we shot, we were received with a warmth that is  probably possible only in America. But I must say, with Schindler I  reached a limit in an area that I don?t want to expose myself to anymore: in connection with shooting permissions and the idiosyncrasies of those who decide whether  you can film or not. The reaction of certain architecture theorists was interesting. They acted as if our filming and documenting the houses was stealing their academic life theme.  Faculty wars in the real 3-D world ? it was almost funny. The deplorable custom in these circles of trying to make  ?representative? views mandatory had not, however, spread to the residents we got to know. Almost all the original owners were part of the artistic or scientific bohemia of Los Angeles. They wanted affordable, but still highly individualistically designed houses. Fortunately, that made  these houses ? though they are meanwhile legendary ? too  small to be interesting for a certain exclusive clientele. John Lautner is there for them. And fortunately, I have meanwhile filmed almost everything I ever wanted to of the so-called famous architects. And no one yet pays any attention to the anonymous architectonic sites that don?t  have any name and that now interest me much more.

Ries:  Today we have two ways to receive ?auteur architecture?. First, via high-quality depictions in catalogs,  in which objects are dissected from their contexts and celebrated as unique items. The other way is by encountering them on-site, which is in part promoted by an excessive  architecture tourism. But between the two modes of reception a gap in experience often opens up that may imply an aesthetic gap, as well: the model in the catalog is ?overshadowed? by its lived existence in an environment and in  a history that leaves traces on the architecture, bringing  something else out of it, maybe what you describe as the ?originality of an authorship of the whole society?.

Emigholz: The aporias of architectural photography are well known. Limited space in the publication media leads to intensely staged condensations and limitations to the supposedly essential ? and to much use of wide-angle lenses,  so that everything is captured in one picture. A human  scale is thereby often lost. What is good for the architect?s  sales brochures need not have anything to do with what one can experience in or through these rooms. I find architecture tourism interesting because one?s own physical experience of a constructed space relativizes its media representation, even casting it into doubt and opening it to criticism. The prologue of my film proclaims the crime that I then commit: the relative isolation of an auteur architecture from the context of a whole society. Many films about architecture try to quote this context into being by providing essayistic commentary. For me, that?s the wrong path, because it avoids the basic experience with an object. It would be much better to depict this context itself, as in the first take of SCHINDLER?S HOUSES. Incidentally, some  of those who have seen the film say they constantly had the feeling of moving in a story or in rudiments of tales. And indeed, certain landscapes of the city of Los Angeles extend into the  images, and many of the houses the film shows are seen in other films shot in Los Angeles. But what is evident in SCHINDLER?S HOUSES is more the Los Angeles of Maya Deren, Thom Andersen, and David Lynch than that  of Alan Rudolph and Wes Anderson.

Ries: Is the ?aesthetic gap? a constituting one, perhaps an a priori component of your architecture-film work, or is it the result of what happens on site? It seems to me as if the milieu were less intensely present in SULLIVAN'S BANKS than in the other works.

Emigholz: The gap you describe is more fundamental to film  than to photography. The sound alone brings much into  the film that is not in the picture. And film images are  constantly ?turned around? and set in new relationships in the sequence of takes. Attributions of significance logically  cannot be as clear-cut in film as they can in photography, even if the director wanted to try. But I don?t have the aim  of isolating and presenting ideal states. In these films, I  don?t use historical footage, because I?m interested in the  current existence of the buildings shown; that is, at a very specific time. I thereby also document the respective present day. That was already the case with SULLIVAN'S BANKS.

Ries: The proliferation of green, of nature, is actually  also a ?subject? of the film. I had the impression that  SCHINDLER?S HOUSES is also a film about nature reconquering civilization ? through a strange affiliation of culture  and nature that the houses have.

Emigholz: But that is no opposition. Schindler had very realistic  visions of the effect the houses would have in an environment that would not grow back until later. With many houses, the landscape around them was part of the design. So he was also a landscape architect. He built in extreme places,  in the wild, almost inaccessible mountain landscape that separates the Los Angeles Basin from the San Fernando  Valley. Nature and its extreme conditions were always immediately a theme of his work. Many ?results? of his work he never experienced, because nature did not play its part  until decades after construction was completed. For example the "Elliot House" in Los Feliz: in the photos shot shortly after its completion in 1930, it stands visible from afar, like an abstract sculpture on a barren hill. Today it disappears in a bamboo forest, and only parts of the garage are still visible  from the street. But in its structures, the house takes up the forms of the bamboo forest ? which didn?t even exist at  the time of construction. The "Kings Road House", which was once way out in the sticks and now, unfortunately, is surrounded by block-like apartment buildings, was conceived  from the start as part of a large garden area. Schindler was downright obsessed with nature. He designed ?sleeping porches? for his houses, where one could sleep outside.  Nature was part of his thing.

Ries: How would you describe the state of (im)balance  between the two levels of experience that is important to  you: here the object, there history and society?

Emigholz: From the level of the viewer. We are damned to view only surfaces. Most media surfaces unfortunately try to copy the politics of words and to take part in their  supposed authority. But it is part of the logic of the threedimensional world that the greatest number of images or pictorial contexts possible in it have never been shown or arisen in consciousness. At any rate, I am aware of a class  of images that are yet to be made and that show the society and its respective ?nature? without clinging to words.

Marc Ries works as a media theorist in Leipzig and Vienna. More information on the films by Heinz Emigholz at:

www.pym.de
www.rudolph-schindler-film.com
www.bruce-goff-film.com
www.robert-maillart-film.com
www.louis-sullivan-film.com
www.annunzio-film.com
www.filmgalerie451.de
 
Picture: Kings Road House (1922) in West Hollywood

TIFF?s Wavelengths section is a curated presentation of artist-made film and video from around the world. The term ?artist-made? is increasingly replacing the more slippery and elusive idiom ?avant-garde? and the somewhat aloof-sounding ?experimental?. They?re just labels, equally expendable, elastic and appropriated at will. Unlike some of my international colleagues, I actually like the terms, but recognize nonetheless that what counts is the ethos: the mode of expression, the personal means of production, the risk-taking.

This year?s Wavelengths demonstrates a remarkable surge in filmmaking, longform and on celluloid, with many works fitting the documentary label in our unflagging urge to categorize. Incidentally, a similar desire for taxonomy emerges variously from some of the works, as diary, catalogue, high-seas chronicle, photographic roadtrip, artistic encounter, protest, even home movie moments. The avant-garde (yes, I?m using the term) is plunging itself into our visual reality, returning to pictorialism and duration, no doubt as rejoinder to our frighteningly accelerated and digitally multiplied world. Some of these films are slow. In a good way. In a regenerative way that brings us back to reality, that offers up the beauty of the world as something to behold and hold onto, allowing us to withstand the unnecessary and unfortunate ills that plague us.

Heinz Emigholz?s SCHINDLER?S HOUSES, which is part 12 of his colossal PHOTOGRAHY AND BEYOND film series is a 35mm catalogue of forty of R. M. Schindler?s houses built in and around Los Angeles between 1921 and 1952. Through Emigholz?s discerning eyes, we view these Modernist architectural marvels, sometimes in surprising compositions created by the filmmaker, and other times,  in equally surprising or dismaying states of decay caused by neglect, weather and time. The film leads us on a pilgrimage, allowing us to discover this significant body of work, as though they were in situ frescos in Italy. Emigholz renders us the time to observe, contemplate, to become familiar with and to recognize Schindler?s unique architectural vocabulary. He may have studied under Frank Lloyd Wright but his signature style is all is own. Time is cinematic, and hence mechanical, artistic, prescribed, etc?but for the viewer, it?s felt as pure luxury. A cameo by Thom Andersen (seated in his Schindler house) whose award-winning documentary LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF screened in Reel to Reel a few years back, provides a cinematic wink. Here, Los Angeles really is playing itself.

Revisit Doc Blog later this week to learn about other Wavelengths docs. Click here for information about Wavelengths tickets.