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March 13, 2004
My Architect: A Son's Journey
Nathaniel Kahn's Oscar-nominated documentary, My Architect (IMDB), focuses on Nathaniel's attempts to understand the legacy of his father, Louis Kahn. Louis is considered to be one of the great architects of the twentieth century, but he also had an unusual private life in that he fathered children with three different women, a fact that many of his professional contacts did not know.
Throughout the film, Nathaniel, who was 11 years old when his father died in 1974, attempts to reconcile the many lives that his father led through interviews with his father's colleagues, other prominent architects, and several family members, all of whom remember Louis in vastly different ways. Some of the people Nathaniel interviews (including a Philadelphia city planner, Ed Bacon) remember him as stubborn, completely impractical and ill-equipped to deal with the pragmatic concerns of city life. Others, including I.M. Pei and Frank Gehry, remember him as a genius, although Pei gleefully acknowldeges Louis's stubbornness.
Other images of Louis capture a more spiritual side, including interviews with a former mayor of Jerusalem, with whom Louis had planned to build a synagogue. A recorded lecture captures Louis emphasizing the need to connect with the natural world when designing buildings. I was most fascinated by Louis's experiences in Rome, when he developed his vision as an architect (check out especially the breathtaking Bangladesh capital building), an intriguing mixture of modern and classical images, synthesizing the pure modernist forms with the ruins of classical architecture.
The build-up to the film's climax, Nathaniel's journey to Bangladesh, is actually quite effectively done. During one earlier sequence, Nathaniel shows some of Kahn's buildings while Beethoven's Ninth plays in the background. You begin to sense Louis's gifts, his sense of vision, and Nathaniel cuts to another architect who says "Let's not glorify the man." This sense of self-awareness is important. Nathaniel celebrates his father's work, but also manages to remain critical of him, to recognize the ways in which he failed to respect the women in his life. Architecture still comes across as primarily a boy's club, but I think the film is critical of that.
As Nathaniel approaches the Bangladeshi capital by boat, we begin to see the building as an amazing achievement, especially given the country's poverty in the years immediately after their war of liberation against Pakistan. Later, Nathaniel interviews Shamsul Wares, and when Nathaniel acknowledges that he'll only be able to devote ten minutes of the film to this building, Wares shakes his head and says, "That's not enough." And, at that point, I felt he was absolutely right. I wanted to spend more time in that building, experiencing that space. As an aside: I'm not sure that the film acknowledges in enough detail the ongoing poverty in Bangladesh, but of course that's not the point of the film.
Like many recent documentaries, My Architect addresses the knowability of the past, the extent to which we can know someone through images and interviews. The film manages to foreground this focus without pushing it. The film opens witha shot of microfiche copies of newspapers reporting Louis's death (in a train station). Later in the film, we get several shots of Nathaniel watching archived footage on videotape, including one shot in which we can see Nathaniel's face reflected in a screen. I think that may be the moment when the film completely won me over, drawing me in to Nathaniel's search.
Roger Ebert fleshes out some of the details about Louis's family life that I failed to mention in my review. Many of them (including the fact that Kahn's body went unidentified for two days after his death) add to his sense of mystery. Interesting to see how Ebert focused on such different details from the film (the Pop Matters review is also quite good).
Posted by chuck at March 13, 2004 12:52 AM
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