Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, VISUAL ACOUSTICS celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the worlds greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. + full entry...
"The director, Robert Stone, is telling an especially complicated story here, one that's simultaneously about how much the first Earth Day in 1970 really did change everything, and also about how much and how fast that change was undone." salon
The German-Lebanese co-production One Man Village tells the story of a man who returns to live as the sole inhabitant of his native Christian village, which was destroyed in the civil war. qantara
New film documents the construction of a green residential building in South Boston through the eyes of the union workers who built it. Interview with the filmmakers and a trailer preview at Dwell.
Take a one eyed film maker, an unemployed engineer, and a vision for something that's never been done before and you have yourself the EyeBorg Project. Rob Spence and Kosta Grammatis are trying to make history by embedding a video camera and a transmitter in a prosthetic eye. That eye is going in Robs eye socket, and will record the world from a perspective that's never been seen before. eyeborgblog
In his experimental short film Brutalitaet in Stein (brutality in stone), Alexander Kluge demonstrates how Nazi architecture used dimensions of inhuman and super-human scale to bolster the regime's politics of the same kind. Shots of huge neo-classical architectural structures from the Nazi period are confronted with equally anti-human national-socialist language as a voice-over. UbuWeb (great UBU feature with links to Kluge's other films)| as blogged in elseplace, with a link to Oberhausen Manifesto, which transformed German Cinema.
A trio of naked soldiers stride slowly through the sea past a floating corpse toward a Beirut of high-rise buildings luridly lit by orange flares. This hallucinatory image repeats like a leit motif throughout "Waltz with Bashir," an animated documentary by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman about war and memory. indieWIRE | Trailer
In 1978 the architect Craig Hodgetts produced a wondrous set of drawings for a Hollywood movie adaptation of the pulp classic, Ecotopia. With plenty of savvy and pop-culture sensibility, the script was translated into awe-inspiring architectonic visuals. The drawings were exhibited and published, but alas, the project never made it to the silver screen. via Ken Saylor, AN Blog
Filmmaker Diego Quemada-Diez' short film most powerfully narrates a poem with the same title in Kibera, one of Africa's largest slums near Nairobi, Kenya.Website | Watch the film
Over the weekend, I caught a screening of Burn After Reading, which turned out to be better than the reviews would have you believe. But the biggest surprise was the trailer for The International. Watching the opening scene, youre probably thinking the same thing I did: The financial crisis, coming to a theater near you. But beyond the (once?) absurd plot of a the worlds largest bank funding murders and coups, the movie looks like it could be the most architecturally savvy since The Fountainhead. A/N Blog | related feature: Video-tecture
Cool video for London's 2012 Olympic Stadium by Squint Opera. Can floating pods, flying seats, and levitating compression rings help London follow up the Bird's Nest? via Anarchitecture
Completely filmed before 2008s Beijing Olympics and edited right after its ending, China According to China presents a set of thoughts by five local architects on Chinas current situation and history. Ai Wei Wei [FAKE design], Jiang Jun [UrbanChina], Yu Kongjian [Turenscape], Wang Shu [Amateur Architecture Studio] and Ma Qingyun [MADA s.p.a.m.] are in charge of defining the issues that every Chinese architect has to deal with in todays practice, all of which may set the parameters of future development for Chinese architecture. Trailer after the jump. + full entry...
