Toronto Dispatch. 7.

Here's Frank (and Sydney)

Documentaries have not been the most prominent section of the Toronto International Film Festival this year, although there have been some good ones - The Smell of Paradise is a tour through global Jihad in which leaders stigmatized as monsters in the media "war on terror" speak face-to-face [more]; John and Jane gives us surprising access to young Indians, the voices on the telephone who perform what we call outsourced jobs; Diameter of the Bomb measures the immeasurable human impact of a terrorist attack.

One doc given special status by the festival is Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack's portrait of the architect, now in his 70s, whose buildings have nurtured a greater public awareness of architecture and design. Pollack is the first Hollywood director to make a film about a contemporary artist, reason enough for this film to be of interest. For Toronto, there's another dimension to all this. Gehry was born here and got his first taste of architecture here. His new building for the Art Gallery of Ontario is now under construction.

Gehry is now one of the public faces of architecture. His buildings have turned drab cities into tourist destinations and revived abandoned neighborhoods. They have reminded the public that, like it or not, the built environment shapes their lives. They have also shaped the way a new generation of architects sees design - either in homage toward the master, or in rebellion against him.

From the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, we now all know Frank Gehry. He may be one of the few contemporary artists whom people outside insular art circles can identify by name, which may explain why distributors are considering acquiring Sketches.

We also all know Sydney Pollack, director of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Jeremiah Johnson, Tootsie and Out of Africa. Sketches of Frank Gehry is Pollack's first documentary. The title comes from the spidery hand-scrawled drawings that are usually the beginnings of a Frank Gehry design. It isn't mechanical drawing, and it isn't the monumental phallic soaring that you might associate with the myth of architecture, but it's Gehry's hand. Pollack then follows Gehry's office through a process that turns that scrawl into a series of models that change with whatever inflection comes to mind.

It's a conversation between two friends and a look at the creative process, which Pollack and others record with small digital cameras as the conversation digresses in all sorts of directions. Yet this is a special creative process, one that involves projects that often have huge amounts of money on the line, money that comes from someone other than the film director or the architect. Gehry cites something he heard Pollack say years before, when Pollock observed that he was seeking to find that tiny space in a commercial practice in which he could produce something of quality. As Gehry sees it, architecture for him is aiming at that same tiny window.

Pollack shot this documentary over five years' time and spoke to a range of critics, curators, architects and even some detractors. Artists talk about Gehry building with cheap, debased materials like plywood and chain-link, and the film notes that he puts his money where his mouth is, using these materials in his own house. Thomas Krens of the Guggenheim Museum, Gehry's most prominent patron to date, warns not to assume that Gehry's Columbo-style homespun modesty reflects the man in full. Inside those rumpled clothes is a huge competitive ego, says the museum director, who has himself never been accused of being ego-impaired.

Real criticism of an architect isn't found much in architecture docs, since they tend to be commissioned by the people who are paying these same architects. When you're spending $100 million or much more on a building, and often trying to raise money as you begin to build, ambiguity is the last thing you want on the screen. Sketches is something of a love letter, but it's not a vanity film. In Pollack's doc, Hal Foster, who teaches at Princeton, faults Gehry for designing spectacle. Gehry himself notes that critics say he's designing a brand, building "logotecture." To the film's credit, we see Gehry working out a new architectural language, fearing being branded for history as the guy who used chain-link or the guy who did Bilbao.

Much of this ground has been covered in the many docs about Gehry and his work. What's new here are the observations of a man who has been central to Gehry's career, his blind psychotherapist Milton Wechsler, whose group therapy sessions have been packed with Hollywood stars. (Now there's a documentary to be made.) Wechsler, spry for a nonagenarian, notes that Gehry's creative force (well-known and prized among his artist friends in LA) lacked confidence until the architect left an unsatisfying marriage. He also admits that other notoriously envious architects watched Gehry flourish under Wechsler's counseling and asked Wechsler to be their therapist. Wechsler turned them all down. You have to have something behind the floodgates for there to be any difference when the floodgates open, he tells Pollack: "I didn't make Frank Gehry famous. He made me famous."

We hear of auspicious accidents on Gehry's way to architecture. He loved flying, which he had a chance to try once his family moved to Los Angeles to soothe his ailing father's health, and he dreamed of becoming a pilot. Perhaps he might have; teachers told him and his mother that he had no talent for design.

Pollack's parallels between the creative dilemma of the film director and that of the architect raise questions worth exploring. Like film, architecture is among the most collaborative of the arts. Look at it closely, and you'll see that the architect is required to perform many more roles than a film director would want to have, unless you happen to be Woody Allen - he's the screenwriter, producer, director, publicist and leading man (women at that level of the profession are still rare).

No journey through Gehry's design career is completed in 83 minutes - because he's had to leave out so many buildings, Pollack gives us a better sense of Gehry the character than Gehry the architect, although he captures the light on the surfaces of Gehry's structures with a delicate touch that I've never seen before on film. Moreover, any documentary about a person who still lives and works is destined to be overtaken by events. In this case, those events are the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the site of the George Orr Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, a building under construction devoted to the work of a quirky ceramicist who's had a wide influence on American artists. Not only the building was damaged; the tall trees framing it went down, and can't be replaced like a steel tower or a wall. We'll wait and see how Gehry resolves that problem. And we'll inevitably see it in another documentary.

Eggleston's Moving Pictures

Another doc, Stranded in Canton, was one of the festival's revelations. It's the only "film" by William Eggleston, the man considered the "father" of contemporary color photography, and the version that we saw this week reflected the editing of Robert Gordon, but these moving pictures shot by Eggleston show a dead-on eye for cinema.

In 1973, Eggleston got a then-new Sony Betacam Portapack and for two years or so turned it on his friends in Memphis, the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans. If anyone's old enough to remember, and I am, barely, these were the days when video "art" consisted of turning on the camera and letting it run, mostly during art openings and other events when artists were getting drunk and hamming it up for a new technology. The sound was off-mike, the picture rambled around like the tipsy person who tended to be carrying the camera, and, to put it very mildly, there was no content besides party banter. Eggleston did much more than that.

Stranded in Canton does indeed consist of conversations with Eggleston's drunk friends, who tended to be writers, musicians or artists. What he did with the camera in black and white was different, and there's still an elegance to it. Somehow he has an extraordinary instinct for composition (which we see in his later insistence that he will only shoot one subject one time). It's been said that you could freeze any image in the film and it would be a great still photograph. That's true, but Eggleston gets a specific image with this camera than you won't find in still photography. You'll see the sensitive camera treat whites (the colors, not the people) in its own particular way, modulating shades of grey with gentle lines that can remind you of the portraits by the artist Alex Katz, who wasn't a huge celebrity in the early 1970s. When the light is too intense, the image, or part of it, just goes white. Some of the close-ups are truly radiant, and the soft grey also softens coarse and gross scenes in which geeks bite off the heads of chickens on the streets of New Orleans - another ritual to mourn?

Eggleston's feel for the moving image is something special, too. He gets tactile on his subjects, often so close that you can tell he's annoying them, but faces and bodies move with grace in and out of his line of vision. Think of a Southern Fellini. The pictures of his friends, his children and of others who happen to be there tell a story that we know: there's a dreamy grace in honky-tonk excess. (It's important to remember this grace, as New Orleans lies in ruins and the South now seems trapped under the graceless thumb of God and NASCAR.) In a perceptive complementary film that also showed here, Michael Almereyda's William Eggleston in the Real World, Eggleston describes his photography as "the war against the obvious." In Stranded in Canton, he hasn't yet moved to that photographic approach. His color photographs eventually look like extended shots taken by a camera that doesn't move. His black and white video camera twists and turns, following his characters, whether they're graceful or grotesque. They're odd, not obvious.

The laconic Eggleston told an audience here that he gave up video when he tried to shift into color, and the machinery was just too heavy at the time to carry around. Soon he would move into the contemplative style that we know today.

The black and white video of Stranded in Canton can't really be called contemplative. It moves and sways and shifts with a soothing pace. Eggleston's deep mellifluous voice indicates that he's as addled as the characters in the frame. Those characters are valuable souvenirs of a New Orleans that may be lost forever. We're lucky that Eggleston saved the 75 hours of tape that he shot, even if he did decide not to pick up the camera again.

Posted by dwhudson at September 15, 2005 12:12 PM