Malcolm is an Australian film released in 1986. I’ve been thinking about it for years. Maybe it automatically rates because it is full of homemade Rube Goldberg machines and nerd contraptions, because I grew up around those, but there’s also the enjoyable fact that they’re all produced by a naive and strangely appealing mechanical savant played by Colin Friels. Sadly, scenes of the contraption which brings in his mail and boils his egg can’t be found on YouTube but you can get the movie here. Malcolm won the 1986 Australian Film Institute Award for Best Film.

Almost everyone in Canada knows this animation from the National Film Board of Canada. It’s by John Weldon, 1979, with music by The McGarrigle sisters. The NFB has always been a brilliant organization, and now they’re offering Canadian films and animations for free in their iPhone app. Watch this and The Big Snit on your phone. For free. Long live public arts funding in Canada.

The movie version of Valley of the Dolls was based on Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 novel of ambition, drug addiction and dissipation in the mid-60s entertainment industries of LA and New York. What is it with Hollywood film’s predictable bias that modern decor, or lofts, or any kind of contemporary design will go hand and hand with dissipation, dysfunction and general immorality? It’s convenient shorthand for the idea of In every dreamhome, a heartache. Sure, this tacit argument might contain a smidgen of truth, since despite its supposed democratic intent high modern midcentury design was often an indicator of way too much money, but Hollywood’s bias probably also belies a completely parochial conservatism. The protagonist’s relieved, happy return to the small Vermont town of her birth is proof of this pat little moral. I love a lot of the film’s modern interiors, their mix of modern furniture and contemporary and Asian art, their colour, their airiness and their postwar optimism. And all their ashtrays. You’ve never seen so much smoking in your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, has probably appeared in more Hollywood films than any other notable modern house and has also been heavily used for ad and fashion shoots, music videos and television. The house is currently for sale at US$15 million, hence these new photos by Tim Street-Porter for Christie’s Great Estates. The building is strange enough on its own – Mayan temple meets Arts & Crafts meets deco meets baronial – without the additional fact that it posed as Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner. Living in this house would be  - well, you’d be an actor in someone else’s movie. The exteriors of Wright’s houses are unarguably impressive, but the style of the interiors, which Wright designed and decorated himself, seem stylistically confused and – despite all the natural light – weirdly ornate and heavy. Unless one has been inside a house one isn’t really supposed to comment, and of course architectural photographs, no matter how good, never give a true impression of a place. But the historical styles and references of Wright’s interiors are plainly evident from photographs, and by any standards they’re a very odd mix. The Ennis House interior suggests the palatial, the hobbity, the occult and the medieval all at once; it’s a bizarre hybrid of Arts & Craft leaded glass, concrete tiles molded in a deliberately pre-columbian style (“textile blocks”), persian carpets, Alhambra-ish wrought iron chandeliers and chairs, and heavy furniture in both early Renaissance and English medieval styles. Personally I would have just limited myself to Mayan temple. I sympathize with Wright’s interest in craft, artisanal excellence, and the kind of painstaking hand-production that references the land and environment, but these virtues can belong to any number of aesthetic styles. Why this medley of styles in particular, why this Lord of the Rings grandeur  - in the middle of LA? It’s sort of a megalomaniac architectural fantasy and it’s no wonder so many Hollywood films have been shot at the house, particularly films on the noirish end of the moral continuum. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been shot here, further belying Wright’s quasi-spiritual intentions for the house.  See below for a long but not exhaustive list of movies filmed in the house, compiled by a moderator on pushpullbar as part of an interesting thread on architecture in the movies. It’s a fairly sombre list.

Both photos above from Blade Runner, 1982, via loftlifemag.

Black Rain, 1989

Grand Canyon, 1991.

House on Haunted Hill, 1958.

Ricky Martin 1998 video Vuelve, above. And oh dear.

More films shot in the house (additional photos to be added… please check back):

Female, aka The Violent Years (1956)
House on Haunted Hill (1958)
Terminal Man (1974)
Day of the Locust (1974)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Howling II . . . Your Sister is a Werewolf (1984)
The Annihilator (1986)
TimeStalker (1987)
Remo Williams (1987)
Karate Kid III (1989)
Black Rain (1989)
Twin Peaks (1989)
Calvin Klein’s Obsession, commercial by David Lynch (1990)
Predator 2 (1990)
Grand Canyon (1991)
An Inconvenient Woman (2 part TVM 1991)
The Rocketeer (1991)
Fallen Angels (1993)
Murder, Obliquely (1993)
The Glimmer Man (1996)
House of Frankenstein (1997)
Rush Hour (1998)
The Replacement Killers (1998)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

Berlin’s modernist and contemporary architecture stands in for Aeon Flux’s fictional city of Bregna in the year 2415 with surprisingly little alteration. At what point will modernist and contemporary architecture no longer seem quite so futuristic? Not only is modern architecture clearly still space-age in the popular unconscious, on some level its aesthetics and utopian aspirations are also clearly under suspicion. I can never decide if this is either well-founded skepticism or some sort of Puritan conservatism, or both. (A friend of mine recently pointed out that in Hollywood it’s always the villains who have the best taste in architecture and decor, but that’s another topic.) Not unlike the biosphere society in Logan’s Run, the future city of Bregna was purportedly built as a utopian haven but quickly reveals itself as a dark dystopia, its superb architecture suddenly taking on a more chilling nightmare feel. Much of the information about architecture in Aeon Flux in this post came from a long thread on architecture in film on pushpullbar, as well as from exhaustive fan websites here and here. There’s also an entertaining discussion here which tries to pin down the film’s architectural style and historical references. The photos above show the interior and exterior of the Baumschulenweg Crematorium of Alex Schultes and Charlotte Frank, which served as the ruling regime’s HQ in the film (note the Pierre Paulin ribbon chairs, in fuschia). All photos are from Paramount via here.

Above, familiar from the film’s poster, is the now disused 1935 Berlin Windkanal or aerodynamic testing windtunnel for German aircraft, built in 1932 and now designated a technical landmark. After WWII the Soviets removed all the equipment, leaving only the tunnel behind. It stands in for the “maze” and government complex in the film.

The Benjamin Franklin Conference Center Kongresshalle, above, by Hugh Stubbins with Werner Düttmann and Franz Mocken, 1957. It’s been renamed House of World Culture, but Berliners call it the ‘pregnant oyster’. Its roof, which has been rebuilt after a collapse in 1980, is the setting for a nighttime battle between Aeon on guards. on the roof at night.

Numerous scenes in the film were shot in the Tierschutzheim Berlin (2000-2001) by Dietrich Bangert, above. The building is actually a large, privately funded animal shelter complex.

Berlin’s modern concrete and glass Mexican Embassy, above, was a public marketplace in the film. It was designed by Francisco Serrano in collaboration with Teodoro González de León and completed in 2000.

The Volkspark Potsdam, 2001, popularly known as the BUGA Park, also includes the biosphere used as a tropical greenhouse in the film. Its recreation area, with standing concrete planes, appeared during the assassination mission sequence.

The scene above was shot at the Radsporthalle (Velodrom) by Dominique Perrault at the Landsberger Allee in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. 1995-96.

Bauhaus Archiv, which served as the exterior of the building where Aeon and her sister Una live (the imaginary interior, probably just a studio set, is directly above). From the Bauhaus Archiv website: “The museum building is a late work of Walter Gropius [1883-1969], the founder of the Bauhaus. It was planned in 1964 for Darmstadt and was built 1976-79 in modified form in Berlin. Today, its characteristic silhouette is one of Berlin’s landmarks.” More information about the images below is forthcoming, once I figure out where they were shot. Anyone?

Complete list of locations below.

(more…)

These stills were shot during the filming of Coast Modern, a documentary film about West Coast modern house architecture, spanning from LA to Vancouver, by Vancouver filmmakers Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard. The film “speaks with the architects and their patrons and asks if Modernism’s time has finally come or did it never really go away.” It is currently in the editing phase and is set to be completed this coming fall. The filmmakers talked with an impressive number of well-known architects and designers up and down the coast, and based on the preview the film has a great feel – entertaining and informative. You can follow the film’s progress on their blog, watch the preview trailer below, and there’s a set of stills on Flickr. I’m hoping the film will spark increased appreciation of modern architecture in Vancouver before the current spate of house demolitions proceeds any further. Photos here are: the Stinson Beach House, top; DJ Greyboy’s Opdahl House by architect Edward Killingsworth; Barbara Bestor’s LA House; the filmmakers talking with Julius Shulman; and the Etenza House where the idea for the Case Study project was hatched. I’ll post more information on the film and its events closer to the release date. All photos posted here by permission from the filmmakers.

Coast Modern Film Trailer from Coast Modern on Vimeo.