If buildings could speak, what would they say? They would purr poetic platitudes and whisper cliches into your ear, according to Wim Wenders and the team responsible for Cathedrals of Culture, a new 3-hour marathon film that aims to uncover “the soul of buildings,” but which feels more like a series of vapid promotional videos.
Several years in the making, the film, which has its UK premiere at the Barbican tonight, is the product of six acclaimed directors, each of whom have chosen a different major building to put on the psychiatrist’s couch and delve deep into its subconscious. From the Berlin Philharmonic to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the half-hour shorts explore a day in the life of these cultural machines, narrated by the imagined voices of the buildings themselves. It is a voyeur’s dream, taking you behind the scenes after hours and from behind closed doors, in a format that puts the architecture – usually just a filmic backdrop – centre-stage.
Shot entirely in 3D, the project is partly intended as a manifesto for the medium, which Wenders insists has not seen its potential fully exploited, confined to action films and special effects. Since his maiden voyage with the technology in 2011 for Pina, a biopic on the avant-garde dance of Pina Bausch, he has been its biggest advocate, for the sense of “heightened immersion” and “real spatial experience” he claims it can allow. Visitors to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale will have had a taste of his ambitions, in the form of his short film on Japanese practice Sanaa’s undulating university campus at EPFL, Lausanne, a surreal affair that featured the architects zooming around their futuristic creation on Segways. A similarly styled film on Swiss recluse Peter Zumthor was shown at the following biennale – a trailer of a feature-length movie on the man to come.
“In the realm of the documentary, 3D represents an enormous step forward,” writes Wenders in the film’s production notes, “and could really push the entire genre to a whole new level.” So, with Cathedrals of Culture, has this new level been reached?
Sadly, the answer is a resounding no. In the majority of the films, the medium trumps the message, as directors desperately set up shots that maximise depth of field and jump between extreme close-ups and agoraphobic expanses, but which do little to assist their narratives. There are clever visual tricks for sure, but ones that ignore the fact that there is actually a story to tell and an audience to engage – for 165 minutes, which feels like an eternity, as architectural ennui descends all too quickly.
On the plus side is the choice of buildings, which set up a promising premise, if only for the chance to see these majestic spaces on the big screen. They include the glacial Oslo Opera House, a white mountain of a building that tumbles into the sea, and the dusty 19th-century halls of the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. There is Louis Kahn’s sun-soaked Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and Norway’s Halden Prison, a sprawling high-security complex set in a charming silvan glade.
The latter is the stand-out highlight. Directed by Danish film-maker Michael Madsen, who made Into Eternity, a brilliant documentary on the strange story of Finland’s Onkalo nuclear waste facility, it is a moving portrait of life inside “the most humane prison in the world.” It is a place where wardens glide along corridors on trendy micro-scooters, where every cell has a flatscreen TV and en-suite bathroom, and which has the overall look of a Scandinavian boutique hotel. But it is a utopian image – reported with glee around the world – offset by a haunting voiceover, told by the prison’s own psychologist, that gives a more balanced view of life inside. The use of fluid free-floating camerawork, meanwhile, intentionally jars with the prisoners’ captivity. Architecture, says Madsen, is “psychology as space,” and his film couldn’t do a better job of showing it.
The same cannot be said for Robert Redford’s offering, which is smothered with all the schmaltzy gloss of a TV commercial for life insurance. Growing up near the building, he chose Louis Kahn’s most admired work, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, as his subject. “The building itself is very Euclidean, it’s very geometric, it’s got sharp angles,” he writes. “They are dynamic, and they are powerful. The opening between the two wings is powerful because it goes into the infinity of ocean and space. So I went to Ed Lachman, the cinematographer, who is very inventive and exploratory, and asked him, can we look at this building and romanticise all of its angles?”
Romanticised camera angles are paired with a voiceover by scientists who work in the facility, reciting misty-eyed reveries about how much the building means to them. And as if all the American mawkishness wasn’t enough, it is set to music by Moby. For even the most die-hard Kahn fans, by the end of this, you’ll want to gouge out your own eyes and ears with a chunk of his concrete piazza.
For many of the films, portraying the character of the building in the form of the narrator’s voice has proved the trickiest thing to get right. The choice of a well-spoken middle-aged German woman for Hans Scharoun’s majestic concert hall is an unexpected, and very successful, decision; she is seductive and fierce in equal measure, just like the building’s sculpted peaks. But others are not such happy pairings. Michael Glawogger’s film of the St Petersburg library presents an intriguing montage of babushkas busying themselves with index cards and dusty piles of books. The purposeful footsteps of their heels echoes in the eerie silence of the empty reading rooms, but the overall effect is spoilt by an overly hammy narrator, spouting excerpts from the weighty canon of Russian literature. And who knew that the voice of the Pompidou would not be the bolshie slurs of a French punk from the 1970s, but the soporific English tones of the London Design Museum director, Deyan Sudjic? Sacre bleu!
For all its lofty ambition, Cathedrals of Culture presents a limited and internalised view of what architecture is, a fault perhaps driven by the obsession with the 3D camera. It is a tool that, rather than broadening the view, has brought a compressive, myopic lens. The context of most of these buildings is entirely absent, as is the bigger story about how they operate in the city. Instead, it is an indulgent, naval-gazing exercise in spatial pornography, choosing visual titillation over giving the full picture. And if the grandiose pronouncements of architects sometimes make you suspicious of architectural culture to begin with, this film will do little to help. It has a self-satisfied, sometimes cultish, air that makes you feel like you’re taking part in some collective brainwashing exercise.
If you are interested in architecture on film, there are a pair of directors who do it much better. They are called Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine, and they have produced an exceptional series of documentaries – Living Architectures – that provide a fascinating window on to the real lives of buildings, behind the idealised image. From following the daily trials of a cleaner around one of Rem Koolhaas’ experimental villas, to focusing on the climbing team charged with maintaining the billowing folds of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, their films unwrap the realities behind the icons, told by those who deal with them. And, as luck would have it, they will also be showing at the Barbican soon – the result of their month-long immersion in the brutalist complex, which promises to be an energising antidote to Wenders’ sickly-sweet eulogy, a caustic remedy to wash away the schmaltzy syrup.
