Ray Pride

What a wilderness is man's mind.

Nathaniel Kahn's beautiful "My Architect: A Son's Journey," one of this year's Oscar nominations for Best Documentary--the others in the impressive field are "The Fog of War," "The Weather Underground," "Balseros" and "Capturing the Friedmans"--is an oddly universal journey of a near-40-year-old man attempting to capture the essence of an elusive father who died in 1974. The father is Louis Kahn, one of the great architects of the twentieth century, whose life was hard, complicated, and yielded only a few buildings, including two we see at length in the film: California's Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the awe-inspiring, natural-light-embracing Kembell Art Museum in Texas.

The movie opens with Kahn's obituary, his sudden death by heart attack in the men's room of New York's Penn Station, alone, bankrupt. "Lou," as Nathaniel calls his father, had three families, yet no one claimed the body for three days. Among the obstinate traits of this small, Jewish, facially scarred-since-childhood Estonian émigré was an adamantine compartmentalization--he was "some fluke of a father who just happened to have these children."

"It was part of his mystery. We didn't even know he was married," an early colleague says. It's a singular situation. But isn't everyone's story the same? Every life--properly lived--is staggering in its uniqueness, its complexity. But not all our fathers struggle with brick and stone and urban planners. Elsewhere, Nathaniel quotes the designer Richard Saul Wurman as saying that "Lou was really here. You can't say that about everybody." His own timetable, his own focus, his own insufferable ego. In the movie, Wurman offers another definition of outsider-ness: "Lou's blood had a yellow armband."

Nathaniel talks with other architectural figures about his father: Pei, Safdie, Scully, Gehry, Stern. Pieces come together in the five years it took to make the film. Nathaniel's spoken of approaches he discarded: objectivity did not become the project. He inserts himself to an intense degree. (I found myself tearing up repeatedly both times I've seen the film.) He talks with his half-sisters. His mother--a remarkable beauty into her seventies-- all but rolls her eyes at some of his questions. "Do you think it's a myth, Nathaniel?" she demands of his suppositions about Lou. "What's your explanation?" (The movie we're still watching, that's the explanation.)

Contemplating the physical world Lou erected and left behind, Nathaniel examines the fearsome God-like volition of this obsessive architect--"I am freezing time and space." Yet he cannot build a world for his son, not with presence, nor with absence. Nathaniel must, inevitably, muse heartbreakingly upon parallel lives, paths taken or not, attempting to place his own modesty next to Lou's attempts at majesty.

There are so many aspects of this movie I love, but I particularly adore Kahn's use of filmed images of his father at work. They're not explanatory. They're glimmers grabbed from outtakes, mostly by the filmmaker Hans Namuth, they're expressions, a look toward the camera, a gesture, the way he holds a bit of charcoal as he sketches. It respects Kahn as a memory; it's like channeling a ghost. The phrases we hear are mostly inadvertently telling, things that Nathaniel would read into Lou's words: "How accidental our circumstances are, really."

Lou discovered near 50 that his work was missing something, and that something was the application of principles of antiquity. Nathaniel totes his 16mm camera along as he visits his father's temples of secular religiosity. We learn that Lou's lurching deeper toward bankruptcy and Nathaniel shares a burst of unfinished projects, a life's inspirations, for the city he wished to transform--Philadelphia--and cities he wished to build within cities, including a landmark synagogue in Jerusalem that remains unrealized.

There's a boy in shorts step-printed along the length of the Salk plaza like in a clever-clever Charles and Ray Eames film, but there is another image that is so sweet and singular in that segment, as the adult Nathaniel Rollerblades from the far distance of the plaza toward the camera, away from the infinite line of sea and sky that the view toward which the buildings force the eye. Nathaniel bobs, weaves--glides through a place of tremendous beauty that exists only because his father existed and persisted.

But Nathaniel saves the best for last. There are many stories he has told in interviews that are not in the film, and one of my favorites is of his first encounter with the massive Bangladeshi monument, the Capital Complex, which was begun in 1962, the year of Nathaniel's birth, and finished in twenty-three years, "the same as the Taj Mahal." Nathaniel wanted to see it whole, to see this one last part of his father's legacy entire, without approaching it. His Bangladeshi friends blindfolded him. He describes the aural experience of hearing the falling away of the mad bustle of the city Dhaka, and then the silence playing over the masses of waters that surrounds the immense complex. And when he took off the blindfold? His journey is at its end.

"He wanted to be Moses here, he gave us democracy," a local architect tells Nathaniel. The statement is of the transformative and invigorating qualities of art: but we also see Nathaniel's expression as he listens to this lovely disquisition about the entirety of the massive, dramatic complex, a moderated mix of fear, glee, confirmation, realization, and love.

"My Architect: A Son's Journey" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2004-02-18)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Cyberpunk progenitor William Gibson's latest, "Pattern Recognition," is a compelling, inspired musing on the machining of "cool"
(2004-02-11)

Tip of the Week
"Design," which debuted at Sundance 2002 amid tepid performance vehicles and movies that take low budgets as an excuse for an anemic visual style, was a sometimes baffling yet bold and audacious first feature, a rare attempt to craft an American meditation on chance and fate
(2004-02-11)

Stealing beauty
Bertolucci demonstrates that movies are the language of his mind
(2004-02-11)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2004-02-11)

Porn by design
(2004-02-11)

Tip of the Week
(2004-02-03)

Up from the underground
(2004-02-03)

Puck'd
(2004-02-03)

Short Runs
(2004-02-03)

Tip of the Week
(2004-01-28)

Indie Jones
(2004-01-28)

Tip of the Week
(2004-01-20)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment