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"Sketches of Frank
Gehry" is director Sydney Pollack's first feature length
documentary on the acclaimed architect, Frank O. Gehry.
The two men have been friends for many years, and Pollack completed
the film over a period of five years, starting in 2000.
Frank Gehry loves to sketch; it is the beginning of his architectural
process. And it is his love of the sketch that gave Pollack his first
clues to the style of this documentary film. Beginning with Gehry's
own original sketches for each major project, the film explores
Gehry's process of turning these abstract drawings, first into
tangible, three-dimensional models, often made simply of cardboard and
scotch tape, then into finished buildings of titanium and glass,
concrete and steel, wood and stone.
To capture the sketch quality in the documentary, Pollack uses a
combination of film and Mini DV (digital video) as his media. Spending
countless hours in Gehry's studio, on building sites, and in his home,
this unobtrusive and quiet shooting style has captured, for the first
time, the essence of Gehry's unique architectural process, and his shy
and elusive personality.
As a counterpoint to the deliberate informality — the sketch quality
— of Pollack's work with the video camera, he painstakingly captures
on film, the grandeur of Gehry's architecture, from his earliest
building, a hay barn in California, to what are now recognized to be
some of the great buildings of the modern era, including the
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los
Angeles.
The dialogue between Pollack and Gehry, as intimate as that of any two
friends of long standing, courses like a continuous melodic line
through the film.
At the heart of the film is the low-key, informal quality that Pollack
brings to his conversations with Gehry, and the many other
participants in the film. This is not a film about rarified
architectural theory. On the contrary, Pollack's ability to pierce the
skin of architectural theory allows him to draw deep insights into the
life of this extraordinary architect and his singular architectural
process.
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http://www.comingsoon.net/films.php?id=13509 |
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Plot
Summary: "I prefer the
sketch quality, the tentativeness, the messiness, the appearance of
in-progress rather than the assumption of total resolution and
finality.." |
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Starring:
Philip Johnson, Sir Bob Geldof, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Dennis
Hopper, Michael Ovitz, Milton Wexler |
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