A Sketch Of Sketches Of Frank Gehry

Filed under: Architecture-Design, Movies-Videos | By DrHGuy | October 30, 2006 at 9:39 am

Netflix Edutainment, Frank Gehry’s Edifices, & DrHGuy’s Edification

One of the benefits of Netflix,¹ is the opportunity to view video titles, often but not always documentaries, that would never make an appearance here in the boondocks and that I wouldn’t attend if they did make such an appearance because the likelihood of garnering enough enjoyment or utility from an unknown film to compensate for the cash and, more significantly, the time spent to watch it, would be a bad bet. The ratings from other Netflixers attenuate the risk of renting a clunker, the monthly fee that is independent of the number of DVDs rented minimizes the incremental cost of the rental, and the delivery by mail makes it not only convenient for renters but also economical for Netflix to stock and ship a huge inventory that includes non-blockbusters.

Thus it was that I recently watched, thanks to Netflix, Sketches Of Frank Gehry, a part-biography, part-documentary produced, narrated, and filmed by Sidney Pollack.²

Frank Gehry? Isn’t He The One That Designed – You Know, That Funny Looking Building That’s Sort Of Shaped Like A … You Know …

Probably.

The most frequently appearing cliché in articles about Gehry may be that his style disallows in-between opinions; one either loves his curvilinear, expressionistic buildings, or one detests them.

I’m ambivalent – about Gehry’s work, not the cliché. I’m pretty certain the cliché is crap. I don’t think I’m sui generis in admiring those fantastic shapes and soaring structures while simultaneously thinking that the buildings don’t seem to fit their surroundings and wondering if their form has less to do with function and more to do with spectacle.

In any case, Pollack is clearly in the pro-Gehry camp. Sketches Of Frank Gehry may not be a labor of love, but it is definitely a feature of fondness, resembling My Dinner With Andre more than Bowling for Columbine or An Inconvenient Truth. Richard Nilsen, in fact, described the documentary as “almost a home movie,” a phrase I think neatly captures the film’s self-satisfied style (many of the scenes are shots of Pollack using a handheld camera to film Gehry) and its structure:

Pollack, between adulatory observations, lobs softball questions
Gehry gracefully, charmingly knocks them out of the park
Pollack and others³ display and emit expressions of awe⁴
Pollack does a camera tour of a Gehry building
Repeat for 84 minutes

However coy this setup may appear on paper, it works in this movie. It all comes off a tad self-consciously but otherwise provides an altogether pleasant and enjoyable environment for Pollack, untrained in architecture, to ask the same naïve, rudimentary questions that I might ask.

Before viewing Sketches Of Frank Gehry, I knew only that (1) Gehry was responsible for much of Chicago’s Millennium Park (because of its proximity to my home) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (because it was the subject of a feature on a TV news program) and a batch of other famous buildings I couldn’t have listed (I would have gotten The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao on a multiple choice exam) and (2) that he is considered the hot shot superstar of modernist architecture.

While I still hadn’t gulped the Gehry Kool-aid by the end of the film, I was much impressed with what I had learned from watching the process by which Gehry creates a building’s design. Considerable footage is devoted to Gehry and his team working with three-dimensional models. Walls are created by folding, cutting, taping, and tearing various materials – and then ripping them apart, refolding, re-taping, and trying again with different media until it’s right (”right” is, of course, whatever Gehry, an obsessive revisionist, says it is). The models are transformed, by technology that the film seems to indicate was developed by Gehry’s people, into computerized digits and then transmuted into the appropriate form to send to clients, engineers, builders, and bureaucrats.

Small but special points in the film:

Gehry attributing his name change (from Goldberg) to being “pussy whipped” by one of his wives
Gehry describing one model thusly, “It’s so stupid-looking it’s great!”
Watching Gehry’s freeform pencil sketches transformed into structural plans
Gehry’s announcing, when taking a break in one modeling session, this plan: “Let’s look at it for a while, be irritated by it, then figure out what to do.”

Conclusion

Frank Gehry is an engaging man, Pollack is a smart filmmaker, Gehry’s building are lusciously photogenic, and the film shows the process of creating a work of art.

What’s not to like?

Videos

Embedded players with these videos at the ready can be found at The Media Page For A Sketch Of Sketches Of Frank Gehry

The links below go to Youtube, the source of the videos:

The Trailer For Sketches of Frank Gehry

Models Of Gehry Buildings

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Chicago Millennium Park Bridge

The trailer can also be viewed in Quick Time format at
~Sketches of Frank Gehry Trailer in Quick Time~

Followup: See Architecture To Wear

Footnotes

Of course, the numero uno, first and foremost, best of the best benefit of Netflix, its raison d’être as far as I’m concerned, is avoiding the likes of Blockbuster (corporate motto: It’s a confusing late fee algorithm to you; it’s the chief source of profit to us) and, indirectly, punishing them financially. ~back~
While this is Sidney Pollack’s initial documentary, he does have some experience in film; he is probably best known as a Director of movies such as Out of Africa, Tootsie, The Interpreter, Absence of Malice, and The Way We Were but is also a producer (e.g., Up at the Villa, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Searching For Bobby Fischer) and actor (Marty Bach in Michael Clayton, Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut, Al Eustis in A Civil Action, and several appearances in TV series) ~back~
Including Dennis Hopper, Michael Ovitz, Bob Geldof, Michael Eisner, Julian Schnabel (Schnabel, a painter who lives in a Gehry designed house, is the outstanding cast member other than Pollack and Gehry, primarily because he appears in the film clad in his bathrobe, smoking a cigarette, and sipping brandy), Milton Wexler, (Gehry’s therapist) and Gehry’s employees and partners ~back~
To balance the praise, two – count ‘em – critics, one of whom seems more divided than derogatory, are given two or three minutes to make their points about Gehry’s imperfections. ~back~

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