Columbus (film group essay)

Columbus


　
1.

Emmanuelle Riva is a French actress. She was conspicuously the face of the French "New Wave", appearing as the heroine in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). She continued to act until within a few months of her death at 89 in 2017. Riva appeared in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Kogonada posted two pictures of her on his website. One shows her as she looked at the time of Hiroshima Mon Amour (in which she plays a French woman having an affair with a Japanese architect in Hiroshima); the other picture shows her as she appeared in Haneke’s Amour (in which she appears as an elderly music teacher debilitated by a series of strokes and cared for by her husband).

Here is what Kogonada wrote about the two pictures:


I fell in love with her twice: when she was 32 and, then, when she was 85. In that time, I had aged only 15 years. This, too, is cinema.

In one afternoon, on Turner Classic Movies, you can see Elizabeth Taylor as a little girl (Lassie Come Home, 1942), as a supernaturally beautiful debutante (An American Tragedy 1951), and as plump, exhausted, middle-aged housewife (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966).

Cinema is about time and the dead.

　

　

2.

A few years ago, a man whose name we don’t know, was writing his doctoral thesis on films made by the Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. The man sometimes wrote essays for the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound. He also had a website on which he posted idiosyncratic short films comprised largely of clips from famous films. One of those short films compiles scenes in Tarantino films in which the camera is placed low and tilted upward to film the actors; another film, consists entirely of shots of hands extracted from films by Bresson. Shots of passageways in Ozu films comprises another one of these short essays.

As far as I can ascertain the young man whose name we don’t know was attending college in Nashville. This city is four hours from Columbus, Indiana. Curiously, Columbus, Indiana is a showplace for striking modernist architecture. The young man thought that it would be interesting to make a film featuring Columbus, Indiana and shot in the style of Ozu. Somehow, he managed funding for this quixotic project, secured some reasonably well-known actors and actresses to appear in his venture, and, in fact, produced the film, named, of course, Columbus.

　

3.

What does it mean to shoot a film in the style of Ozu?

First, we must observe that Ozu had a long career and his films made in the Silent era and even the thirties don’t look like the famous films that he directed after World War II. (Early in his career, Ozu loved American gangster films and shot his pictures in a fast, jazzy style derived from those movies.) The pictures that Ozu made after World War II have these characteristics:

1. He uses very little camera movement;
2. The camera is mounted as if kneeling or sitting on a tatami mat – that is, with lens about 3 feet off the floor;
3. Dialogue is shot frontally – often the person speaking seems to be talking straight into the camera;
4. Shots are very carefully framed and, frequently, contain internal frames – that is, people appear in corridors or thresholds; the shot is often conceived as a series of boxes within boxes;
5. Takes are relatively long;
6. Ozu is famous for his empty shots, thought to reflect Zen Buddhism – the image shows a place but there is no one present;
7. Objects (hats, bicycles, books) stand for people or their absence;
8. Acting is extremely understated – melodramatic emotions are never shown;
9. Ozu’s famous films in his late style are all family comedies or dramas – his subject is the Japanese family;
10. Like Griffith and other silent film directors, Ozu grounds his films in certain interior shots or exteriors to which the movie reverts repeatedly to establish a sort of pictorial or emotional home base.

All of these principles are at work in Columbus.

　

4.

Columbus is directed by Kogonada. "Kogo Nada" is a nom de plum, derived from the name of Ozu’s favorite screenwriter, Kogo Noda.

On the evidence of photographs, Kogonada, who was born in Seoul, South Korea, is about 35. On the basis of his speech, I would guess that he was adopted by a wealthy American couple when he was a tiny baby. I would guess that he doesn’t speak Korean.

As of this writing, he has successfully concealed his real name. Nothing is known about him. We don’t know whether he is Gay or Straight, married or unmarried, or where he lives. We know that he is an admirer of Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Bresson, Ozu, and Richard Linklater. Indeed, he has written an essay for Criterion’s release of Linklater’s Before trilogy.

His website is fascinating but exceedingly austere.

　

　

5.

Columbus, Indiana is a town of about 40,000 inhabitants located about a half-hour south of Indianapolis on Interstate 65 – it is like a larger version of Northfield in relation to Minneapolis.

Columbus is the world headquarters of Cummins Engine. For many years, that company was lead by J. Irwin Miller (1909 - 2004). Miller was born into a banking family in Columbus, attended Yale, and studied abroad for several years. He returned to Columbus and, beginning in the fifties, began to renovate the town. Miller’s commitment was to entice the greatest Modernist architects in the world to design and construct buildings in his city.

This program continued for many years and is ongoing. Today, Columbus contains the world’s most concentrated and spectacular collection of Modernist buildings. In Columbus, you can see buildings by Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero Saarinen, I M. Pei, Richard Meier and Robert Venturi among others. Many prominent artists have also been engaged to provide works of public art, including monumental sculptures by Henry Moore and others.

These commissions were underwritten by the Cummins Foundation. Today, Columbus is a mecca for architects and architecture students, offering about a half-dozen tours of buildings in the city, including the spectacular Miller house.



6.

"We shape our buildings, and, afterward, our buildings shape us."

Churchill

"Does modern art matter or is it just a thing we do to distract ourselves? I wanted to find out and so I made Columbus."

Kogonada

The greatest filmmakers believe that cinema changes the world. Good cinema inculcates the values required for good citizenship. This has been the faith of moviemakers since D. W. Griffith. Griffith made Intolerance as reparation for the hatred that his film Birth of a Nation had roused. He opposed America’s entry into World War One and ends Intolerance with images of warring armies suddenly casting down their weapons as hosts of angels descend from the sky. The battlefield blossoms as a garden and children hand flowers to one another.

American directors like King Vidor and John Ford believed that better films created better people. In Europe, Roberto Rossellini clung to the notion that the horrors of World War Two could only be justified if artists used the past to forge images of a better, more enlightened world. All of the movies made by Rossellini in the last two decades of his life serve this faith. Directors as diverse as Satjiyat Ray and Aki Kaurismaki seem to be belong within this tradition as well.

An equally powerful utopian strain exists in modern architecture.

As early as Boullee and LeDoux, architects involved in the French Revolution, visionaries have dreamed that an utopian society might be feasible if only our buildings and our cities were purified to reflect our ideals. (Boullee conceived of massive city-sized sphere as a monument to Newton; in LeDoux’s ideal city, brothels would be shaped like erect penises.) Frank Lloyd Wright spent years trying to build Broadacre City, a metropolis that would be entirely self-sufficient, vast fields of growing crops surrounding high-rises and mile-high skyscrapers. Les Corbusier advocated that Paris be razed so that his Ville Radieuse ("Radiant City") could be built. Walt Disney imagined utopian cities adjacent to his amusement parks and drew plans for their construction – one of them, Seaside, Florida was actually built. The Garden Cities movement in England also resulted in the actual construction of several towns – plans show flowering gardens with artificial waterfalls next to "Epileptic Farms","Homes for Waifs", and "Housing for Inebriates." Albert Speer drew plans for Germania, a National Socialist City replacing Berlin and built on the model of Imperial Rome with a stadium capable of seating one million people. Instead of Germania, the Germans got Norman Foster’s Reichstag with its transparent dome, intended as a symbol of the transparency of democratic regimes. South Korea’s Songdo is a cyber-city, a place where every street lamp and every house is wired to a master mother-board.

Thus, throughout history, radical architects have argued that human nature itself can be transfigured and that the re-design of our buildings and cities will accomplish these objectives. Generally, of course, these plans are too vast and ambitious and, to tell the truth, too thoroughly inhuman to be implemented. Examples of "intentional communities" in which all human activities are architecturally controlled are generally dusty, decaying ghost-towns within a couple of decades of their inception – consider, for instance, Fordlandia in the middle of the Amazon, now in ruins, and Paoli Solieri’s Arcosanti, an impressive ghost town that still hosts string quartets and forges wind chimes in the Arizona desert sixty miles north of Phoenix.

But, lest we rule out the utopian strain in modern architecture as both unrealized and unrealizable, consider that Rem Kohlhass, the great Dutch theorist of urbanism, has been invited to create ever larger and larger complexes of buildings. He is now working in Beijing and Shenzhen, China, has developed the Master Plan for Singapore, and is working on an urban plan for the third largest city on the planet, Lagos. And consider Louis Kahn’s vast and pharaohnic government center for Bangladesh, a planned city center that has given an entirely new meaning to that country’s government and aspirations.

So what is the effect of living with, and among, some of the greatest works of architecture in the modern era? Kogonada’s film invites us to consider this question.

　

　


Minnesota Architecture Quiz
1. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Elam House is a Usonian building, now partially converted to a Bed and Breakfast in what Minnesota city?
2. The Brutalist Rarig Center at the University of Minnesota was designed by this one-armed architect with the assistance of Kay Lockhart, Kim Lockhart’s father?
3. Philip Johnson designed this sky-blue building in the Twin Cities?
4. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this modest commercial structure in Cloquet. What was sold there?
5. A building that most architects revere as Louis Sullivan’s greatest work is located in what Minnesota city?
6. Students of Louis Sullivan, Purcell and Elmslie built these two jewel box banks in what Minnesota cities?
7. The famous German expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn (the architect of the Einstein Tower in Potsdam) ended his career with the Mount Zion synagogue located on this historic thoroughfare in the Twin Cities?
8. Minoru Yamasota designed this building with fluted pillars and a reflecting pond as part of the urban renewal of the old Gateway neighborhood to the west of the Milwaukee Road terminal in Minneapolis. What was the building?
9. The Federal Reserve Building in Minneapolis uses as its form and structure this geometric shape.

10. Another example of Brutalist architecture in Minnesota in Marcel Breuer’s belltower at -------?

11. These father and son architects have left their mark on Minnesota. The father is the architect who designed St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in south Minneapolis and who trained Ralph Rapson. The son designed the sleek IBM complex in Rochester. What is their last name?