This film shows the last eight buildings Louis H.Sullivan (“form follows function”) has designed and furnished at the end of his career. He consistently draped his buildings with facades that no longer had a load-bearing function as a form of free expression. From one building to the next, both inside and outside, he varied and perfected his modular ornamental design in brick, steel, plater, terracotta, glass, ceramics, mosaic, marble, light, relief, stencil designs, wood and metal.
Sullivan’s writings and constructions set out central positions of modernism, including its ambiguity. His organic ornamentation, conceived and created in conjunction with modern methods of construction, was barely noticed in Germany. Although Sullivan’s work was displayed at the centre of the “Exhibition of New American Architects” in Berlin’s Academy of the Arts in 1926, Europeans did not consider Sullivan to be of interest as a Theoretician, even though he was Frank Lloyd Wright’s teacher. —www.filmgalerie451.de
Born in 1948 near Bremen in Germany, Heinz Emigholz trained first as a draftsman before studying philosophy and literature in Hamburg. He began filmmaking in 1968 and has worked since 1973 as a filmmaker, artist, writer and producer in Germany and the USA. In 1974 he started his encyclopaedic drawing series The Basis of Make-Up. He looks back on numerous exhibitions, retrospectives, lectures and publications. In 1984 he started his film series Photography and beyond. He has held a professorship in Experimental Filmmaking at the Universität der Künste Berlin since 1993, and co-founded the Institute for Time-based Media and the program Art and Media, there. In 2003 Filmgalerie 451 started an edition of all his films on DVD. Publications a.o.: Krieg der Augen, Kreuz der Sinne (War of Eyes, Cross of Senses), Seit Freud gesagt hat, der Künstler heile seine Neurose selbst, heilen die Künstler ihre Neurosen selbst (Since Freud Said That the… read more