Heinz emigholz architecture as autobiography of benjamin hall

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. You can see why cinema has seldom made it an explicit subject: The act of photographing space reduces three dimensions to two, and it seems a doubly perverse exercise to confront the mute, static presence of a building with a movie camera.

Discussions of architecture in relation to cinema usually concern films by, say, Michelangelo Antonioni or Jacques Tati, in which the built environment is prominent. But over the past two decades, the German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz, in proposing radical departures from the typical representation of built space, has become the leading exponent of the microgenre that is the architecture film.

Almost all the works are devoid of voice-over commentary. And yet, despite this veneer of standardization, they are deeply idiosyncratic and personal films. Architectural photography has a tendency to present spaces in their idealized form: It relies on all-encompassing shots, at times distorted through wide-angle lenses, that strive to provide something approaching a definitive view.

Heinz emigholz architecture as autobiography of benjamin hall: His writings on architecture

His is a curious, embodied camera, with an eye for detail and a taste for complexity, prone to looking up, around, and off to the side, as we might while orienting ourselves in new surroundings. The hallmark of his style is the canted angle, a frame associated more with Expressionist noir than with documentary. Following his inquisitive gaze into and around a given environment, one never forgets the presence of a guiding consciousness behind the camera, a subject within the space.