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Nervous Breakthroughs: Heinz Emigholz’s Films by Gerry Fialka and Will Nediger
Filmmaker Heinz Emigholz in one of his subject buildings. photo: courtesy H. Emigholz
IF YOU'RE FAMILIAR WITH HEINZ
Emigholz’s work pre-2017, it’s probably through his architecture films, formally rigorous works which explore the nooks and crannies of modern buildings through canted angles and a precise, patient camera.
Those films have a laser-sharp focus on the architecture. Even when their subject is, say, the bustling “jewel box” banks of Louis Sullivan (2001’s “Sullivan’s Banks”), people are always merely in the background. Aside from occasional title cards identifying the buildings, there are no words in the films. So if you’ve seen those films, “Streetscapes [Dialogue]” will come as a surprise.
Dialogue is part of a four-film series that Emigholz calls “Streetscapes”, which also includes two films made in the mold of his earlier architecture films: “Dieste [Uruguay]” explores the work of the Uruguayan architect Eladio Dieste, while “Bickels [Socialism]” is about the buildings that Samuel Bickels designed in Israel, mostly for kibbutzim.
Unlike in Emigholz’s other architecture films, the relative lack of a human presence in “Bickels” sends a clear message. Many of the buildings Emigholz shoots are abandoned, as if to point out the failure of the socialist ideals alluded to in the title. Even more atypically, “Bickels” includes an epilogue in which a voiceover tells of the decline of the Vio Nova kibbutz in the Crimea.
“Bickels”, then, prefigures Dialogue, which melds the formalism of Emigholz’s architecture films with some features of (duh) more dialogue-driven films. For “Dialogue”, Emigholz turned his sessions with his therapist into a series of dialogue scenes in which a filmmaker (unnamed, but based on Emigholz) talks to a therapist about his artistic process, his mental blocks, and eventually about the creation of “Dialogue” itself. These scenes take place inside various buildings in Uruguay, filmed with Emigholz’s trademark Dutch angles, as if his characters have been transported into one of his previous films.
The poster from Emigholz’s 2017 film 'Streetscapes [Dialogue]'. photo: courtesy H. Emigholz
It’s often tempting but usually pointless to try to psychoanalyze an artist on the basis of their work. The work, after all, can speak for itself. But “Dialogue” is such a relentlessly self-reflexive work, above all about Emigholz’s own mind, that its invitation to speculate on its creator’s psyche is difficult to resist. You get the impression that filmmaking is a compulsion for Emigholz (okay, Emigholz’s fictional avatar, but in such a candid film it’s relatively safe to elide that distinction). At one point in the film he describes his work as an evasion, which is an arresting statement for an artist, especially a filmmaker, to make. We often think of the creation of art as a way to confront or to heighten reality.
One of the four questions from the “tetrad” that Marshall McLuhan would ask about any medium was “What does it enhance?” Many filmmakers would say that the camera enhances vision, is an extension of the human eye (e.g. Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye), but Emigholz talks about the camera as something that gets between his eye and the world around him, as if to shield him from reality. He tells us that “the camera is not the eye,” challenging the viewer to rethink how this tool extends the human sensorium.
Emigholz talks about his notebooks, filled with clippings of advertisements and other cultural ephemera and surrounded by his own writings in dense, tiny text. Parts of those logs are shown in the fourth movie from the “Streetscapes” series, “2+22=22 [The Alphabet]”.
There’s a “horror vacui” in their pages, whose every inch is filled. Maybe his fear of unmediated reality is related to his fear of the blank page. “The artist cures his neurosis himself,” says Emigholz, suggesting that his art is a way of working through his psychological issues the best way he knows how.
He continues, “There’s this recurring theme: how can this good feeling last followed by my idea of death changed?” In other words, his work is a far cry from abstract formalism; it implicates some deeply personal issues. In one sense, then, it’s perhaps surprising that he manages to produce works of thorough formal precision. On the other hand, it’s clear that he’s entirely uninterested in most of the trappings of the film industry as an industry, maybe because his art has such an intensely personal origin, maybe because of his fear of success, failure or some other hidden factor.
Building from Emigholz's 'Bickels [Socialism], 2016, a survey of 23 structures in Israel by Samuel Bickels, who was raised on a kibbutz. photo: courtesy H. Emigholz
He talks at length about his disdain for having to appear at film festivals to represent his work, and about how, when his works are praised, he remains deeply distrustful of their reception, as if he’s pulled the wool over the critics’ eyes and is afraid of being unmasked. The result is a hermetic body of work that follows its own internal set of rules but isn’t beholden to anything else. It is all the more powerful because of this freedom.
Early in the film, Emigholz quotes the old line about “turning breakdowns into breakthroughs." It’s the most clichéd line in the film but nevertheless an apt summary of “Dialogue.” Ironically, the obsessively inward-turning “Dialogue” opens up the rest of his oeuvre, giving us a new way into what might otherwise be entirely sealed off. With his art, he tries for that steely transformation of rejection into redirection, weakness into strength.
Gerry Fialka and Will Nediger are currently writing a book on the future of the history of avant-garde film, see their site here, or reach Fialka or Nediger . Posted on Aug 14, 2018 - 12:04 AM