Being Frank

Leading the way: Architect Frank Gehry (right) explains one of his buildings to filmmaker Sydney Pollack in the documentary Sketches of Gehry. Photo Ultan Guilfoyle. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media.

“What’s all the fuss about?” asks director Sydney Pollack early in Sketches of Frank Gehry, an engaging portrait of his good friend, Toronto-born super-architect Frank Gehry. It’s a softball thesis question when you’re talking about one of the most revered iconoclasts of our time, but in Pollack’s case, the query seems genuine. The filmmaker admits he knew bubkes about architecture before Gehry asked him to shoot this documentary. It turns out to be a perfect match. Instead of a dissertation or a hagiography, we’re treated to what feels like a relaxed, Sunday afternoon kibitz; halfway through, you expect the two old boys to start jawing about their grandkids.

As with Gehry and Pollack, there’s a warm familiarity between film and architecture that helps lift Sketches of Gehry out of what could have been banal A&E Biography territory. To mangle a famous witticism, filming architecture is not quite as futile as dancing about it. In the film’s finest passages, Pollack demonstrates how film allows us to focus on architectural moments. By subtly tracking the camera along some of Gehry’s structures, we are made to understand how a building like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain garners its great power. It is a structure of sweeping tracking shots, an aria of action, a crescendo of commotion. It is, to quote countless reviews and guidebooks, “cinematic.”

Pollack casts himself as an aw-shucks layman, and starts his search for edification by comparing Gehry’s creative process with his own. (Don’t snigger; long before his turgid remake of Sabrina, Pollack directed Robert Redford in the classic Three Days of the Condor and Jeremiah Johnson, easily one of the best Westerns of the ’70s.) It’s Gehry and Pollack’s cozy discussions about art making — informed by their obvious friendship and shared admiration — that gives the film its rumpled, avuncular charm. But it also stops frustratingly short of what could have been a genuinely stimulating conversation about the similarities of the two media.

Having said that, Sketches does an adequate job of pointing out the more prosaic parallels between film and architecture. Both, we’re reminded, are expensive industrial art forms: Pollack’s last film, The Interpreter, had a production budget of $80 million; Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall cost $274 million. While the best artists in both media try to reinvent formal and aesthetic rules — “Rules!” spits Gehry dismissively at one point in the film — neither escapes the plethora of regulations that can easily hamstring a project: unions, building codes, shooting permits, Byzantine financial entanglements, the laws of physics. Sketches makes it clear that one of Gehry’s greatest gifts is managing these intangibles. As the architect says, it’s about “finding that small percentage of space in the commercial world where you can make a difference.” The Academy Award-winning Pollack has managed this once or twice (Tootsie, for example, is a fine examination of Reagan-era gender-nomics). Gehry has made a career out of it.

This ain't no Mickey Mouse building: Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Photo Fernando Gómez. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media.

Pollack hints at another tantalizing link between film and architecture by showing how essential digital technology is to the flowing, sculptural style that has become the architect’s hallmark. Gehry’s team uses, among others, a software program called CATIA (Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application), which helps inform the structural engineers and other technicians how to go about building those ridiculously unorthodox confections of metal, glass, titanium and wood. The equation is simple: no CATIA = no Bilbao Guggenheim. A similar equation applies to Sketches of Gehry. The film, which is a round-the-world odyssey that was five years in the making, would not have been financially feasible without a three-chip digital camera, a gizmo that’s led directly to the renaissance of the documentary in the past 10 years. For both media, the digital realm has allowed unbridled freedom and increased ingenuity — if not, necessarily, artistic success.

While Sketches conveys the meat and potatoes of the rapport between film and architecture, it entirely forgoes the gravy. For instance, both architecture and film have interesting relationships with time and space. The late Philip Johnson, the most influential figure in postwar American architecture (and who appears briefly in the film), once said, “Architecture is the art of wasting space.” If that’s true, then film is the art of wasting time. When you put those two statements in a blender, you get Johnson’s New Canaan estate. It’s home to that famous Modernist statement, Glass House, which is either a sublime waste of time and space or a poignant autobiographical journey, an unstructured physical narrative that allows the chronology of a creative life to unfold. Johnson’s Glass House has been joined over the years by additional structures dotted over the estate. This is storytelling in three dimensions, over real time. Film, meanwhile, inverts this — it tells stories in elastic time and space, in two dimensions, over the period of two hours. These conjurer’s tricks have similar results — they can whittle eons down to moments. They can manufacture perspective.

Modest beginnings: Frank Gehry's sketch of the Diller building, which is scheduled to be built in New York City. Photo Fernando Gómez. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media.

The notion that architectural structures are everlasting has changed somewhat since the ancient Greeks hammered Athens together. Industrial societies (especially in North America) consider progress a greater virtue than posterity. Great swathes of our architectural past have been demolished — many Canadian cities are a testament to this. Gehry’s own redesign of Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario will destroy a large portion of some recent renovations, a fact that deeply upset one of the gallery’s primary benefactors, Joey Tannenbaum. Daniel Libeskind’s Renaissance ROM eliminates the museum’s great hall (built in the ’70s) while maintaining the older buildings. This trend of new structures built into or on top of older ones recalls documentary film’s use of found or stock footage. The older, augmented structure ceases to become a structure in its own right, and like a piece of aged film, is now an archival document. It tells a story within a story. It becomes context.

Architecture has always existed within film — what are production designers if not temporary architects? Increasingly, film exists within architecture. Bill Gates’s house in Seattle is famously bedecked with digital screens in place of walls. Internal and external space is blurred, flipped around, turned inside out. Few structures on our planet take this notion further than Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron’s Prada Tokyo, which is the perfect physical realization of a music video — a jagged mixed-media montage of an exterior constantly informed by what is going on inside. Prada Tokyo is the equivalent of a bank of a billion TV screens, blaring visual stimulation at a rate architecture’s pioneers could never have dreamt of. It out-films film. 

Indeed, if Sketches suggests anything about modern film and architecture, it is that only one of these two media continues to be relentlessly, consistently inventive. Whether Gehry is digging in his wastebasket for inspiration, or directing a design partner to tape another piece of corrugated cardboard onto a scale model, his creative dexterity shines through. As Gehry reminds us in the film, “creativity is about play and a kind of willingness to go with your intuition.” Hopefully, Pollack and his movie-making colleagues take note. Perhaps then we can hope for an upcoming big-budget Hollywood production as profoundly moving as the Bilbao Guggenheim.

Sketches of Frank Gehry opens June 16 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer.

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