Product Description

Frank Gehry and Sydney Pollack are two of the best-known names in their respective fields of architecture and filmmaking. In his first documentary, Academy Award®-winning director Pollack turns his camera on to his long-time friend Gehry, one of the world s most celebrated architects and creator of some of the greatest buildings of the modern era including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Pollack uncovers Gehry s creative process, from his early abstract sketches and three dimensional models to the awe-inspiring finished structures. Shot in an informal, highly accessible style and featuring contributions from Gehry s contemporaries, clients and admirers including Philip Johnson, Dennis Hopper and Julian Schnabel among others, the film is a fascinating portrait of the man whose masterpieces have transformed a conventional science into an extraordinary art form.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18349 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-10-22
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 81 minutes

Synopsis
Oscar winning director Sydney Pollack takes a sharp sideways turn with SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY, a documentary about the noted architect. Usually known for making grandiose productions such as THE FIRM and OUT OF AFRICA, Pollock adds a genuine curio to his filmmaking resume with this movie. Although the two men have been friends for years, Pollock thankfully bypasses the opportunity to pay a fawning tribute to Gehry, instead presenting a well-balanced portrait that offers both positive and negative commentators the chance to etch their thoughts into celluloid. But it quickly becomes clear that the biggest naysayer of all is Gehry himself, who is painted as a highly self-critical man, clearly ill-at-ease with fame and his own achievements. Pollock offers some screen time to Gehry's magnificent creations, but not as much as a less experienced director might have done, instead choosing to focus on the man himself. People such as Gehry's therapist, Milton Wexler, and garrulous artist/director Julian Schnabel (BASQUIAT) offer their thoughts, but the real magic occurs when Pollock and Gehry are on screen together. The series of interviews between the two men have the kind of relaxed atmosphere that could only exist after years of friendship, and Gehry comes across as an astonishingly normal and likeable fellow who keeps his ego firmly in check. Shooting mostly with hand-held digital-video cameras also brings a nice intimacy to the proceedings, creating a warm testimony to a great artist who has somehow managed to keep his integrity intact despite the ruthless nature of the industry in which he works.

Customer Reviews

is this architecture or just scaled up desk sculpture?
This window into the world of Frank Gehry is surprisingly uninformative. It's really just a love-in between Pollack and Gehry who seem to spend quite a lot of the film in mutual congratulation and affirmation.

The film also contains quite a lot of nonsense in its bid to triumph Gehry as the world's greatest living architect, which obviously he isn't. We get Pollack telling us that Gehry was one of the first architects since God was a boy to show an interest in art and artists. Obviously Leonardo was just playing at the whole art thing.... And the likes of Corb, Mies, Aalto, they didn't have any interest in art, did they? We get some guy from the Disney Music Hall telling us how amazing Frank is, because, when he was designing the concert hall, he put his need to make wacky shapes to the background and considered the acoustics. WOW - who'd have thought an architect designing a music hall would have stopped to think about acoustics, eh?

Annoyingly, Gehry lumps himself in the same class as Alvar Aalto, which I think is highly arrogant and entirely wrong - Aalto never worked in the arbitrary way that Gehry appears to, as shown in this film when he just adapts models by ripping off bits of card or cutting it with scissors. You become aware that the process of design for Gehry is one of form-making alone, there is little thought of inhabitation, its just about making a building that shouts at you - "Hey, I'm big, I'm brash, I'm a Gehry Building". Hardly very Aalto.

Perhaps owing to the brashness and arbitrary nature of his design, a lot of American CEOs, film stars and sculptors come on to tell us that Frank is "the man" and even, bizarrely, Bob Geldof says that whilst 95% of the time if he was introduced to an architect, he'd hit them first, he reckons Gehry's wonderful. I never realised Michael Eisner, Dennis Hopper and our Bob were such architecture aficionados. My take on this is that America needs to triumph an architect who is at best mediocre in the face of far stronger designers in Europe currently, so Frank happens to be the one they've chosen.

Disappointingly, there are very few voices of dissent in the film. Charles Jencks tells us that Gehry has made some awful buildings, but we don't get to find out which ones he means. The only critic who is given time to speak is a squeaky-voiced intellectual, the insinuation being that the people who don't get Frank's work are just lilly-livered academics who have no fire in their bellies. Meanwhile Richard Serra, bizarrely wearing a white dressing gown and sitting in a chair that resembles a throne goes on to tell us that anyone who does criticise Frank is "no better than a fly buzzing around the neck of a mighty lion".

The previous reviewer said that Gehry is unpretentious. I can only assume he hasn't watched many films about Gehry, or indeed watched this film very closely. Gehry admits he has a massive ego but tries to disguise it. But he's not very good at that, insisting on a quid pro quo arrangement to tutor if he is allowed to play ice hockey against the varsity team. Or getting a former client to come on to wax about spending US$6m on preliminary drawings for a house that in the end was never built.

So this is a film for fanboys by fanboys, unfortunately. Things that are interesting within it are the dichotomies in Frank - he says he wants to push limits, but when Pollack asks him why he doesn't paint, he said he would never even try it - which is odd for a supposedly ground-breaking visionary. Cue sycophantic comment by Pollack that the materials and surfaces of Gehry's buildings are as good as the canvas of any masterpiece. When asked about where Gehry gets his inspiration from, something you'd genuinely want to understand from a film like this, Frank glibly replies to look in a waste paper bin and the crumpled paper forms and the voids... inspiration is everywhere. Really Frank, is it? Gee, man, let me write that down, thanks for your insight! Statements like that do little to assure you that there is any depth to the work. Yes, Gehry has pushed computer aided design forward, and like Hadid, he has made architecture more sculptural by using advanced techniques. This film does show some of this, and it is revealing in the arbitrary nature of the work. But for the most part, this film is a chorus of affirmation, hail our great California-based architect.

Far better is "My architect", where, as an illegitimate son, Nathaniel Kahn manages to preserve some distance and occasional disdain for his father's character and work. Its a far more balanced portrayal of a great architect than this work is, but then again, Kahn and Gehry should hardly be placed in the same sentence.