Films by Heinz Emigholz

Germany 2022, 95 min
by Heinz Emigholz

The Neo-Andean architecture of Freddy Mamani Sylvestre, influenced by indigenous culture, adorns the Bolivian city of El Alto. A psychoactive inspection at 4,000 metres above sea level.As a pioneer of Neo-Andean architecture, Freddy Mamani Silvestre attracts attention far beyond the borders of Bolivia. His non-conformist designs are influenced by the culture of the Aymara, the biggest ethnical group in the country, echoing their myths and patterns. Buildings constructed between 2008 and 2021 are circled, inspected and captured, in part 35 of the ongoing series “Photography and beyond”.Like giant jewels, the Cholets rise into the sky above the Bolivian city of El Alto, at 4,000 metres above sea level. Cholets, a neologism created from chalet and Cholo, the local term for indigenous people, are the creations of architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, born in 1971. Several dozen buildings designed by him adorn the otherwise fairly unglamorous city otherwise mainly dominated by raw red brick. Mamani’s built fantasies, on the other hand, are striking, arrogant and bold. Snakes seem to be slithering up their facades, scattered diamonds cling to the glazing and occasionally the whole thing is crowned by a stand-alone residential building. But the Cholets are mainly used for festivities, because they house the so-called “salones de eventos”. Emigholz unlocks psychoactive places that evoke the interior of pinball machines and, in their confident splendour, triumph over the richer neighbouring city of La Paz. [65 DOK Leipzig, Carolin Weidner]

2022, 80 min
by Heinz Emigholz

The quasi-fascist architecture of Francisco Salamone's slaughterhouses in the Argentine pampas, the utopian buildings by Freddy Mamani Sylvestre in El Alto, Bolivia, and the restorative "City Palace" in Berlin are the cornerstones of an analytical documentary film that explores the dual character of architectural modernism in the field of tension between avant-garde and political propaganda.The actor Stefan Kolosko acts as a diver in the sunken city of Epecuén, where he paraphrases a text by Jorge Luis Borges, and as a curator in Berlin's "Humboldt Forum", where he enumerates the crimes of Wilhelm II. The architect Arno Brandlhuber comments on the reconstruction of the "Berlin City Palace".The film was shot in Berlin, Bolivia and Argentina in 2021.

Germany 2022, 62 min
by Heinz Emigholz

Slaughterhouses with concrete blades on top, monumental cemetery gates in the plains: Architect Francisco Salamone (1897–1959) shaped the image of the Argentinean pampa around Buenos Aires. In part 34 of his “Photography and beyond” series, Heinz Emigholz once more probes architecture for biographical traces. Salamone, who immigrated from Sicily as a child, realised his ideas between 1936 and 1940, when Mussolini’s Italy re-discovered architecture as an ideological craft.Axes seem to be buried in the façade of the Coronel Pringles city hall. Elsewhere, stone tree fungi grow. And in front of the Saldungaray cemetery, viewed from the rear, a giant pancake or satellite dish forms, while in front a suffering head of Jesus protrudes from the concrete. Monumental designs, occasionally incorporating elements of Art Deco or Italian Futurism, towering in the sky and advertising importance. Francisco Salamone worked in the years of the “Década infame”, that infamous decade followed shortly afterwards by the presidency of Juan Perón. The buildings seem inhospitable and full of hubris. They are supposed to herald modernity and progress and yet loomed terrifyingly over the peasantry of the country. Heinz Emigholz documents these intimidating buildings from every conceivable angle. [65 DOK Leipzig, Carolin Weidner]

Germany 2020, 101 min
by Heinz Emigholz

An archaeologist and a weapons designer, who knew each other in a previous life as a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst, meet at an excavation site in the Negev desert and begin a conversation about love and war, which they continue in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva. A series of encounters with alternating actors in different roles ensues, which leads the viewer through the cities of Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong and São Paulo. Among those appearing are: an old artist who meets his younger self; a mother who lives with her two grown-up sons, a priest and a policeman; a Chinese and a Japanese woman; a curator and a cosmologist. The protagonists’ dialogues revolve around social taboos that have become obsolete, generational conflicts, war guilt and cosmologies. The architecture of these five cities serves as a third interlocutor in the protagonists’ conversations and completes their philosophical and metaphysical journeys. With: John Erdman, Jonathan Perel, Young Sun Han, Dorothy Ko, Susanne Sachsse, Laurean WagnerinLocations: Be’erSheva, Athen, Berlin, São Paulo, Hongkong.

Germany 2019, 93 min
by Heinz Emigholz

Demolition of the old and building of the new Kunsthalle in Mannheim in the years 2013 to 2018.

2018, 36 min
by Heinz Emigholz

A confrontation and comparison of two church buildings, which could hardly be more different, but also a dialogue between various concepts of church and community: the Protestant Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen and the Catholic Cathedral in Orvieto. The cathedral in the central square in the middle of the city of Orvieto, with its visual histories in the interior and on the façade, and the imposing brick building of the church on the edges of Copenhagen, which forms the center of a housing complex of like-minded persons. Both radiate into their surroundings, the cathedral from great heights into the mountains around, the church itself like a rock in the flat land. The cathedral as a community achievement of great craftsmanship and the church like a strictly constructed dogma. Horizontal meets vertical, north meets south, mysticism meets joie de vivre, Protestantism meets Catholicism, clarity meets complexity, however they are distributed when it is a matter of the ideology of holy sites and the reflection and contemplation made possible inside them: the beauty of craftsmanship and political intentions.

Germany 2014, 110 min
by Heinz Emigholz

The film PERRET IN FRANCE AND ALGERIA presents thirty buildings and architectural ensembles of the French architects and construction engineers Auguste and Gustave Perret. Auguste Perret has masterfully refined concrete construction in the implementation of his projects and instilled in them a classical expression. Working in parallel to the execution of numerous construction projects in France, Perret was building under conditions of colonialism in North Africa. The film traces this division chronologically. The buildings erected in Algeria from 1912 until 1952 are for the first time the subject of a film, as are the ones built in France. The edifices of Perret in France and their continued existence in the present are thus juxtaposed to his projects realized in North Africa. A differentiated interaction with the "architectural heritage" in diverging cultures thereby becomes visible. The fate of Western architectural modernism along with its symbolic value and sustainability in the everyday interaction with its resulting products in varying social conditions and landscapes comes into view.

Germany 2014, 108 min
by Heinz Emigholz

Imagine an airspace into which a bomb has been dropped. The bomb has not reached the site of its detonation, but there is no way to stop its speedy approach. The time between the bomb’s release and its explosion is neither the future (for the ineluctable destruction has not yet happened) nor the past (which is unavoidably about to be extinguished). The flight time of the bomb thus describes absolute nothingness, the zero hour, consisting of all the possibilities that in just a moment will no longer exist. Thus, this story will end before it has begun; here it is told in defiance: an architectural journey from Berlin through Arromanches, Rome, Wrocław, Görlitz, Paris, Bologna, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Atlántida, Montevideo, Mexico City, Brasilia, Tokyo, Saipan, Tinian, Tokyo, San Francisco, Dallas, Binz and Mexico City back to Berlin - into the abyss.

Germany 2012, 100 min
by Heinz Emigholz

Directors statement: "PARABETON starts with the first still exstant dome built of concrete by the Romans in the 1st century BC in Baiae near Naples. Followed in chronological sequence by twenty buildings of Italian civil-engineer Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979) – inventor, grandmaster of concrete structures and the architect's architect of the 20th century: among others the Pirelli-skysraper in Milano, the Headquarters of Unesco in Paris, the Palazzo del Lavoro in Turin, the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome and the Papal Audience Hall at Vatican City. This succession is from time to time halted by cinematic studies of large Roman structures, among others the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla in Rome and Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. In doing so the film relates Nervi's path-breaking constructions with the pioneering Roman inventions in his field 2000 years ago. The 100 minutes long film is the first of two parts of the project Decampment of Modernism with which I will conclude my series Architecture as Autobiography about the origins, fate, glory and decline of modern architecture. In a way, PARABETON will be the "grand finale" of the series by going back to the Roman origins of the constructional core of Modernism." We will see (in order of appearance): Tempio di Mercurio, Baiae 1st cen. B.C. Municipal Stadium, Florence 1932 Experimental warehouse, Rome 1945 Tempio di Giove Anxur, Terracina 1st cen. B.C. Exhibition Hall B, Turin 1948 Exhibition Hall C, Turin 1950 Salt Warehouses, Tortona 1951 Tobacco Factory, Bologna 1953 Terme di Caracalla, Rome 3rd cen A.D. UNESCO Headquarters, Paris 1958 Pantheon, Rome 2nd cen. A.D. Small Sports Complex, Rome 1957 Tempio di Minerva, Rome 3rd cen. A.D. Pirelli Tower, Milan 1958 Flaminio Stadium, Rome 1959 Colosseum e Forum Romanum, Rome 1st cen B.C. Sports Complex, Rome 1960 Aqua Claudia, Rome 1st cen A.D. Train Station, Savona 1960 Palace of Labour, Turin 1961 Villa Adriana, Rome 2nd cen. A.D. Burgo Paper Factory, Mantua 1962 Mausoleo Tor de ’Schiavi, Rome 4th cen. A.D. Roof of the Cuore Immacolato di Maria Church, Bologna 1962 Palatin and Motor boat in ferro-cement, Rome 1967 Papal Audience Hall, Vatican City, Rome 1971 [source: http://www.filmgalerie451.de/en/filme/parabeton/ ]

Germany 2011, 91 min
by Heinz Emigholz

A Series of Thoughts consists of four parts: El Greco in Toledo, Leonardo’s Tears, On Board the USS Ticonderoga and A Museum in Essen. The series comprises a train of thought on the religiously and politically motivated and, in military terms, strategically executed sacrifice of sons. El Greco in Toledo documents, in 2009, the existence of the painting “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz” that El Greco completed in 1588. Leonardo’s Tears combines all views of the Brazilian midfielder Leonardo Nascimento de Araujo that were broadcast from the Soccer World Cup 1998 with a text collage on “Grace Jones” from the year 1986. On Board the USS Ticonderoga retells a photograph that Wayne Miller took on November 5, 1944, on board an American aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A Museum in Essen shows the spaces of the new building of Museum Folkwang by David Chipperfield Architects that were still empty in December 2009, and into which one can imagine the preceding images.

Germany 2008, 168 min
by Heinz Emigholz

by Heinz Emigholz

Le Corbusier [IIIII] Asger Jorn [Relief] contrasts the Villa Savoye, built by Le Corbusier in 1931, and Asger Jorn’s Grand Relief, which the Danish painter and sculptor produced in 1959 for the Århus Statsgymnasium. The film makes connections between what does not belong together, at least not according to the ideological stipulations of their creators.“The film came about because I was intrigued by the premise of comparing two buildings that at first seem to have nothing to do with one another. A dialogue between thoroughly stylized clarity and declared wildness, both with ideologically trimmings. It was only by working on the film that I learned to appreciate the two works that had once left me indifferent: the delight of their creators in the productively implemented statement.” Heinz Emigholz