A Documentary Coup (Page 3)

By Stuart Klawans

This article appeared in the November 24, 2003 edition of The Nation.

November 6, 2003

Hard experience has taught me to beware documentaries that invite us along on the filmmaker's personal journey. (A particularly awful subset: The films my friends summarize as, "Let's drag grandma back to Poland, so she can see where her whole family was killed!") But when the filmmaker is as tactful about himself as Nathaniel Kahn, and when his journey is so odd, suggestive and important, I can only be grateful for the chance to ride along. Kahn's My Architect--another Film Forum offering, as it happens, opening November 12--strikes me as one of the most rewarding pictures of the year.

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The title might have been My Father, had Kahn been given the chance to know one. A father forms you--builds you up, ideally. In this case, though, the father was Louis I. Kahn, perhaps the most revered American architect of the last half of the twentieth century, who never acknowledged the son he'd had out of wedlock with Nathaniel's mother (or the daughter he had out of wedlock with another woman). Nathaniel saw the great man only for brief moments, usually at night, when Lou took a few hours off from his official family. When Kahn died in 1974, world-famous but short on clients and deeply in debt, Nathaniel was 11. A quarter of a century later, Nathaniel set out to discover his maker--his architect--the only way he could: through Kahn's buildings and the people who knew about them.

The pathos of My Architect--which fortunately remains understated--lies in the tension between public and private life, but also between the monumentality of Lou's buildings, their seeming timelessness, and the shadowy, contingent existence to which he condemned his son. On the one hand, Nathaniel can take beauty shots of his father's Kimbell Art Museum, put the "Ode to Joy" on the soundtrack, and have the building actually stand up to the music. On the other hand, Nathaniel follows this sequence with a snippet of interview with architect Robert A.M. Stern. "Don't put him up on some pedestal," Stern says. "He was in the trenches."

My Architect does full justice to both truths. And if it proves that Kahn's buildings can hold up against Beethoven, it also forces Kahn the man to hold up against a moment like this: Nathaniel is in California, interviewing an architect who worked with his father on the great complex for the Salk Institute. In mid-anecdote, the man mentions, "I spent Christmas with him."

Nathaniel interrupts, in a tone that for politeness' sake I will call wondering. "You spent Christmas!" he gasps.

About Stuart Klawans

The Nation's film critic Stuart Klawans is author of the books Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order (a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Awards) and Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001. His film criticism and reviews for The Nation won the 2007 National Magazine Award. When not on deadline for The Nation, he contributes articles to the New York Times and other publications. more...
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