We see a face reflected in the computer screen, but the expression on that face is unreadable. It stares straight ahead as pages and pages of microfilmed newspapers flash by, reeling in the years until we come to a dead stop on an obituary from 30 years ago. The great American architect Louis I. Kahn has died, the obit announces, and the man with the unreadable face wonders aloud why his own name hasn't been listed among the survivors.
It's a fair enough question, since the man who's doing the asking is Nathaniel Kahn — the son of Louis I. Kahn. Nathaniel Kahn is also the director of My Architect, a provocative and deeply poetic exhumation of the famous and impossibly complicated father he barely knew.
For such a public figure, Louis Kahn was amazingly successful at keeping his private life private, even from those closest to him. Kahn was married to the same woman until the day he died, but, as it turns out, he simultaneously kept three separate families, each located mere miles apart. One of these secret, long-term relationships resulted in the birth of Nathaniel Kahn, who, for much of his early life, did not officially exist. Nathaniel was 11 at the time of the great architect's death, and the boy and his mother were not invited to the funeral.
The full title of Kahn's movie is My Architect: A Son's Journey, an apt enough description for a man's struggle to come to terms with his father. As is so often the case in epic journeys of this nature, what is found is something both more and less than what was bargained for.
Louis I. Kahn (and I'll do my best to resist puns involving the word "icon") was a visionary artist and an infuriatingly enigmatic human being. A walking illustration of the old joke about the humanist who loves humanity but can't stand individuals, Kahn was a deeply spiritual soul who often treated his loved ones with an alarming lack of sensitivity. He was great at grasping the Big Picture, but couldn't quite see the trees for the forest.
My Architect puts Nathaniel Kahn squarely in the picture, but also somehow outside of it, as the son mounts a full-blown, hands-on investigation into the wonderful, horrible life of daddy dearest, while rarely revealing what he's feeling. Nathaniel keeps his head as all about him lose theirs, as the filmmaker revisits the old haunts and architectural glories of his father, tracking down virtually everybody who ever knew Louis and conjuring up a world of memory and theories.
There are a surprisingly high percentage of dead ends here, but that's all part of the journey. We get intimate but not entirely enlightening testimonials from some of the 20th century's greatest architects (Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei are downright reverential), wistful and sometimes tearful interludes with former friends and lovers, and some fascinating twists as well. Ultimately, not much is gleaned from the talking heads, but plenty is revealed through the architect's art.
Nathaniel's journey is both metaphorical and physical, and it takes us on a tour of many of his father's most famous creations. We're presented with image after gorgeously photographed image of such breathtaking Kahn achievements as the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas (a building lit entirely by natural sunlight), and the American Wind Symphony Barge, a whimsically Fellini-esque boat that transforms into a concert stage. The journey ends on the other side of the world, with a blast of pure spirituality, in the stunningly designed capitol building that Kahn built in Dakha, Bangladesh.
The movie even goes so far as to evoke the old kabalistic claim that God can only be known through his works, suggesting that our only hope of truly understanding a flawed human artist like Kahn is by taking a hard look at his art. One former colleague even conjectures that the cracks and pockmarks that Kahn allowed to seep into his work were much more than just a means of revealing the process by which the buildings were made. The "scars" on the work, the colleague speculates, might just be a mirror on the imperfections of their creator, a man whose face was badly burned in a childhood accident. (In a metaphor too good to be anything but true, little Louis was seared by a stove's red-hot coals when he — wait for it now — tried to get too close to the light.)
What eventually emerges in My Architect is a film with all the passion, mystery, tears and joy of first-rate, fully fleshed fiction. It's a story all the more fascinating for being true, and one that's considerably richer than most of the expensive, meticulously crafted lies that fill our movie screens these days.
More Movies Than You Can Shake a Bagel At
It's that time of year again. For the next few months, we'll be seeing film festivals popping up all over the Bay area. The season begins Feb. 22 with the Eighth Annual Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival.
The festival's opening presentation is a kitschy, ethnic take on those audience participation events a la The Sound of Music: a Sunday sing-a-long matinee of Fiddler on the Roof. Audience members are encouraged to come in costume, Hebrew National Hot Dogs will be available at the show, and I swear I'm not making any of this up.
The festival continues on Tuesday, Feb. 24, with Make Me a Match, a documentary on Jewish matchmaking brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century. On Wednesday, there's the Oscar nominated short One Day Crossing followed by Gloomy Sunday, an oddly engaging mix of politics, eroticism and surrealistic whimsy.
My favorite film of the festival is the Israeli slice-of-life A Trumpet in the Wadi (Saturday, Feb. 28), an authentic-feeling account of unlikely romance blooming between a Russian Jewish immigrant and an aging Arab woman. Other likely highlights include a documentary on that strangest of birds, the Southern Jew (Shalom Y'All, Thursday, Feb. 26), and an offbeat thriller about a petty criminal who becomes involved with a traditional Jewish internment organization (The Burial Society, Feb. 28). The festival closes with a double-bill of Under Water (a drama about a teenage girl caught between a secular life and an Orthodox parent) and Miss Entebbe, in which Jewish and Arab kids tragi-comically play out the misguided passions of their elders.
Festival venues include Tampa Theatre, the Royalty Theatre in Clearwater, the Golda Meir/Kent Jewish Center, and the Hillel Jewish Student Center at USF. For information, visit www.jewishtampa.com.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at 813-248-8888, ext. 157, or lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2004.