D'Annunzio's Cave

In this creative documentary, filmmaker Heinz Emigholz presents a series of filmed photographs of the work of the exceptionally inventive American architect Bruce Goff (1904-1982), who was apprenticed at age 12 but never formally educated as an architect. His work, mostly churches and private homes, displays a unique style that sets it apart from most 20th century architecture. The Episcopal Church in Tulsa built in the 1920s is a towering Art Deco icon, while the Hopewell Baptist Church in Edmond resembles a strange futuristic concrete teepee challenging the landscape. Bruce Goff is the great unknown of an original American form of architecture. Through his photo-driven style, Emigholz brilliantly exposes details of Goff's structures that might otherwise be missed, making these fascinating artifacts even more intriguing.

Sixty-nine of Heinz Emigholz's illustrated notebooks from 1983 to 1996, three sketch books from the 80s and 90s, and cinematic studies of his exhibition "Der Untergang der Bismarck" at the Zwinger Gallery, Berlin 1988, a castle moat in Riva, Italy 1997, a casting of Aguste Rodin's "The Gates of Hell" in front of the Kunsthaus in Zürich 1988, an olive grove near Norma in Italy 1995, a magnolia tree in Basle 1996, burnt meat at Cabo de Creus in the Pyrennees 1988, an intersection in Owatonna, Minnesota 1995, and a house underpass in Giesshübelstrasse, Zurich 1996. In addition, there are 184 drawings from the series "Die Basis des Make-Up" as positives and negatives.

A Series of Thoughts consists of four shorts: EL GRECO IN TOLEDO, LEONARDOS TRÄNEN, AN BORD DER USS TICONDEROGA and EIN MUSEUMSBAU IN ESSEN.

Belgium, 9th october 1979. A cook drills a hole in the door to the "camera obscura" (lat. dark room) of his boss, a persian-american carpet dealer, who lives together with two women and a narcistic drunkard in a dark carpet-cave. All the characters walk a fine line between professional and private life, between dependence and exercise of power trying to save his/her love. Blatant voyeurism rules. The characters mutually spike their feelings whenever possible driving wedges of love into one another's flesh. Masochistoic institution grows out of romance, which portrayal degenerates into a comedy.

Experimental short about some stairs.

Experimental short.

An experimental German film

His buildings are garish, colorful and completely overloaded. Columns and glittering chandeliers everywhere, and way too much of everything. The Bolivian civil engineer and architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (*1971) builds houses in El Alto for a nouveau riche upper class of the Aymara, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Bolivia.

The ‘Casa do Povo’ cultural centre in São Paulo, an icon of the secular Jewish workers’ movement: a crumbling theatre flanked by staircases, entryways and corridors. Construction noise drones away in the background, clinking crockery, a broom sweeping over tiled floors, an expressive façade of countless adjustable panes of glass covered by a patina. It’s October 2016 and a group of young people are preparing a preview of Bickels [Socialism]. The venue is to form a prologue to the completed film, which tours 22 buildings in Israel designed by Samuel Bickels, most of which for kibbutzim. Dining halls, children’s houses, agricultural buildings, bright structures inserted into the Mediterranean landscape with great ingenuity. An architecture with a sell-by date: That many are now empty or have been repurposed at best is linked to the decline of the socialist ideals they embody.

Famed Swiss architect and artist Robert Maillart was renowned for his concrete bridges; this documentary examines the elegant design of his engineering masterpieces, which, the film argues, embrace both functionality and aesthetics. Instead of following a traditional journalistic structure, director Heinz Emigholz's spellbinding film reads more like ethereal visual poetry, allowing the beauty of Maillart's work to speak for itself.