Attention: film buffs and architecture/design buffs: During the month of August, the Architectural Heritage Center (AHC) offers two free matinee showings of classic films that prominently feature architecture and design. Popcorn and soft drinks served.
Saturday, August 5, 2 pm is the 1927 film, Metropolis. The dazzling, science fiction masterpiece by Fritz Lang was made in the Weimar Republic and features a futuristic art deco-inspired cityscape. It is set in a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners. The son of the city’s mastermind falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.
The story follows the son of a wealthy industrialist as he sets out on a journey of discovery in the underground of the city that he’s known all his life but never seen due to his privileged social position. It’s there that he finds meaning, love and the strength to question what he knows. There will be a 15 minute intermission halfway through the two and a half hour film.
Two weeks later, Saturday, August 19, Man With a Movie Camera from 1929 will be shown at 2 pm. The Soviet-era documentary film is directed by Dziga Vertov, who found the fledgling medium of film to be rife with the possibility for expressing the breadth and depth of life in the Soviet Union and a weapon to bear against the industrialism of his urban surroundings with all the verve of the human spirit.
Just over an hour in length, the film follows a man as he travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention. It illustrates how the realm of the self became a technology of the Soviet experiment as buildings, machines and bodies of work are all given equal visual weight. Camera techniques that would be impressive even today elevate the most mundane of human activity to the sublime. It is a visual feast and a unique opportunity to peer directly into another time and place, to see it not as it is, but rendered through a visionary’s imagination.
The AHC is located at 701 SE Grand Ave. Visit visitahc.org or call 503.231.7264 for more.