Filming Erich Mendelsohn’s buildings.
They showed a work in progress cut of a video installation piece they have been doing on four of Mendelsohn’s buildings.
Mendelsohn apparently was preoccupied by the movement of people through his buildings so the artists have used their cameras to track the movement through the spaces using dollies, zoom and cameras spinning and arcing slowly. In all very sweet and gentle sequences.
Mendelsohn was also very aware of photography and its relationship to architecture. He was a photographer himself and had a book of his Manhattan shots published. He also was one of the instigators of architectural postcards as adverts for his practice. These post cards were apparently very popular in 20s-30s Germany.
Their constant question when they started the project and even now most of the way through is “How do you film a building?” Without making it either seem like a backdrop or end up with some kind of narrative, i.e. a documentary. How do you just capture it visually? This seemed to be a general theme through the day and a nice end point to the whole proceedings.
