Years of Construction (Heinz Emigholz, 2019) (Patreon)

Of course it was a commission. How did I not see that?

At first I was quite taken with Emigholz's latest film, since, in a way, it struck me as a continuation of the unusual path he took with two of his recent works, Streetscapes [Dialogue] and 2+2=22 [The Alphabet]. After all, here was an artist who needed to mix it up a bit. For nearly two decades, Emigholz has been working diligently on one essential mien, the "Photography and Beyond" series, and most of its components have been intensive studies of architecture. 

Many of those works are gorgeous and illuminating, and it would be foolish to argue that they are somehow all the same. (My personal favorites are Schindler's Houses, Sullivan's Banks, and Two Museums, but this has a lot to do with my interest in the architects in question.) But Emigholz had indeed winnowed his method down to a particular formula, one that revealed buildings in space through Cubist dislocation while also articulating their relationship to their broader surroundings. The primary differences between these experiments had to do with the information front-loaded into them.

So when he made a music documentary (2+2=22), or reorganized his interest in architectural space along the lines of psychology, by dramatizing his own therapy sessions (Streetscapes [Dialogue], maybe his best ever film), it felt like a necessary jumpstart into a new way of working. And likewise, Years of Construction started out seeming like something new as well: a time-based examination of the presence, demolition, and reconstruction of a museum space, the Kunsthalle Mannheim. Instead of treating buildings as finished facts, whose "performance" occurred through human occupation, Emigholz's newest film would actually detail the existence of a space, its removal, and the painstaking recreation of its architectural replacement. Human labor would now enter the equation.

What I had not counted on, alas, is that this kind of process-oriented construction film is the sort that already exists in numerous iterations. This is the first Heinz Emigholz film that feels like it could have been made by somebody else. Sure, he employs his trademark canted angles, and carves oblique spatial motifs out of the collision of brick, metal, and sky. But the entire midsection of the film has an uncharacteristically "environmental" feel, like a film you could easily give your attention to and take it from, like a gallery projection.

This is ironic, given the fact that it is precisely a museum space that is slowly coming into being. The early parts of Years of Construction are particularly interesting, as we see the cramped galleries and storage areas of the old Kunsthalle, with various masterworks of modernism jostling for elbow room against pure white architecture. Then, once the finished museum is opened, we see many of those same pieces (and some new ones) asserting their primacy within the building made for them. It's unusual, and a mark of Emigholz's unique practice, that we notice the space surrounding the artworks as much as the pieces themselves.

But the time element, which makes Years so distinct from other Emigholz films, doesn't tell us very much about the institutional history of the Kunsthalle, or its relationship to the city of Mannheim. Unlike other Emigholz films, this one seems to bracket history altogether, which is strange, since it actually documents change over time. In a way, this is Emigholz's most accessible film, but only because it is his least demanding. We aren't asked to make connections between buildings, or between architecture and its social setting (the "beyond" of his subtitles). Instead, the Kunsthalle is presented as a kind of shell, with no administrative, curatorial, or sociopolitical existence. Disappointing as this may be, it's also oddly enlightening. Decontextualized Emigholz, unexpectedly, reads a bit like Frederick Wiseman b-roll. It's pleasant, but it's only half a film.