Slaughterhouses of Modernity (Heinz Emigholz, 2022) (Patreon)

The NYFF Currents regime doesn't have a lot of use for the old lions of the avant-garde. So it was surprising that an exception was made for Emigholz, whose work has changed a bit in recent years but has still retained a basic austerity. Well, wouldn't you know, he's gone and embraced the essay-film trend, adapting the techniques of his "Photography and Beyond" architecture documents so as to apply them to an appropriately bald-faced statement on fascism. Not a problem in itself, but Slaughterhouses is a film at pains to tell us exactly what we should be thinking about the things it shows us.

After opening with a mini-lecture on postmodernism and capital, Emigholz takes us to Argentina, for a consideration of the buildings of Francisco Salamone, a Latin American modernist influenced by Art Deco and Mussolini. In various towns on the pampas, Salamone designed city halls, cemetery entrances / facades, and yes, slaughterhouses. During Argentina's so-called Infamous Decade, new prosperity came to the nation through cattle ranching, and Salamone marked the occasion by building multiple permutations on his spare yet grandiose civic style, intended to convey the strength and power of the Argentine state. 

Suffice to say, Emigholz's work is a lot more interesting when he is focusing on an architect of whom he approves. Unlike his films on Louis Sullivan, Bruce Goff, Rudolph Schindler, others, Slaughterhouses of Modernity is an effective but ultimately uninspired PowerPoint about the relationship between buildings and power, eventually making explicit the only thing he'd refrained from stating outright. That's Argentina's Nazi connections, the influx of German immigrants who went to South America to escape Allied justice. While neither Salamone nor his architecture was overtly fascist, those influences became part of the intellectual culture in Argentina, a point Emigholz makes clear by having his in-film surrogate (Stefan Kolosko) deliver a lecture about Borges, in particular his story "German Requiem" which glorifies an aging concentration-camp comandante. 

Slaughterhouses, then, makes an unusual journey from the literal (abattoirs in rural Argentina) to the somewhat figurative (Auschwitz), squaring the circle in the film's final section about the Humboldt Museum in Berlin. A conscious combination of the vaguely Romanesque remains of the Berlin Palace and a stark  Brutalism, the Humboldt is an architectural metonymy, yoking the proto-Nazi reign of Wilhelm II and the democratic state, in order to showcase plunder from various conquered peoples. As Emigholz makes clear, it's a building that is every bit as hideous as its contents, a sign of raw power that would be ridiculous were it not so institutionally entrenched.

While there's nothing particularly wrong about Slaughterhouses of Modernity, it's a film that fails to play to Emigholz's ample strengths. As a bit of Mike Davis-style leftist analysis, it doesn't dot its I's or cross its T's especially well. Like so many essay-films, it would rather infer than draw irrefutable historical connections. And, unlike Emigholz's most accomplished films, Slaughterhouses actually distances us from its architectural subjects. Whereas earlier films used fragmented editing, canted angles, and a skillful part / whole orientation to produce cinematic knowledge about structures and urban space, this new film merely regards various buildings as superstructural symptoms of events whose causes lay elsewhere. It's a cogent enough lecture, but Emigholz is a much more accomplished artist than this.