Loos Ornamental ***
Heinz Emigholz, 2008
Germany
@ Northwest Film Forum

Incredible.

First come a few words in German, and then there are no words at all, only images of Adolf Loos's architecture, arranged in a chronological slide show of long-held video stills inside and outside the buildings, mainly in Vienna. Loos famously eschewed ornament, reducing form to function by exposing beams, stacking grids, and letting materials express their own conditions. This makes for some genteel moments, but there's also the return of the repressed, in perfectly flat and geometric surfaces that nonetheless roar like baroque sculpture because they are made of wildly mottled red or green marble. Drunk on the dream of modernism, you reach the end of the film, where there's only a cube gravestone with the architect's name on it. It's right in the city, and a train passes close behind it.

See also: IMDb | Jen Graves in The Stranger