Movie review: “Visual Acoustics”
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman. 3 of 4 stars with hearty encouragement that fans of photography and/or modernism see the show and film.
Famous photographer’s story told
City museum of art shows “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman” in addition to exhibit
Filmmaker Eric Bricker wisely allows Julius Shulman’s stunning images to tell the legendary architectural photographer’s story in the intriguing documentary “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman.”
The film is showing today-Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in conjunction with the special exhibit “Julius Shulman: Oklahoma Modernism Rediscovered.” The exhibit features more than 60 images the photographer took in the state between 1950 and 1980.
Now 98, Shulman is considered one of the foremost architectural photographers of the 20th century. His evocative photos also helped popularize and spread mid-century modernism with its focus on airy spaces, long, clean lines and harmony with a building’s natural surroundings, through his photos.
Narrated with warmth and occasional wit by Dustin Hoffman, the film relates the artist’s growing years and in rural Connecticut and his family’s 1920 move to the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles. Then 10 years old, Shulman watched as the West Coast metropolis grew and changed.
He developed an early love of photography. In 1936, he got a chance opportunity to work with Richard Neutra, who with Rudolph Schindler spearheaded Los Angeles’ mid-century modernist movement.
Shulman photographed many of Neutra and Schindler’s projects, followed the modernist movement into Palm Springs and then traveled the world capturing modernist structures. The film briefly covers Shulman’s 1961 photos of Herb Greene’s “Prairie Chicken House” in Norman.
He worked with many great architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Oscar Niemayer and Pierre Koenig. The film takes Shulman back to the sites of many of his acclaimed photos. It also sometimes reunites him with people he knew or worked with back in modernism’s heyday. The artist’s free-spirited personality is the only aspect of the film that can compete with his dramatic photos.
The film offers an in-depth examination of Shulman’s most famous photo, Koenig’s “Case Study House #22.” Cinematographer Dante Spinotti beautifully captures the striking Hollywood Hills home.
It also relates how postmodernism nearly caused Shulman to abandon his art, the ’90s revival of modernism and his later work shooting Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall.
Interviews with Gehry, designer Tom Ford, actress Kelly Lynch, publisher Benedikt Taschen and Oklahoma-bred artist Ed Ruscha interestingly convey Shulman’s continued influence.
But animation sequences from Trollback & Co. only occasionally enhance the film and can’t compete with Shulman’s artistry.
-BAM
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