Visual Acoustics

It didn't take too much to convince my visiting parents to come down to the Ritz and watch Visual Acoustics with me last Wednesday. They had been to the Ritz the last time they were in town, to see No Country..., so they we're excited, if skeptical, that this interesting new movie might live up to that experience. It didn't, but only because we couldn't get in.

This was embarrassing for me, you understand, because I had just heard from someone at the AFS that their credit card machine wasn't working and that plenty of tickets were available to purchase on site. "Don't worry about it," I told my folks. But when we arrived the line was so long I had no hope of getting in, even with all my damned connections and everything. This, I'm guessing, was on account of the triple advertising efforts of the Blanton, the AFS, and the Alamo.

But it did pay off to try, because on Friday I was tipped off that they were showing the movie again Saturday morning. We went and, along with about 10 other people, were treated to a great show. The film is about the architectural photography of Julius Shulman, who documented modernist buildings exclusively - and did it well enough to become known as the greatest architecture photographer ever. He's also a just hell of a guy, still larger than life in his mid nineties.

So the first-time filmmaker (Eric Bricker) had an interesting and wonderful challenge on his hands. How would he make a moving picture about still photography? He more or less split the movie between the character and his work, using a combination of talking heads, veritae, and the incorporation of the stunning photographs. His method for the latter was sometimes as basic as showing the photos full screen, and other times using what he called symphonies - a barrage of photos creatively displayed, put to music, deviod of dialog or narration. These moments were the most expressive of the film, they served as welcome mental breaks for all the info, and they were all very different from each other.

One "symphony" opened the film, and it was this one I found most interesting. It was a fairly simple photo slideshow, although the photos were each oriented differently and thus the screen seemed to be flipping around a la the beginning of 2001 A Space Oddessy. To do this, I think, he simply bordered the photos with a black background and placed them next to eachother where either walls or shadows spanned the entire side of a composition. In the case of modernist architectural photos with all of its leading lines and sharp edges, this great plan worked easily.

Aisde from that, the I noticed a whole bunch of different video/film formats were used to put this thing together. During the Q&A, Bricker characterised this as a mistake and described his post-production as a nightmare. Probably worth it though, I'm guessing.