Film: Schindlers Häuser (Schindler’s Houses)

(Original version) and discussion with director Heinz Emighaus and architect Arno Brandlhuber

In his film Schindlers Häuser (Schindler’s Houses) Heinz Emigholz shows forty buildings dating from the years 1921 to 1952, made by the Austrian-American architect Rudolph Schindler, whose pioneering work established a unique branch of modern architecture in Southern California. The film also offers a portrait of urban life in Los Angeles. The screening is followed by a discussion with Heinz Emigholz and the architect Arno Brandlhuber.

Heinz Emigholz (born in Achim, 1948) is a filmmaker, artist, writer, and producer whose career has generated an expansive filmic and artistic oeuvre. In 1984 Emigholz began the film series Photographie und jenseits (Photography and Beyond) a “collection of freely combinable films that deal with products of human design,” with the sub-series Architektur als Autobiografie, which presented, in chronological order, the still extant buildings of architects such as Bruce Goff, Adolf Loos, Pier Luigi Nervi, Auguste Perret, and Rudolph Schindler. From 1993 to 2013 Emigholz was a professor of experimental film at the Universität der Künste Berlin. In May of 2012 he was appointed a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Arno Brandlhuber (born in Wasserlos, 1964) is a Berlin-based architect and professor. He studied architecture at the Technischen Hochschule Darmstadt and the Accademia del Arte in Florence. Since 2003 he has been the chair of architecture and urban studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg. Brandlhuber is co-initiator of the forum Academie c/o in Berlin, which addresses the “the production of the space in the Berlin Republic.” In 2006 Brandlhuber founded his own studio and purchased a building plot in Berlin-Mitte (Brunnenstraße 9), where he built studios for artists and a gallery. Since 2010 he has been working with the idea of Berlin as a “green archipelago,” an urban concept that was developed in 1977 that promotes heterogeneity, cost-effective construction, and affordable rent.