Michael Blackwood

No understanding of the modern movement in architecture is possible without knowledge of its master builder, Mies van der Rohe. Together with documentation of his life, this film shows all his major buildings, as well as rare film footage of Mies explaining his philosophy. Phyllis Lambert relates her choice of Mies as the architect for the Seagram building. Mies's achievements and continuing influence are debated by architects Robert A.M. Stern, Robert Venturi, and Philip Johnson, by former students and by architectural historians. Mies is seen in rare documentary footage.

A film essay contrasting the modern metropolis with its "golden age" from 1830-1930, with the participation of some of New York's leading political and cultural figures. Made at a time when the city was experiencing unprecedented real estate development on the one hand and unforeseen displacement of population and deterioration on the other. Empire City is the story of two New Yorks. The film explores the precarious coexistence of the service-based midtown Manhattan corporate headquarters with the peripheral New York of undereducated minorities living in increasing alienation.

A portrait of the eminent Nobel Prize winning physicist who greatly advanced our knowledge of the atom. Bethe discusses the milestones of his career: his student work in Germany, his flight from the Nazis, his work on the Los Alamos Atomic Bomb project under Robert Oppenheimer, and his research on the energy production in stars. In working to help solve the energy crisis of the 1970’s, Bethe established himself as one of the country’s leading spokesmen for a safe way to use nuclear energy. Speaking in support of a sensible use, he represents a side of this controversial issue that deserves more attention. The film provides crucial insight into this complex issue by one of the world’s authorities.

George Segal constructs a type of human form and vulnerability that feels rare in the world of sculpture. As we follow his process at the isolated New Jersey farmhouse that serves as his studio, the intimacy between Segal and his art is contagious. He casts people who he knows, respects and admires, making the final outcome of the piece seep with personality and humanity. Segal is focused on creating a mold that does not necessarily subscribe to society’s notion of beauty. Originally released in 1979.

"Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis" is a visually striking film portrait shot on location in Japan with the participation of the major Butoh choreographers and their companies. Although Butoh is often viewed as Japan's equivalent of modern dance, in actuality it has little to do with the rational principles of modernism. Butoh is a theater of improvisation which places the personal experiences of the dancer on center-stage. By reestablishing the ancient Japanese connection of dance, music, and masks, and by recalling the Buddhist death dances of rural Japan, Butoh incorporates much traditional theater. At the same time, it is a movement of resistance against the abandonment of traditional culture to a highly organized consumer-oriented society.

When the Tuscan city of Pisa commissioned David Chipperfield to create a master plan that would bring new vitality to this historic spot on the Arno, an exhibition of selected works produced by him in the last 25 years was also invited. "David Chipperfield: Form Matters" documents the architect as he leads the way through his models, drawings and photographs, explaining his designs in the process. Chipperfield's vast array of international work spans over Europe, China, Japan, the United States and Mexico and as he guides us through his career Chipperfield offers a detailed accounts of his creative direction at every stop.

This documentary explores the creation of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Reaction of the German public to the completed memorial is also shown.

As an architect, educator, and philosopher, Louis Kahn played a prominent role in the history of 20th century architecture. An examination of six of his most significant buildings: The Salk Institute; the Kimbell Art Museum; the Center for British Art; the library at Philips Exeter Academy; the Indian Institute of Management; and the Parliament Buildings of Bangladesh.

By the end of the 1980's a new architectural sensibility challenged the prevailing post-Modern attitude and brought forth new and daring designs. Driven by the philosophy and theory of Jacques Derrida, the architects of Deconstructivism are rooted in a movement that urges us to examine the space we move through. Deconstructivist Architects documents explosive and seemingly chaotic structures from Vienna to L.A., and interviews those who pursue its aesthetic issues. Filmed on location with the architects and at the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, which was curated by Philip Johnson.

With a rambling, unstructured style that echoes Andy Warhol’s own approach to filmmaking, this documentary profiles his career, showing him to be a brilliant manipulator, dedicated voyeur and person of astute commercial judgment.

A film consisting of seven episodes directed by young West German filmmakers, some of whom were signatories of the famous Oberhausen Manifesto. The film focuses on the sometimes highly dramatic fates of young girls.

Description by D.A Pennebaker: "This movie is something of a mystery. Timothy Leary was getting married to a model named Nena Von Schlebrugge up in Millbrook, New York at the Hitchcock house, where Leary had been carrying on his hallucinogenic revelries for the past year or so after leaving Harvard. It was rumored that this was going to be the wedding of the season, the wedding of Mr. And Mrs. Swing as Cab Calloway put it. Blackwood took me downtown to meet Monte Rock III who was singing at Trudy Heller’s but who was also a very pricey and off-the-wall hairdresser and was in fact going to be doing the bride’s hair. Nena’s brother, Bjorn, known as the “Baron” was a friend of the Hitchcock’s, as was I, and the idea of going along and filming the wedding seemed not unwarranted. I’ve always wanted to film someone getting married."

Japan's establishment as an economic superpower led to a Golden Age of Japanese architecture. Six innovators stand out particularly, fusing Japanese traditions with modern materials and technology.

Tadao Ando, a self-taught architect, proposes an international architecture that he believes can only be conceived by someone Japanese. His architecture mixes Piranesian drama with contemplative spaces in urban complexes, residences and chapels. This film presents the formative years of his impressive career before he embarked on projects in Europe and the United States.

4 Artists: Robert Ryman, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Susan Rothenberg acts as a collective portrait of creators linked only by their stated intention of expressing ideas through art. Unconnected to traditional concepts of beauty, storytelling or pictorial representation, the artists discuss the context of their art and how their work and the public's perception of it have changed over time. This film offers the rare opportunity to see a large body of work in their studios.—Michael Blackwood Productions

This film includes important examples of the Robert Rauschenberg's diverse and extraordinary accomplishments, tracing his development from his student years and his earliest experiments to a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It features Rauschenberg, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and was released in 1979.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, abstraction - that most quintessentially modernist innovation - maintains a peculiarly contradictory position. Used, on one hand, by post-modernist artists as just one more quotable style amongst many, it is on the other hand still considered an elitist or hermetic language by audiences intimidated by its lack of recognizable subject matter. Yet ultimately, abstraction continues to be a viable creative path for contemporary artists of all generations, many of whom embrace it as the most inclusive and fundamentally resonant of artistic languages. Filmed at the artists' studios, the Dia Center for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Museum during their exhibition, "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century."

Explores the paths being forged by six modern artists, giving us rare insight into the minds behind this rousing new wave of painting.

The band of American artists known as the New York School toyed with tradition and rebelled against the Renaissance.Feeling as though free association yielded their best results, the painters, poets and performers of the New York School took a surrealist approach that was concerned less with aesthetic and more with expression. Those associated with the School were unified by their desire to create from within. They created a monumental, dramatic art that remains a singular expression of the crucial modern quest for individuality and personal freedom." Never knowing exactly how their pieces would turn out, the artists of the New York School embraced their own complex humanity and worked from a place of bold, sporadic realness.

The multiple means of making art after the end of illusionism led these artists to create performances, sculptures, earthworks, tableaux, furniture, shaped canvases, and more, using unusual materials. They explore the process of making forms and giving meanings to those forms. In this idea art, their focus is as often social and psychological as artistic. Some of their activities enlist engineering and construction techniques, others compose texts or scripts that are central to their art. Some cast the viewer in the role of a spectator, while the others demand active participation. The sources for their concepts and art works are equally diverse; the delicate proportions and balance of Early Renaissance painting, the exploration of the surface of the moon, the structure and inventions of vernacular architects, to name only a few.

The first chapter in our Masters of Modern Sculpture series looks at groundbreaking work from the brilliant minds that reshaped sculptural art and inspired generations to come. Narrated by George Segal, The Pioneers explores famed pieces from sculptors such as Rodin, Maillol and Picasso.

"Frank Gehry: An Architecture of Joy" illustrates the unique intertwining of art and architecture throughout Gehry's spectacularly eclectic career. In this portrait, Gehry explores his work of the 1990's including The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Frederick R. Weisman Museum in Minneapolis, as well as his first European commission, the EMR Communication and Technology Center in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany. Seeing himself as an artist first, Gehry discusses his early relationships in the art world and how sculpture, painting and small scale work has influenced his architectural style. Like Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, he has introduced "bad taste" into his concepts, while keeping himself outside of the contemporary dialogue between modernism and post-modernism. He has translated the vocabulary of contemporary art into an architectural language of his own, disobeying the rules of his profession and questioning its historic conventions.

Crewdson is observed and questioned closely during his work on ten new images in as many different sets.

Beginning with their small wrapped objects of 1958, this portrait examines the continuously bold and ambitious artistic ventures of the enigmatic duo, CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE. Though their large scale environmental projects, such as Running Fence and Wrapped Coast, are often met with distress and concern from the surrounding community, perceptions of the project are likely to shift when it comes time to interact with the grand, finished piece. Neither permanent nor purchasable, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works exude the essence of freedom and exist only for the sake of existing.