Space and Light

Documentary on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture.

All great art engages in a dialogue with the past. Architecture is no exception, as this film shows in its examination of the legacy of Sir John Soane (1753-1837), an English architect of rare genius whose influence on a generation of America's foremost architects is profound.

The screen legend conducts a personal tour of the great city that shaped him.

Infinite Space, a documentary feature film, traces the lifelong quest of visionary genius John Lautner to create “architecture that has no beginning and no end.” It is the story of brilliance and of a complicated life – and the most sensual architecture of the 20th century.

The life and work of the Scottish architect and artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Charles Gwathmey has held steadfast to the spirit of modernism in his architecture from the day he successfully built his parents' home in 1967 based on the theories of Le Corbusier and American individualism. Avoiding the nostalgia of fashionable postmodernism throughout the eighties, Gwathmey partnered with Robert Siegel, and their firm continues to create innovative houses, corporate, institutional and university buildings across America. This documentary ranges from the deMenil villa on the dunes of Easthampton to their Guggenheim Museum addition. We hear from such leading architects as Philip Johnson and Peter Eisenman, and from filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who describes how a journey through a Gwathmey Siegel house creates the same sense of drama as a well-made movie.

A panorama of the Clyde, from Biggar to Brodick, with Billy Connolly as your guide. Directed by Murray Grigor for the Films of Scotland Committee.

Billy Connolly was, in the 1970s, a sort of Scottish Lenny Bruce, who, with devastating humour, sliced through the hypocrisies he perceived. This 1976 documentary follows the singer-comic during his 1975 Irish tour. Made in a cinema verité fashion, the performer appears to be completely unaware of the presence of the camera in his off-stage and backstage moments.

Sequence of animations and random footage (Olympic torch lighting, rituals etc) which were "based on ideas of Hans Hollein; created for the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Museum's opening exhibition: Man transForms", 1976. Nine designers worked with Hans Hollein in the "MAN TRANSFORMs" exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Decorative Arts and Design: Nader Ardalan, Peter Bode, Buckminster Fuller, Murray Grigor, Arata Isozaki, Richard Meier, Karl Schlamminger, Ettore Sottsass, and Oswald Ungers.

Overview of Vorticism, a radical art movement of the early 20th Century.

In the twilight years of the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese filmmaker slowly becoming blind tours the country screening her last film to peasants. In it, the woman imagines two "alien" lovers walking from end-to-end along the Great Wall to join each other in the middle, one last time. This documentary is an adaptation of Ulay and Marina Abramovic's final collaborative project, the 1988 performance "The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk."

The story of Harris Tweed and its Hebridean homeland.

A study of the works of the Scottish architect Robert Adam.

A portrait of Edinburgh, accompanied by the Picturesque notes of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1878.

Mackintosh Redux is a restored version of the original 1968 film Mackintosh, also directed by Murray Grigor. Mackintosh Redux was scanned to 4K from original 35mm preservation materials of the 1968 film Mackintosh held in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive. It was then re-mastered by the Moving Image Technical and Preservation Manager, Alan Russell. Murray Grigor, the director of the original film, had Frank Spedding’s original score re-recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Rory Boyle at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Although keeping to the main framework of the 1968 film there are now a number of new shots edited in and others that were dropped; subtitles added to inform the music sections and a revised narration assessing mackintosh in the history of architecture.

Artist Eduardo Paolozzi explores idiosyncratic aspects of the culture and history of Malta in this unique experimental tourist film.