Sketches of Frank Gehry [siff] is a love note to one of modern architecture’s most recognizable figures. It is sort of a meta-documentary about Sydney Pollack’s documentary about his friend Frank Gehry, who’s responsible for convention-defying buildings like our own Experience Music Project, Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
I generally like Frank Gehry’s buildings, which is probably why I liked the movie. It fawns over his work with only a token critic thrown in to speak for the people who find his style deeply offensive or over-hyped. But this film is not about them. It is a forum for celebrity admirers (Pollack, Michael Eisner, Bob Geldof, among others), artists, curators, and critics to praise his artist-architect designs while showing the rest of us how his whimsical creations go from scribbles to structures.

We get a sense of his creative process, which involves sketches, models that get torn apart and rebuilt, and innovative 3-d modeling software. We hear [a lot] from his therapist, we meet the creative team, we learn about how Gehry came to be an architect and learned to break away from expectations, and we hear from Bilabo about how a signature building functions to raise a community self-esteem.We also hear about the difficulty of filming buildings, though Pollack is largely successful at capturing the structures capturing light and reflections of rippling water, rain, or fireworks. However, we don’t hear much about our own much-maligned EMP.

If you’re a believer, seeing these sketches morph into realized structures and the enthusiasm behind them is pure magic. If you’re not, this might convince you to buy into the hype, but it could just as easily drive you crazy with frustration.

(26 May, 29 May)