Frank Lloyd Wright - A film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
by Lynn Novick, Ken Burns
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DVD details
Actor: Edward Herrmann, Julie Harris, Philip Bosco, Sab ShimonoDirector: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 153 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-08-28
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Pbs Home Video
DVD Reviews of Frank Lloyd Wright - A film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
DVD Review: Good but there are much better Burns works out there
Summary: 3 Stars
I don't know if it is because it wasn't just Ken Burns or what but it wasn't A+ like his most of his other works. It left out some details that seemed needed for the story. I own most all of Ken Burns work but this is one I just rented and didn't buy.
DVD Review: THE "LIFE" OF A GREAT ARCHITECT IS THE MORTAR THAT HIS DESIGNS SPRANG FROM!
Summary: 5 Stars
IN A NUTSHELL:
Any way one looks at, this was a very well done documentary. Yes, it did stress his life and misdeeds. Apparently, his deeds and misdeeds were the mortar that his designs sprang from.
WHAT IT IS:
Essentially, through this chronological biography of a sort, we see the development of the man being mirrored by the development of his ideas of how to make interior space for living, worshipping, and working more civilized and, in many ways, more functional and ergonomic.
Yes, of course, there were failures, but so many of his designs were experiments, and experiments are prototypes, and protoypes are invariably flawed. Just look at the auto industry! Though he was a self-promoter, he did not stoop to assembly line construction. Even his modest designs were filled with civilized and novel ideas that actually brought about the advent of the ranch house. His constuction innovations integrated into the hotel in Tokyo, which survived the great Earthquake, set the standard for building codes that are today used around the world to save lives in Earthquake-prone regions. His use of sites to maximize set-backs and combine living space into nature as harmoniously as possible is still at the cutting edge of site design planning, urban planning, and architectural design methodologies.
It is truly a shame that he had a bumpy ride through life, but for all his personal problems and the human wreckage the seemed connected to it, he gave the world as a whole much more than he took from it. Though he may have seemed an underachiever at times, in the long run, his achievements will be more connected to the effect he has had on the field of architecture and civilization which have been improved through his efforts. In essence, one can not judge Frank Lloyd Wright by the 769 buildings he built, but rather by the millions of structures that now incorporate many of his innovations and are safer and more liveable for it.
To tell the story, they used an eclectic group of witnesses ranging from a 100-year-old son to former fellowship members, plus grandsons, critics and collegues. Of course, they also showed parts of his interview with Mike Wallace back in 1957 and some home movies too.
CONCLUSION:
As evidenced in his personal life, he was a very emotional man. Combining his strong emotions with his skill as an architect helped him create designs that were works of art, like the Guggenheim. His emotions blended into his designs to instill a desirable emotional effect on visitors or owners of his creations. Some people described it as a spiritual experience. In Columbus, Indiana there are a large number of structures that were built by Wright and his followers. There are tours through Columbus showing these marvels off and even a lovely park [Mill Race Park] that somehow makes 100 acres adjacent to a noisy highway and a polluted stream into an Eden that seems like 1,000 pristine acres.
ABOUT THE DVD:
In two parts on one DVD, it was 146 minutes long. It also contained several interviews and it was very helpful to see the perspective of filmaker Ken Burns and company.
DVD Review: A superb if not all inclusive documentary
Summary: 5 Stars
In watching this marvelous documentary on the life and career of Frank Lloyd Wright I was reminded of an equally unpleasant creative artist. After Robert Frost spent several days of abusing and attempting to humiliate the poet Archibald McLeish, the historian Bernard DeVoto told him, "Robert, you are a great poet, but a bad man." Contrary to one myth, not all geniuses are jerks. Marcel Proust was exceedingly quirky, but by every account he was a generous and caring friend. Albert Einstein was by accounts a remarkably nice person, Vladimir Nabokov, though a brute in reviews (known as Vlad the Impaler), was in ordinary life a kind and goodhearted soul, while William Carlos Williams was not only a great modern poet, but a thoroughly decent human being. But there are enough people like Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso, Beethoven, and James Joyce to keep alive the myth of Genius as Jerk. Wright certainly did his share to feed into this myth and the documentary doesn't try to mute this aspect of his life. He was just not a very nice person and had he not been a great architect we wouldn't want to know anything about him. Apart from his work his was an ugly life. But he was also a stunningly gifted and prolific architect. I've never heard anyone address the question of which architects in history had the largest number of buildings constructed, but I could easily believe that the crown belongs to Wright. I first saw a Wright designed building when I lived for a year in Louisville, KY and had a striking looking bank building pointed out as a Wright design. I also visited the Guggenheim in NY when living in New Haven for several years. I was never impressed by the art collection it was designed to display, but the building itself I found to be stunning. My closest encounter with Wright came when I moved to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago and my route home took me each time directly along the Robie House, usually considered one of his two or three most important designs. For several years, for instance, AIA members voted it the second most important structure from an architectural standpoint in America, surpassed only by Wright's Falling Water. Yet, the Burns's documentary gives virtually no attention to the Robie House, although they do show it briefly. This is probably my only major complaint, the near complete neglect of one of his most highly regarded designs (notwithstanding that it is the one I know best).
Through Wright's life is unpleasant at almost every point to contemplate, his architecture from beginning to end is utterly exhilarating. More than any architect I know, whenever I see either in person or on film or in print any of his designs, I am seized with a desire to inhabit that space. When I see a Mies van der Rohe design, I have the opposite reaction. The spaces designed in the International Style I rarely find inviting, inspiring, warm, or welcoming. Wright's spaces, whether public or private, always are all of these things. The documentary does a great job of showing many Wright spaces, photographing them in ways that show how the spaces work, and from angles that are especially revealing.
I do think that the documentary would have helped by looking at more buildings, especially the Prairie style homes (such as the Robie House, which is shockingly relegated to a bit part). But much else also is left out. Wright was as much a designer as an architect, yet while his furniture and windows are seen in a myriad of shots, there is virtually no mention of his thoughts about design. Also, there was very little in the way of valid criticism of his work. Anyone who has known first hand any Wright structure knows that they are, as a rule, very poorly constructed. Most of his works have had to be rebuilt or at least corrected. The film does talk of the severe leaking of the roof that was experienced after the completion of the Johnson Wax Headquarters. Almost all of his designs have had the same problem. One of the critics on the show talks of Wright being a great engineer, and on the macro level perhaps that is true. But on the micro level, he simply didn't seem to have a grasp of how to put things together. Just one example from my own experience. If you walk along the long exterior wall that lines the Robie House one will be stunned to see how crooked it is. It wriggles like a snake. I have read that Falling Water has been similarly plagued with structural problems. Yet apart from the Johnson leaky roof, almost no mention is made of any of this.
Reading some of the reviews below, I have to express some bafflement that so many seem surprised that the documentary focuses so much on Wright's life. The title of the documentary is FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, not THE ARCHITECTURE OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT. I'm not being pedantic. Only in the second case should one be surprised that so much was said about his life. In the former case I would have been astonished if they left all the biographical details out. I think much of the problem here stems from two sources. First, many want this to be the documentary that they anticipate seeing, not the one that Burns actually made. Second, much of the problem is that there is a massive gap between the quality of Wright's work as an architect and the quality of his life as a human being. As DeVoto might put it, he was indeed a great architect, even if he was a bad man.
DVD Review: Ya Gotta Like Ken Burns
Summary: 3 Stars
The reviewers below are right about this DVD: if you want to see Wright's work, you'd be better off looking elsewhere.
Burns is obviously fascinated by the person. We learn so much about a self-promoting genius who succeeded in such a uniquely American way. Perhaps his most fascinating characteristic is Wright's apparent complete absence of self doubt, carried to such an extreme as to allow him to reinvent himself over, and over, and over again.
Wright was a hornswoggler in the best American tradition. Had a few of his works not attained memorable standing in 20th century architecture, he'd be long forgotten. If the era in which he built were more like our own present, he'd be broke from lawsuits and uninsurable for malpractice.
We live in a more careful, more thoughtful era now. And there are good things about that. But Wright takes his personal place in history now, and Burns seals it with this lively and diligent production.
DVD Review: This Is Not a Movie Picture Book
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this dvd thinking that I wanted to see homes that Frank Lloyd Wright built, but this dvd does that no justice. This is a documentary of Frank Lloyd Wrights life, not a movie about his work. I do not suggest buying this unless you want to know about the man, not his work.
Description of Frank Lloyd Wright - A film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest of all American architects. He was an authentic American genius, a man who believed he was destined to redesign the world, creating everything anew. Over the course of his long career, Wright designed over eight hundred buildings, including such revolutionary structures as the Guggenheim Museum, the Johnson Wax Building, Fallingwater, Unity Temple and Taliesin. Wright's buildings and his ideas changed the way we live, work and see the world around us. Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural achievements were often overshadowed by the turbulence of his melodramatic life. In ninety-two years, he fathered seven children, married three times, and almost constantly embroiled scandal. Some hated him, some loved him, but in the end, few could deny that he was the most important architect in America and perhaps the world. With exquisite live cinematography, fascinating interviews, and rare archival footage, this riveting film brings Wright's unforgettable story to life.The beauty of Frank Lloyd Wright is that aside from telling a long and often melodramatic story lucidly, it deals with issues of art and architecture in ways that are approachable but not simplistic. (It's also surprisingly scandalous, although this is seen as part of his art.) Wright was first and foremost a rebel who took his cues from nature, though, as one commentator points out, this is not to say his approach was natural. What he was rebelling against was the clutter and claustrophobia of Victorian architecture. The rooms he designed opened up on each other, and his exteriors seemed to grow laterally out of the landscape. All of these ideas are neatly illustrated--although it perhaps could have been explained how Wright's later, whimsical designs related to his earlier, earthbound ones--with some marvelous footage of a Wright lily pad column supporting a load of sandbags and quiet Steadicam shots of Wright interiors that give the viewer a feeling for his sense of light and harmony. The filmmakers have wisely kept the technical talk to a minimum, but they are also not afraid to step back and let the experts ruminate on the nature of his genius, even when these experts are at a loss for words. Burns has made stars of some of his commentators in previous films, and in this one the late critic Brendan Gill shines. Wright himself comes across as a man who never doubted himself, a lousy father, and self-consciously Byronic. His vitality and larger-than-life persona seemed to belong to the 19th century, making him--and this is perhaps a mixed blessing--the last of his kind. --John Clark
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