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Classification: Good Originally Published: Pop Thought, 3/1/04 |
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Simple, yet deeply powerful, My Architect: A Son’s Journey is the story of a man investigating the life of the father he never knew. The man is documentary filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn, and the father is Louis I. Kahn, known to everyone as “Lou,” one of the most talented and important American architects of the twentieth century. Described in a lot of ways in the film, but perhaps best as a nomad, the elder Kahn traveled the world for his art, and perhaps never truly felt at home, which could potentially explain the behavior toward women that eventually led to two illegitimate children by two women separate from his wife, whom he never divorced.
Nathaniel is one of those two children, and in My Architect he seeks to find a deeper understanding of the man he knew only as a frequent visitor in his house. Lou would tell him stories, write him letters, but never left his legitimate family, even though Nathaniel’s mother believes Lou intended to divorce his wife and live with them at the time of his curious death in 1973, of a heart attack in the bathroom in Penn Station. Her evidence is Kahn’s passport, found on him at the time of his death with his address scratched out. As a result, his body was left unclaimed in the morgue for days and a woman has spent the rest of her life holding onto a belief of what might have been. With little left of his father’s possessions - the man, we learn, had few to begin with - Nathaniel seeks to come to terms with his father by visiting the buildings he made and seeing what they can teach him. Some he dislikes, like a medical facility in Pennsylvania that the employees hate for its strange angles and inconsistent temperatures. Others, like the Salk Institute are deeply spiritual buildings that, thanks to My Architect’s gorgeously quiet photography, evoke wonder from the audience. Even architectural dolts like myself will be stunned speechless by some of the images in this film, at the beauty of something so simple as lighting an art gallery purely through natural sunlight. In perhaps the movie’s most meaningful passage, we see how a Jewish architect has brought democracy and peace in ways he may not even have dreamed possible to the Muslim country of Bangladesh, thanks to his astonishing Capital Building. This is a building - a building! - that can literally move men to tears. Nathaniel’s travels also bring him into contact with many of his father’s colleagues as well as the rest of his surviving family, including two half-sisters and his father’s other mistress. If there are no great revelations in the film, it is because there can be no great revelations in a story like this. Rather that we must accept our pasts, and embrace our future, as Kahn’s children do when they accept that they are a family, not because they coincidentally share a father, but because they choose to care about one another. My Architect also includes its share of humor, as when some men from Bangladesh mishear Nathaniel’s father’s name as “Louis Farrakhan.” My Architect is a memorable, haunting film, and in its way, a haunted one as well. This father has cast an enormous shadow over his son’s life and this film is a way for him to step out from beneath it, not to distance himself from it, but to gain a perspective on it. It may not carry the social commentary of Spellbound, the complexity of material of Capturing The Friedmans, or the political insight of The Fog of War but its hopeful message, fascinating subject matter, and uplifting cinematography rank it amongst those films as one of the best documentaries of 2003. |