Strange Magic

Sarah Morris
Strange Magic
2014
HD Digital
45:08 mins

With this film, Sarah Morris will resume her investigation of urban psychological landscapes, work methods, and architecture. This time, in Paris and Los Angeles, with the specific focus on Frank Gehry’s new building in Paris’ Jardin d’Acclimatation for the LVMH foundation. For the artist, this film will be an active inquiry into the industries, architecture, planning and visceral reality of this new building. The lens will shift from wide views of the city’s urban plan to macro shots of the building, its interior and its surroundings. Morris will focus on not only on the building and its context, but the work, practice and methodology of its architect Frank Gehry.

The film will explore this through parallels in the city as well as through some thoughtful visual studies of Gehry’s work environment in Los Angeles. Morris continues her interest in constructing the city as a chain of events linked to other chains of events. Every city is connected to elsewhere, creating links that continually make the overlapping of places inevitable. The distinct overlapping of Paris and Los Angeles will be explored and juxtaposed visually and through use of some dialogue, similar to Morris’ film about the legendary script doctor ‘Robert Towne’, and ‘1972’, her look at the Munich Olympics and the architecture of Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto.

Morris’s films always show sights of pre-production and post-production, so in this instance tracking Gehry’s inspiration both through the interview, images and the building itself in the context of Paris. It’s important to film in both cities at various stages and certainly while Gehry is in Paris. Morris employs techniques that shift from the macro to the micro lens similar to the films of Charles and Ray Eames. The shifting scales is crucial to Morris in both her paintings and films and serve to create simultaneously a panorama of a place, architecture and an insight into its intention of psychology and aesthetics. Typical of her past films, shot and sequence will be spontaneously improvised as well as highly coordinated and organized; two different modes of production that will capture the city both as spectacle and through real time. Morris seems to utilize a cinéma vérité style that combines realistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices, and in which the artist places her camera in situation that invoke the meaning of surface and form. This film will place architecture at the center of cinematic and theatrical potential.