Pollack: Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005)

Frank Gehry and Sydney Pollack were old friends by the time this documentary about Gehry’s life and architecture was made. As a result, it’s quite informal and relaxed – most of it is shot on low-budget digital cameras, while Pollack himself is often present within the frame with his portable camera in hand. On the one hand, that really draws out the friendship between the two men – their conversations have the organic ease and assurance of people who’ve known each other for close to half a century, which also allows us as viewers to cut through some of the awe that can sometimes shroud Gehry and his projects. At the same time, the low-budget look allows for quite an embodied, visceral sense of what it is like to move through Gehry’s spaces - from the very beginning, Pollack makes it clear that he doesn’t simply want to reduce these buildings to a series of photographs, or montage sequences. Instead, he aims to celebrate everything three-dimensional about Gehry’s work, which increasingly means focusing on him as a sculptor as much as an architect. At one level, that’s quite a commonplace when it comes to Gehry – as he himself points out, he’s always been “aligned” with artists more than architects, perhaps explaining why so many of his projects have centred on exhibition venues. At the same time, though, Pollack’s proximity to Gehry allows him to capture just how obsessively he moulds, shapes and structures every object he encounters – he is always fiddling with something, crafting several makeshift cities a day out of all the flotsam and jetsam that comes in his way. Up close, you can tell that he’s yearning to simply sculpt buldings by hand, yearning for a handheld architecture that sits quite naturally with Pollack’s own handheld approach. More than that, you can tell that he thinks and speaks in shapes – by the end, he’s less an architect than a purveyor of “caverns, spaces and textures,” moulding each comment before he makes it, only to discard it almost immediately in search of fresh textures and thoughts to shape and caress. Of course, for someone whose very thoughts are architectural structures, it’s inevitable that the vast majority of Gehry's vision is going to be left behind, remain sketches. But the peculiar beauty of the film is that it embraces that, pays tribute to all those inchoate, ephemeral “caverns, spaces and textures” that will never be realised - it's a projective retrospective that's all the more poignant in that this would turn out to be one of the last and most personal films in Pollack’s own career.