Heinz Emigholz

A German Platoon is explored through the brutal fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad. After half of their number is wiped out and they're placed under the command of a sadistic captain, the platoon lieutenant leads his men to desert. The platoon members attempt escape from the city, now surrounded by the Soviet Army.

The ‘Casa do Povo’ cultural centre in São Paulo, an icon of the secular Jewish workers’ movement: a crumbling theatre flanked by staircases, entryways and corridors. Construction noise drones away in the background, clinking crockery, a broom sweeping over tiled floors, an expressive façade of countless adjustable panes of glass covered by a patina. It’s October 2016 and a group of young people are preparing a preview of Bickels [Socialism]. The venue is to form a prologue to the completed film, which tours 22 buildings in Israel designed by Samuel Bickels, most of which for kibbutzim. Dining halls, children’s houses, agricultural buildings, bright structures inserted into the Mediterranean landscape with great ingenuity. An architecture with a sell-by date: That many are now empty or have been repurposed at best is linked to the decline of the socialist ideals they embody.

The film juxtaposes/compares two museums: The Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel, which Samuel Bickels (1909-1975) built there in 1948, and The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, built by Renzo Piano (b. 1937) 1986 . The method of natural lighting in Bickels‘s construction was the direct model for Piano, who adopted for his construction at the request of its patroness Dominique de Menil.

In the beginning of the 19th century, Johannes Elias Alder is born in a small village in the Austrian mountains. While growing up he is considered strange by the other villagers and discovers his love of music, especially rebuilding and playing the organ at the village church. After experiencing an "acoustic wonder", his eye color changes and he can hear even the most subtle sounds.

With Marcia Bronstein and Silke Grossmann. Hamburg, Wandsbek-Gartenstadt, May 1976.

Adaptation of the novel "Bartleby the Scrinener: A story of Wall Street" (1853) by Hermann Melville.

A film director confides in his interlocutor. He talks about the working process, about creative blocks, about artistic crises and expressive forces. At some point, the idea takes hold that this conversation could be turned into a film. And this is the very film we’re watching the two of them in.

This story is told by the boy's father: "My father wrote letters from the front. He didn't come back from the war. In my dream, I saw a hundred thousand letters falling from the sky." The letters are memories and trauma. No one talks about them. The boy knows nothing yet about the legacy of all wars. The setting for this story is a former military airfield and its surroundings.

Heinz Emigholz, the premiere purveyor of architectural oddities (Sullivan’s Bridges, Goff in the Desert), meticulously documents 15 rooms of the enormous Villa Cargnacco in Lombardy, Italy, designed by proto-fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). The controversial figure spent 17 years designing the Vittoriale, a state museum on Lake Garda, and furnishing the Villa Cargnacco, which is part of the grand complex. This unusual documentary resulted from a photography session in the villa, when four friends—cinematographers Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and Heinz Emigholz—simultaneously filmed the rooms and furnishings of the villa in their own specific styles.

Contemporary cinema’s preeminent chronicler of architecture and its intersection with the ever-present crisis of 20th-century modernity, Heinz Emigholz returns with an alternately mournful and sly treatise on how the presence—and, in some cases, absence—of municipal and communal building architecture is inseparable from capitalist ideology. Focusing mainly on cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia, Emigholz’s latest film is a work of quiet observation and historical excavation. From slaughterhouses in Salamone to the flooded former spa city of Epecuén to the newly built Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the film demonstrates the effect of capital on public spaces, where creation and destruction go hand in hand, and as always, Emigholz makes the journey one of intellectual force and cinematic beauty.

Stylized, black and white biography of Frances Farmer by author Lynne Tillman and Sheila McLauglin.

An experimental German film

Max Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.

After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

The film shows the Antivilla built by Arno Brandlhuber in Potsdam, Krampnitz, between 2010 and 2015. The building has the project number 0131 in the catalog of works by Brandlhuber +. The shooting of Antivilla took place on April 4, 2016 in preparation for the feature film Streetscapes [Dialogue].

His buildings are garish, colorful and completely overloaded. Columns and glittering chandeliers everywhere, and way too much of everything. The Bolivian civil engineer and architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre (*1971) builds houses in El Alto for a nouveau riche upper class of the Aymara, the largest indigenous ethnic group in Bolivia.

In the 21st part of his Photography and beyond series, Heinz Emigholz projects as usual a series of structures into our brains and from there on to the screen: Airports, motorways and bus stops; department stores, market halls and warehouses.

An archaeologist and a weapons designer, who knew each other in a previous life as a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst, meet at an excavation site in the Negev desert and begin a conversation about love and war, which they continue in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva. A series of encounters with alternating actors in different roles ensues, which leads the viewer through the cities of Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong and São Paulo. Among those appearing are: an old artist who meets his younger self; a mother who lives with her two grown-up sons, a priest and a policeman; a Chinese and a Japanese woman; a curator and a cosmologist.

A confrontation and comparison of two church buildings, which could hardly be more different, but also a dialogue between various concepts of church and community: the Protestant Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen and the Catholic Cathedral in Orvieto.

Famed Swiss architect and artist Robert Maillart was renowned for his concrete bridges; this documentary examines the elegant design of his engineering masterpieces, which, the film argues, embrace both functionality and aesthetics. Instead of following a traditional journalistic structure, director Heinz Emigholz's spellbinding film reads more like ethereal visual poetry, allowing the beauty of Maillart's work to speak for itself.