I was fortunate enough to meet Julius
Shulman, the architectural
photographer whose luminously otherworldly black-and-white work
chronicling the buildings of Richard Neutra, John Lautner, Richard
Schindler and other Southern California Modernists did as much to make
their work accepted as art as their buildings, themselves. His own house
was on a Modernist Los Angeles tour and he sat at a table, outside the
entrance, cheerfully and spryly welcoming visitors and signing copies of
his books and calendars. He was then in his late nineties (he died in
2009 at age 98) and, after giving up architectural photography when the
Post-Modernism he hated came into vogue, had lived to see Modernism and
his own reputation make a comeback.
In very old age, he had become a
Rock star. Visual
Acoustics, a documentary beautifully and artfully made by Eric
Bricker, shows the delighted, sweet way that Shulman welcomed that fame
in his last years, and even shows him working, with an assistant, on a
few final valedictory
projects. But the real meat — or, more appropriately, bricks-and-mortar —
of the film is hearing Shulman, as well as experts on architecture and
photography, discuss how his extraordinary career developed part and
parcel with the achievements of those building the great mid-century
Modernist homes. The section on how Shulman staged and lit his most
famous image, the 1960 photograph of Pierre Koenig’s “Case Study House
No. 22,” is especially illuminating — literally. Models sit and relax
inside the glass-sided house perched atop a hillside but seemingly
floating in space, as “city of light” Los Angeles sparkles below. The
filmmaker has Shulman visit the owners of the home today to reminisce.
In fact, Shulman’s meetings with the few surviving mid-century Modernist
architects (and their homeowners) are all very moving — a summit of
pioneers looking back with pride. Grade: B-plus
