The Dream of Perfection
Dir. John Weiley
THE DREAM OF PERFECTION is as extraordinary as its provocative subject matter, the dramatic story of the building of the Sydney Opera House, culminating in Utzons departure from the project. Director John Weiley was commissioned in 1968 to make the documentary Autopsy on a Dream by then BBC2 controller David Attenborough, and following its only screening on the BBC, it was destroyed literally chopped to pieces on the chopping block. Miraculously, a mute print of Autopsy on a Dream was rediscovered in a BBC vault this year, and has now been restored with sound saved by John Weiley, and with a new prologue. The film features interviews with David Attenborough, Jan Utzon, Lin Utzon, and Richard Neville.
That Far Corner:
Frank Lloyd Wright in LA
Dir. Christopher Hawthorne
Producers: KCET TV
Duration: 56 minutes
Language: English
Christopher Hawthorne, the former LA Times architecture critic recently appointed as chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, takes on the mantle of writer/director for a one-hour documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright's patterned concrete-block houses in LA.
In That Far Corner, which kicked off the ninth season of KCET's artbound series earlier this month, Hawthorne goes on both geographical and intellectual journeys to, in his words, "crack the mysterious case of Frank Lloyd Wright's Los Angeles houses." He visits Chicago and speaks with critics there about Wright's Prairie houses. He speaks with museum curators about Mayan and other Pre-Columbian art and their influence on American architecture. He even speaks with his eight-year-old daughter's piano teacher, who lives in Wright's Millard House, also known as La Miniatura. And he visits other textile-block houses Wright created in Los Angeles in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In the end, Hawthorne posits his own take on Wright's LA houses, born as much from personal concerns as architectural ones.
