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Los Angeles, April 24, 1998:
From the Getty Center to the Fountainhead
by Heinz Emigholz
Films are imaginary structures in time, useful
for taking up little space on storage systems; another advantage
is that they cannot be reduced to a common denominator in the minds
of consumers—no matter what film reviewers and PR companies
would have us believe. Sophisticated and passive, we sit before
the cinema screen as silent as the grave and try to make sense of
the world presented to us. The things that this complicated corpse
imparts to us from its very special coffin are never to be found
in any newspaper. A little spark of electricity, an “Ah-hah!”
or a “Rather not” will sometimes suffice. The consequences
are stored, and then forgotten, just as films themselves decay once
their half-lives have elapsed, or are perhaps already rendered useless
by the absence of machines that are able to read them. In any case,
films can only ruin the view briefly.
Things are a little different when it comes to
houses. Driving down Sunset Boulevard on the way to the public toilets
in the Will Rogers State Park, one encounters a strange sight at
the junction to the San Diego Freeway. Rising from the crest of
the flattened out foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains is a well-organized
complex of buildings constructed from pale-coloured tuff. It is
the new Getty Center, designed by Richard Meier & Partners.
Even from this distance, it is possible to make out many of the
details of this cluster of buildings. Armed with our entrance tickets
(duly applied for months in advance) Peter Dreher and I were soon
aboard the rack-railroad car that toiled up the side of the mountain,
on our way to lifting the veil that shrouds the secret of the site’s
perspective. Details familiar to us from Meier’s Museum für
Kunsthandwerk in Frankfurt on Main: obstructed stairways; a maze
of balustraded walkways and isolated, spotlit trees commandeered
to pose as nature—overdrawn so as to be easy to spot from
a distance—had been exaggerated here to monstrous proportions.
Meanwhile, inside the building, the artworks have been mounted forlornly
on enormous chimneystacks (one for each epoch—not the best,
but no doubt the most expensive art). While this peculiar display
of genre painting as “fireplace art” promptly sent my
companion into an acute bout of depression, I was amused. As a centre-cum-graveyard
for the collection, this solid, earthquake-proof complex that is
now impossible to divorce from one’s image of the place is
rather like a calling card for a future assignment as production
designer on a James Bond movie (although it should be noted that
the centre does not adhere to the fundamental rule that film sets
must be scaled down by 15 percent to display to perfection the bone
structure of expensive actors). Although the entire complex may
well hold more appeal as an imaginary rather than a real piece of
architecture, the fact remains that, had the architect gone for
just a little less effect in this complex, the result might at least
have been a little more visionary than the current hodgepodge of
different genres.
It is the year 1971. In the San Fernando Valley,
beyond the hills that were as yet spared from Richard Meier’s
excesses, the villa designed by Richard Neutra in 1935 for Josef
von Sternberg is being torn down. The demolition is taking place
a year after Neutra’s death, and two years after von Sternberg’s,
and marks the end of the pair’s troubled association. The
animosity between these two artists born in Vienna in the 1890s
was legendary. Certainly, the fact that they did not see eye to
eye on a number of issues had something to do with their very different
approaches to media and design. Neutra arrived in America (with
financial assistance from Rudolph Schindler) in 1923—ten years
after von Sternberg. Evidence of just how keen Neutra was to integrate
his family into life in modern America can be seen in his decision
to name his first son (born a year later) Frank Lloyd. Meanwhile,
von Sternberg was busy making a name for himself as a Hollywood
director. Once he had achieved sufficient status, he was able to
turn his attention to defining the parameters of filmmaking. Neutra
and von Sternberg appeared to be embroiled in an intellectual wrestling
match: which one of us, they seemed to be asking, is more American,
more Californian, more visionary? Theirs was a conflict between
arrogant European values, on the one hand, and robust American theories
about imagined spaces on the other.
Neutra was on the threshold of his own architectural
career when von Sternberg asked him “to carry out my ideas
of what a house should be.” Neutra was later fond of circulating
the myth that von Sternberg’s only condition was that the
cost of the house should not exceed von Sternberg’s weekly
wage as a director. When asked to comment on Sternberg’s alleged
stipulation, Neutra responded, “Don’t you think that
helps to make you interesting?” Image boosting is the unwritten
law of Hollywood. Naturally, the architect, emotional parasite that
he was, could not have been averse to making an active contribution
to his own publicity drive—au contraire!
From the air, Neutra’s house for von Sternberg
looked rather like an aircraft carrier. For this reason, it later
became a popular landmark for American Marine test pilots. Von Sternberg,
however, had another reason for moving out of the house: “It
reflected me too much,” was how he justified his flight to
the South Pacific in an attempt to escape the spirits he himself
had evoked. “Later I sold the house and grounds for what the
tennis court cost to build. Actually, I was inclined to pay someone
to take it off my hands.”
The house was bought by none other than Ayn Rand,
who can be seen romping about—at a writing desk or drinking
coffee—in Neutra’s publicity stills. This is how von
Sternberg refers to Ayn Rand and to Neutra (without mentioning her
name and thus denying her an entry in the index of his autobiography):
“It should be mentioned that in most of the books on his work,
this house, according to him, was not built for me but for its recent
owner, now well known as the author of The Fountainhead,
though at the time I built the house of steel and glass the author
thus credited was employed in the wardrobe department of a Hollywood
studio.”
Ayn Rand’s long struggle for recognition
that preceded the fulfilment of her dream of living in a modern
house is a monument to over-compensation. Appalled by the Russian
Revolution, Rand left the Soviet Union in 1925 at the age of 20;
she found work as an extra in Hollywood a year later. She began
working as a script reader and subsequently took up screenwriting
herself before moving on to novel writing. Much of her output comprised
large-scale ideological works devoted to her own philosophy of rigorous
individualism along the lines of “give me freedom or let me
die,” of which her 1943 novel The Fountainhead became
a best-seller. The novel has long been a standard work of American
literature, selling millions of copies. In spite of a controversial
stance that virtually branded her a sectarian, Rand continued to
postulate her objectivist theories of capitalism in public; she
was even interviewed by Phil Donahue during a live broadcast from
New York’s Felt Forum attended by an audience of some 5,000
people. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (the
body responsible for setting interest rates and which plays a leading
role in helping to shape American economic policies) is one of Ayn
Rand’s greatest fans.
One cannot help but wonder how Rand came to acquire such substantial
media clout. Could it have something to do with America’s
love of eccentrics? Or was it perhaps because this nation approved
of its ideological frontline work being carried out by highly motivated
immigrants (such as Gropius and Breuer et al at the Graduate School
of Design in Harvard)? In any case, the popularity of Rand’s
theories appears to fulfill the cliché of America as a country
of unlimited possibilities, a country, moreover, that feeds off
the impetus of its immigrant population, with its attendant motivation,
drive, rigour, clarity, and lack of compromise. America: a country
that manages to channel this energy for its own purpose and yet
somehow remain untouched at heart. At the end of his two-month tour
of the US in 1928, Walter Gropius pronounced: “Truly American
architecture does not yet exist.” Clearly, Gropius was the
man destined to rectify the situation. However, to my mind, the
real reason that Gropius wound up in the driver’s seat at
Harvard can only be explained by America’s own apathy towards
administration—in other words, getting talented new arrivals
to do tedious administrative work was a deliberate and rather clever
piece of manoeuvring.
Another architect that had spent time travelling
the length and breadth of North America—some time before Gropius—was
Erich Mendelsohn. However, in his 1926 book on the nation, Mendelsohn
fails to mention even one American architect. It is as if he were
incapable of detecting a single piece of individual architecture,
seeing instead nothing but an amorphous mass of construction, thrown
together, as he comments, “in grotesque confusion.”
A Hegelian on the Brooklyn Bridge, as it were, his hair standing
on end in shock. “It is quite impossible,” he continues,
“to imagine the mind that one day might be in a position to
put all of this in order.” He neglects to explain, however,
just why anything he sees should be in such urgent need of order.
The fruits of Mendelsohn’s journeying—deeply Eurocentric
outpourings in a tone full of pathos—testify to his systematic
refusal to acknowledge his sources (borne out by his inclusion of
a number of stolen, anonymous photographs and his refusal to mention
a travel stipend received from the American Dawes Foundation Program).
One has to wait until 1986 before one encounters the slightest,
revisionist attempt to atone for this oversight: here, in the publication
of a manuscript dating back to 1942, one discovers at least the
names of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Ayn Rand herself wrote the screenplay for King
Vidor’s 1949 adaptation of The Fountainhead, a thriller
set in the world of architecture, for which Gary Cooper was secured
to play the lead. The film’s subtext is the cultural controversy,
kindled by Walter Gropius in Harvard, surrounding the Neues Bauen
debate in the US (the fact that the American roots of this controversy
are only of peripheral concern to Gropius, is not only scandalous
but is worth a book in its own right). The subject of this film
is, quite simply, the construction of the world’s tallest
building. Except that, in this case, scraping the sky would be merely
foreplay—penetration is what is required and, frankly, nothing
that stops short of this will do for Ayn (whose name “rhymes
with wine,” Newsweek, December 29, 1950). From the
moment it was premiered, the film has been consistently panned as
completely off-the-wall. A review in the New York Times
dated July 9, 1949 quips: “The Fountainhead is a
film you don’t need to see to disbelieve.”
A masterpiece of experimental mainstream cinema,
the film was a commercial failure at the time and, even today, has
all but vanished from Vidor and Cooper’s filmographies. Nevertheless,
consciously or unconsciously, the film succeeds in depicting the
drawbacks of modern mythmaking: something which begins as an exercise
in democratic building ends in embittered egomania. All at once,
all that repressed psyche comes to the fore, raising its ugly head.
Two social climbers from Hell’s Kitchen and a neo-idealistic
journalist form a triumvirate of unbridled pride, sadistic power
mongering, and the virtues of l’art pour l’art. Houses
are constructed as monuments to their creator’s strange inability
to love, his buildings languishing like miserable architectural
hearts of stone. The film’s eponymous “Fountainhead”
is Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), an architect who traces the origin
of avant-gardism back to the discovery of fire. Roark is determined
to encourage and, if necessary, impose his own clear-cut approach
to design in a bid to eradicate the prevailing tendency towards
ornamentation. The dubious sexual appeal of Roark’s mission
is reflected in the title coined for the dubbed German version of
the film, Ein Mann wie Sprengstoff (or “Dynamite Man”).
At The Banner, a tabloid newspaper generating
huge profits for its publisher, Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey), a
battle for supremacy has broken out between two rival columnists.
Ellsworth M. Toohey (Robert Douglas) is an old cynic whose column
is entitled “One Small Voice”; his antagonist is Dominique
Francon (Patricia Neal), a dedicated idealist who writes a column
called “Our House.” One day, the author of “Our
House” decides to withdraw from the world of business as the
result of a prolonged campaign, mounted by the author of “One
Small Voice,” aimed at dragging the good name of art through
the mud. “One Small Voice” has been running a feature
on a corrupt young architect; the columnist is clearly revelling
in the spectacle of this young man supping with the Devil. In the
meantime, another architect—Howard Roark—is busy making
a name for himself by creating absurd parodies and, worse still,
dangerously insecure variations of buildings designed by Louis Sullivan,
Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn. The aforementioned architects
represent artistic positions which, as far as the film is concerned,
are supposed to merge in the shape of Roark’s character. At
this point, the film’s criticism of the purely illustrative
(which, otherwise, is not easily dismissed) takes on idiotic proportions.
The real Frank Lloyd Wright withdrew from the project after the
producers refused to pay his $1 million fee for permission to use
his original designs created for the film. Wright’s retraction
notwithstanding, the filmmakers were determined to somehow retain
his presence in the film, at least in spirit. But their decision
to use ridiculous reproductions rob Wright’s ideas of their
realistic substance and end up peddling his reverential approach
to architecture as something cheap and nasty. And so the pillars
of the film’s own line of argument come crashing down before
our very eyes.
Gary Cooper (who von Sternberg once described as
“one of the nicest human beings I have ever met”) is
spectacularly miscast as the ambitiously idealistic architect Howard
Roark. In fact, Cooper is miscast to such a degree that this is
reason enough to see The Fountainhead. Even for the relatively short
duration of a feature-length film, Cooper—the quintessential
quiet American—could never sustain the role of a loquacious
Bauhaus proponent. As he was familiar with the matrix of modernism
that later manifested itself in a grand Mafiosi-style silence on
the subject of earlier American architects (but was also evident
in the astonishing ignorance of architectural precursors that prevailed
among Bauhaus proponents), Cooper decided to do things his own way.
His interpretation of the role of insolent European theoretician
is, basically, a piece of Brechtian Verfremdungstheater, lending
the part a strangely inverted kick-start.
As a young student, Cooper attended an agricultural
college in Grinnell, Iowa, where he would have passed an early example
of modern American architecture on a daily basis: Louis H. Sullivan’s
Merchants’ National Bank. Built in 1914, Sullivan’s
bank was a brick cube with an ornamental keyhole motif in the building’s
front wall. It was, in effect, an over-dimensional model of a Kodak
box camera. There’s even a brief reverential nod to Sullivan
at the beginning of The Fountainhead: as he lies dying
in a Red Cross ambulance racing across the city of Chicago, he (Sullivan)
quotes his famous dictum Form Follows Function," and prophesies
a season in hell for the young man seated beside him (his artistic
offspring) should he persist in his uncompromising course of action.
Sullivan had already distanced himself from his misunderstood functionalism
20 years previously and certainly long before Gropius, Breuer &
Co. hijacked the phrase “form follows function,” divorced
it from its original context, and turned it into their own money-spinning
credo. This oft-quoted slogan first appeared in print in Sullivan’s
1896 essay, The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered:
“Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open
apple-blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching
oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all
the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law...It
is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all
things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things
superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart,
of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that
form ever follows function.”
Sullivan’s substantiation of his formula—i.e.,
that life is always recognizable and legible in all its physical
manifestations and forms—makes it clear that he was talking
about life’s variety as well as the innovation and experiment
expressed in the form of all things organic and inorganic. Moreover,
his wording intimates that the presence of these forms originates
from a secret we cannot possibly foresee or copy. The way in which
Gropius and his gang chose to interpret this formula can only be
described as vulgar in comparison. “Purity of form”
is the hoariest chestnut of modernist theory, a catch-22, even.
To claim that beauty is the same as function or that function equals
beauty is nothing but a gross misconception. It is not the reduction
of form to the mere illustration of function that lies at the heart
of Sullivan’s philosophy, rather the equality and the merging
of both elements—the mutual recognition of a double code.
In the wake of his PR efforts for Harvard Graduate
Center, Gropius had always been a master of bold conceptual distortions.
His tendency towards misrepresentation commences with the belief,
espoused during courses at Harvard, that the camera—a technical
apparatus—was entirely commensurate with the human eye. Thus,
at the very outset, Gropius was determined to elide a physical fact
with the intellectual consequences of the act of seeing and perceiving,
in order to give credence to his own extremely reductive functionalism.
Incidentally, it is interesting to note that, in order to illustrate
his own textbooks, Gropius was fond of using drawings that had appeared
in books on popular science from the 20s, such as Dr. Fritz Kahn’s
mass-selling encyclopaedia, Das Leben des Menschen, in
which the organs of the human body were presented as masterful feats
of engineering. Gropius had no qualms about using these illustrations
just as they appeared in their original form, and certainly never
gave a thought to naming any of his sources.
King Vidor’s 1947 film Duel in the Sun
was a huge commercial success; this gave the director carte blanche
to take on as his next project a far more intractable subject. Vidor
savoured this authority to the full—even adding a generous
portion of sadism to all that was considered de rigeur in terms
of culture. Consequently, in his new work, Vidor allowed every single
subtext to boil over, unchecked and unhindered, taking great delight
in the resulting porridge of half-baked thoughts redolent of the
ideals of clarity postulated by modernist thought. Vidor’s
inherent contempt for the tirelessly self-consistent practices of
the modernists was a precursor of the extensive flak the movement
was to receive later on; but it could also be seen as a response
to the post-war necessity for inexpensive housing. It certainly
sets the pace for much of what postmodern theorists later had to
say about modernist architecture. The film portrays a neurotic coterie
of avant-gardists whose rigid logic of causality forces them to
drop bombs, but who then, in a bizarre German cocktail of ambition
and supercilious idealism, find themselves having to sell as sex
symbols the barracks that have been erected on the bomb sites.
The Fountainhead is a film that seems
to get nothing right. An analyst would probably say it lacked supervision.
But this is precisely why it deserves to be admired. Thanks to Vidor’s
practical intelligence and the way in which the film fails to work,
the flawed logic of the ideas that run riot throughout the plot
are served up to us in an act of strangely indifferent satisfaction.
The film becomes a dispassionate mirror for the modernist world,
sinking in a quagmire of intellectual passions—a world, moreover,
devoid of a system of references.
Many of the efforts brought to bear by Vidor’s
crew ran counter to the director’s own epistemological interests.
Max Steiner poured a viscous and utterly inappropriate, seamless
mélange of interpretative film music over the soundtrack.
The film marked Robert Burks’ (who later became Alfred Hitchcock’s
master cinematographer) second outing as chief cinematographer and
presented him with a veritable playground in which to flesh out
his own style. One can be sure that Vidor, who supported the development
of cinematography as an art form in all his work, would have given
Burks free rein to visualize the story as he wished. For his own
part, Vidor the professional storyteller and master of experimentation
of all things probable and improbable, used this film to try his
hand at the new role of Vidor the sadist. The aporia of the avant-garde,
translated into wincing, strained one-to-one dialogues, yield only
laughter. Like the speech bubbles emanating from houses in comic
strips, or distant relatives in soaps, everyone pronounces—directly
and at times hysterically—who they are and what they think.
The problem is, there doesn’t appear to be anybody to acknowledge
any of these announcements.
At the end of the film, Howard Roark stands on
the edge of his monstrous tower, his trouser legs flapping like
a parachute in the wind, his face about to buckle from his efforts
at self-control, and watches as his wife glides towards him in the
elevator on the outside of the building. Dominique, who, after all
manner of detours (including a phase of sadomasochism and a failed
marriage of convenience) has finally managed to secure the title
Mrs. Roark, throws back her head of hair in a gesture of mock enthusiasm
as the tip of the Empire State Building disappears beneath her in
the city smog. Size does matter when it comes to idealism, and the
biggest is definitely the best. The Fountainhead remains
a definitive modern melodrama, served up as a cold and merciless
piece of intellectual kitsch.
Translated by Lindsey Merrison.
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