Structure (experimental film series)

November 2019

Structure is a limited edition print publication, analog photography collection and film series about spatial relationships and how our built environment defines and influences cultural development and, ultimately, self-awareness. With a heavy focus on urban planning, this project looks at how the purposeful design of built structures gives our lives a sense of “place,” and how we occupy buildings as intimately and as exploratively as we occupy our own bodies. Sixteen films were produced in three months by the collaborative efforts of sixty artists. The films were then released as part of a month-long multimedia exhibition with The Neutra Institute Museum in Los Angeles, California. Below are a few of my favorites.

Credits

Farida Amar, Director & Executive Producer
Milana Burdette, Producer
Andru Perez, Producer

The Salk Institute of Biological Studies (Super8)

If you are a concrete square, but deep down you’ve always known you’re really a circle, you may actually just be a Louis Kahn building. 

Tall thin rectangles with long diagonal shadows, overlapping flat lines falling into the abyss of gaping hollow hexagons, circle windows, triangle windows, shattered light crashing down on what could have been a floor but is somehow instead just another ceiling. Louis Kahn’s work is confident. Aggressively slicing into landscapes and sight lines; Kahn is entirely unapologetic about his use of raw materials and sharp geometries. Using natural light of the sun and moon to tear open boundaries where you’d expect them to throw their weight and providing a gift of unexpected, mind-bending accessibility from heavy solids such as concrete and brick.

Credits

Milana Burdette, Director & Producer
Krystall Schott, Performance
Maya Angel Allen, Performance
Nana Yaa Asare Boadu, Performance
Olive Kimoto, Performance
Roberta Haze, Performance
Farida Amar, Executive Producer
Ken Whiting, Gaffer
Andru Perez, Stylist

Rockhaven Sanitarium (Super8)

Created by Agnes Mary Richards in 1932, Rockhaven Sanitarium was the first of its kind—intended to support the female “insane” and mentally afflicted in a cloistered, homelike environment. With private rooms and private routines, Agnes’ early vision of healthcare for women was a forerunner to a more modern, thoughtful, idea of mental health. Nuanced. 

Rockhaven Sanitarium was founded in the city with the ‘finest air’ in California. It had secluded grounds, was run by women, and had a full-time, female-only, caregiving staff. Here, ‘mentally unstable’ women were sheltered, treated, and on occasion, healed.

Credits

Jon Pham, Director
Mia Maselli, Performance
Niko Sonnberger, Performance
Sarah London, Performance
Blake Myers, Camera Operator
Farida Amar, Executive Producer
Milana Burdette, Producer & Editor
Andru Perez, Stylist

Mt. Wilson Observatory (16mm)

The list of scientific breakthroughs made at the Mount Wilson Observatory are seemingly endless. The most widely lauded include the discovery of magnetic fields in sunspots (giving rise to the advent of helioseismology), Harlow Shapley’s quantification of the Milky Way Galaxy, and Edwin Hubble’s identification of spiral galaxies and the expanding nature of our universe. It is no overstatement when [Tim] Thompson writes, ‘Here at Mount Wilson we discovered the sun, the stars, the Galaxy, and the whole wide universe beyond, in a very real sense.’

Everywhere you look, precision rules. The white steel domes that crown Mount Wilson, resembling a space-age holy land, are in themselves a triumph of design. Commissioned by D.H. Burnham & Company in Chicago, the 100-inch building was ‘a drum-like-sub-structure capped by a massive, rotating half spherical steel dome,’ visually echoing ancient observatories and religious temples...Inside this immensely powerful structure, one can’t help but feel reverential.

Credits

John Calabrese, Director
Artemis, Performance
Phoenix Lee, Performance
Stirling Gill, Performance
Farida Amar, Executive Producer
Milana Burdette, Producer
Andru Perez, Stylist

Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex (16mm)

Neighboring a mining ghost-town in the arid Mojave Desert, the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex is one of only three complexes in the world established to communicate with spacecraft. Here, satellite dishes reach to the far edges of our solar system, over 11 billion miles away. In fact, visitors to Goldstone may think they have left Earth entirely–the stark contrast of giant white antennae and desolate rain-shadow desert creates a martian landscape, reminding us we are little creatures inhabiting a giant rock moving through space.

Conceived in 1958, Goldstone began its operations for NASA by tracking the Pioneer probes to the Moon. Now deactivated, the Pioneer Station was a key component in California’s contribution to the Space Race and became the prototype antenna for the Deep Space Network. For over half a century, GDSCC has been a vital communication source for NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The 53-square-mile complex houses five working antennas that not only support interstellar missions, but provide scientists with a wealth of data concerning planets, asteroids, and comets.

Credits

Bradley Wilder, Director & Composer
Ashley Robicheaux, Performance
Kyla Carter, Performance
Lorrin Brubaker, Performance
Nana Yaa Asare Boadu, Performance
Daron Bell, Choreographer
Farida Amar, Executive Producer
Milana Burdette, Producer
Andru Perez, Stylist

Lincoln Heights Jail (Super8)

Walk down 19th Avenue, along the Los Angeles River, and the Lincoln Heights Jail looms. Built in 1927 during the peak of the Art Deco movement in Los Angeles, the city was filled with sweeping visions of modernism and progress. But ultra-modern exteriors like that of the Lincoln Heights Jail hid less-than-progressive ideas.

Designed to hold a maximum of 625 occupants, this jail held up to 2,800 prisoners at the height of use—and was famous for overcrowding … As with many people on the periphery of mainstream society, the stories of people who pass through the Lincoln Heights Jail tend not to be well-documented. The rich history, social hierarchy, and cultural dynamics that thrived inside its walls are mainly held in the memories of its inhabitants rather than in history books or official documents.

Credits

Ken Whiting, Director
Anya Johnson, Performance
Peter Kalisch, Performance
Farida Amar, Executive Producer
Milana Burdette, Producer
Andru Perez, Stylist

Devil's Gate (16mm)

Devil’s Gate Dam lies under the Pasadena 210 Freeway, surrounded by scraggy brush and several tons of loamy sediment. Once a natural dam, the rocky terrain held back a lake fed by San Gabriel Mountain streams. When the granite eventually gave way, a narrow passage was created, the floodwaters cutting a peculiar design into the rockface. 

Although marked ‘No Trespassing,’ the dam and surrounding scrabble is accessible by a variety of entrances. The infrastructure is massive and elegant. Beauxs-Arts arches crown the sluice gates, their smooth siding reinforced by concrete buttresses. The namesake rock formation and gated tunnel are at a slight remove. The echo chamber effect of the tunnel plays tricks on your senses, making sound and forward motion almost indistinguishable from silence and stillness.