Dan Slevin has tasted this year’s cinematic celebration of the curated world around us.
Audrey Hepburn at a New York automat. Photo: Slice of Pie
The Architecture & Design Film Festival – now inextricably I hope linked with its sponsor Resene – used to be pretty niche. I’ve always been fond of it, though, and have previewed earlier events here (2019) and here (2018).
The new edition, curated by the mysterious agency Art Department, features 17 titles and – it seems to me – broadens the kaupapa of the festival into something that mainstream audiences should definitely seek out. Two out of the three films I picked at (almost) random) for preview are going to be genuine crowd-pleasers and one might be my favourite documentary of the last 12 months.
We’ll start with that one: The Automat is a loving portrait of a lost culture, not just a lost culture of food but of service, of loyalty, and of business. I’d heard most of this story before on the podcast 99% Invisible, but being able to see it – the archive material is beautiful – really makes all the difference.
Philadelphia restaurateurs Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart opened their first outlet in 1888 serving a distinctive New Orleans-style coffee that was soon the talk of the town. In search of more innovations, they came across the German “Automat” concept, using vending machines to serve customers pre-prepared food and beverages and they could see how this would appeal to a modern clientele that desired fast, convenient, affordable and dependably high-quality food.
Why is this story in a design film festival? Because the Horn and Hardart restaurants were often beautiful – art nouveau in the early years, art deco during their heyday – and also because the engineering of their systems was impeccable. Children visiting Horn & Hardart automats would often be told that there was a magician behind those brass and chrome cubby-holes and they easily believed it.
The reason I fell so hard for this film is not so much about nostalgia for an eating system, but the whole culture of the company that seems to have been lost: there was no discrimination or segregation, the poor could eat (or just sit) beside the rich, the only currency required was the nickel. Staff were treated like family and returned the favour. The only real sour spot in the film is where union-busting oligarch Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks) talks about how the automat is still his inspiration while at the same time missing the point of them entirely.
Other interviewees tell a better story but sadly many of them have already passed away: former US secretary of state Colin Powell talks about going to Horn & Hardart as a poor Brooklyn kid and how seeing the diversity in the restaurant inspired his efforts to integrate the US Army in later life, Ruth Bader Ginsburg remembers how welcoming the restaurants were as a young working woman wanting to avoid unwanted attention and comedian and director Carl Reiner bickers with his great friend Mel Brooks over which dish was the best value.
Brooks (still with us, thankfully, at 95) is the MVP throughout – he offers so much advice to director Lisa Hurwitz he might as well be directing the film himself.
Photo: The Guardian
I got to preview Emily Richardson’s House Works (which screens alongside another of her films Memo Mori). House Works is a compilation of three short films about British modernist domestic homes but – like all good films about architecture – they are also about much more. All three are meditations rather than narratives, with information (such as it is) supplied by inter titles rather than voice over. Let them wash over you and don’t expect your questions to be answered. I went to Wikipedia after I’d finished to fill in the gaps.
It's always fun to argue about when the '60s actually began and ended ('Love Me Do' and 'Abbey Road' are convenient bookends for me) but Sadie Frost’s documentary Quant makes a compelling case that the 60s actually began in 1955 when the designer Mary Quant opened her first boutique (Bazaar) on the Kings Road.
Mary Quant Photo: RAADFF
Frost’s film, Quant, tells (and shows) us that Quant’s liberating women’s fashion led and followed and then led again the seismic shifts that were occurring in British post-war society. The generation that had fought the war had no energy left to constrain the next generation who for a decade or so remade Britain in their image, creating Swinging London in the process.
Luckily for us, and for Frost, movie cameras and television programmes were plentiful so there’s a great deal of quality archive material to show how Quant worked and thought, as well as how those young customers took on her ideas. That quality and quantity of archive material leads to my only disappointment with the film – the casting of Camilla Rutherford to play a not-entirely convincing recreation of Quant in some segments.
Otherwise, the film is a treat – a portrait of an era as well as a singular designer, also a portrait of a wonderful relationship – behind every great woman is a great man, you might say. Her husband Alexander Plunket Green seems like someone you would have liked to have around.
The film concludes with some shots of a recent exhibition of her many famous garments at the Victoria and Albert Museum and I, for one, would queue up to see that exhibition if it were ever to come to Te Papa.
Unlike many current festivals that day-and-date across New Zealand, this one is “traveling”. The Architecture & Design Film Festival opens in Auckland today (until 25 May), Wellington on 19 May (to 5 June), and then Dunedin (2-15 June), Christchurch (9-26 June) and Havelock North (9-22 June).
