German director Heinz Emigholz is renowned for a series of stunningly meticulous films on the buildings of architects like Louis Sullivan, Adolf Loos, and Rudolf Schindler. With The Airstrip, he weaves architectural study into a wide-ranging examination of the “concrete culture” of WWII and Modernism’s postwar embrace of the material. Touching down in Germany, France, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and the Northern Mariana Islands, Emigholz sets structures by Viktor Sulčič, Luis Barragán and Pier Luigi Nervi alongside the concrete and steel remains of the Battle of Normandy, monuments to civilian casualties during the US’s brutal invasion of Saipan, and the airstrip of Tinian, which served as the take off point for the the planes that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Presented in collaboration with CATE.
Heinz Emigholz (b. 1948, Achim, Germany) is an artist, director, writer, and actor. He trained as a draughtsman before studying philosophy and literature at the University of Hamburg. A major figure in German independent and experimental cinema, Emigholz has produced over 90 long and short films, ranging from theatrical features to experimental documentary. Described by Variety as the "most accurate observer of architecture," Emigholz is dedicated to origins, the fate, the triumph and end of architectural Modernism. From 1993 - 2013 he served on the faculty of the Berlin University of the Arts. He has been the subject of numerous surveys and retrospectives internationally, most recently at the National Gallery in Washington D.C Centro Cultural in São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salle in Rio de Janeiro and XV International Biennial of Architecture of Buenos Aires.
His work is distributed by Pym Films and Filmgalerie 451.
The name for the other partner is Conversations at the Edge and the Department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.