What the new Julius Shulman documentary leaves out

It would be easy to think that we've heard all there is to hear -- or said all there is to say -- about Julius Shulman, at least for the time being. Dozens of obituaries, remembrances and eulogies followed the architectural photographer's death in July at age 98. And now, as if to top it all off, a documentary, "Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman," has arrived in theaters.

Directed by Eric Bricker in a fizzily honorific style, it features appearances by fashion designer Tom Ford, curator Joseph Rosa, architect Frank Gehry and actress Kelly Lynch, among many others.

And yet the movie does anything but neatly wrap up the photographer's place in history, or add a simple coda to the recent flurry of Shulmania. In fact, it suggests -- unwittingly, for the most part, and often in spite of its own straightforward, upbeat ambitions -- just how complicated and unresolved Shulman's legacy remains.

"Visual Acoustics" thoroughly and often playfully charts the progress of Shulman's career; the shades of his generally optimistic personality; his dislike, shading into hatred, for Postmodern architecture; and his late-in-life resurgence as a modernist revival began to gain momentum a decade or so ago. But it is decidedly less enthusiastic about exploring the wide, sometimes contradictory sweep of his influence, which in certain respects is a richer and more meaningful story. It steps back from confronting the ways in which the modernist architecture he championed and promoted helped push American cities -- Los Angeles in particular -- in directions the photographer himself either distrusted or actively tried to fight.

One of the directions was the result of modernism's drift, as it flourished in the United States, from the social mission that had propelled its rise in Europe in the first few decades of the 20th century. Another was its effect, in the most extreme examples bluntly destructive, on the American city, especially as Modern architecture moved from progressive underdog to dominant, default style, and from the private house to the public building.

In both those cases, Shulman's iconic images of the postwar Southern California residence -- cool, spare, transparent and communing more with nature than with any neighboring houses -- helped promote the idea that the finest architecture of the period was a vessel for personal rather than collective ambition and had little if anything to do with the messiness of cities or urban planning.

There is a moment near the end of the documentary when Columbia University's Kazys Varnelis begins to make a version of this point, noting that modernism in Southern Californa became more and more "associated with the idea of lifestyle." The idea is dropped, though, before it gains a foothold in the movie's crowded visual landscape.

But it's a third theme, not unrelated to the first two, that really ties the documentary's narrative strands into knots. It is the relationship between the single-family house and suburban sprawl, and between competing notions of private and shared nature.

Shulman lived for most of his career in a house in the Hollywood Hills he commissioned from the modernist architect Raphael Soriano, and in the early scenes of "Visual Acoustics" the photographer happily describes the remarkable buffer zone of privacy surrounding the house and its extensive garden. Pointing out that the house stands just "two miles from Hollywood Boulevard," Shulman pauses and says triumphantly, "Listen. Not a sound. Just the birds.... This is heaven!"

Having walked with Shulman through that garden, I know that his appreciation for nature -- and for a talented architect's ability to set a flat-roofed house into a hillside just so -- was genuine. Indeed, he was actively involved in the early stages of the environmental movement, arguing for measures to cut the smog that had by midcentury blanketed much of Los Angeles. In the documentary, he is shown in a television appearance -- the width of the lapels suggests it is of 1970s vintage -- facing off against a PR representative from the Irvine Corp. who is eager to defend the practice of transforming virgin land on the outskirts of Los Angeles County into new housing tracts for the middle class.

But the movie never pauses to consider a pressing, if inconvenient, point: That the very success of Shulman's most famous and reproduced photographs in romanticizing the newly built single-family house also gave a boost to sprawl, freeway construction and the pollution that attends both.

Not everybody can live on a secluded parcel of land in the Hollywood Hills. But for a long time, Shulman's potent images helped convince Southern Californians that their goal should be to live in a single-family house with a private garden somewhere -- even if it were to be built by companies like the Irvine Corp. on property a lot more than two miles from Hollywood Boulevard.

For all those reasons, the documentary operates, however indirectly, as a long proof in support of what might be called Shulman's Law of Unintended Consequences.

Shulman's best photographs undoubtedly qualify as art. But he was very much an artist for hire, and his work was in nearly every case patently promotional, as he was happy to admit. What remains out there, waiting to be tackled, is the question of what, in the broadest sense, he was promoting -- and what the runaway success of that effort has meant for architecture and for Los Angeles.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Photo: Julius Shulman in 2005, photographing a Schindler house. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Alison King, Modern Phoenix]

You're kidding me, right? To characterize this film so fresh out of the gates over the content it leaves out? What it isn't rather than what it is? As "topping"? Really.

Visual Acoustics was filmed and produced while Shulman was alive. If a viewer is suffering from Shulman burnout its because the man deserved the coverage he earned through a lifetime of service in the arts. He loved the media and the media loved him. The critical mass of interest building up to this documentary's worldwide release is frustrating in that it could not be enjoyed long enough in Shulman's lifetime.

To assume the documentary could make any neat and tidy statements about a man's complete body of work and its long-term impact is asking too much. Visual Acoustics is not a posthumous documentary filmed through the lens of hindsight, but rather one that captured enduring live footage of this artist and is gaining momentum in its own time (and not by merit of Shulman's passing, I might add, but by its own merit in form and content).

I saw the documentary while Shulman was still alive, and in full disclosure sponsored one of its screenings in Phoenix, AZ last year. I felt it was colored with an appropriate mix of respect and objectivity. Let us leave the pick-apart criticism on long-term cultural impact of the promotion of sprawl to the infinite unfulring of History that follows. Sounds more like a topic fit for a Masters thesis paper on (sub)urbanism than a full-fledged documentary on photographic arts. Honestly, it seems even more like a footnote.

[Andrews]

I thought the film was great and a Homage to Julius Shulman,Modern
Architecture and Design and the Southern California Life Style as imagined
and created for us by some of the greatest Architects of the 20th Century!

[Ints Luters]

My read of this article was the Mr. Hawthorne used this documentary as a specific example to illustrate a more general point about Julius Shulman and the romanticization of Modernism.
The seductive imagery of Shulman's work does, and I see this as Mr. Hawthorne's main point, did and continues to "flatten" Modernism into a two-dimensional style, easily understood as simply an aesthetic by the average public.
It doesn't help that, for the most part, the iconic imagery of Modernist architecture consists mostly of single-family residential, office and civic buildings.
Not that this documentary had to tackle the issue, but without the deeper exploration of Modernism and it's success or failure in addressing planning, urbanism and sprawl, it becomes a style or lifestyle, readily consumable via Dwell or Design Within Reach.

[Sam Hall Kaplan]

Hawthorne's perspective is welcome, if not needed in the wake of the wave of accolades for Uncle Julius following his demise. Julius at least when I knew and worked with him in the 80s (he was the principal photographer of my "L.A. Lost & Found") would have been the first to proudly admit he was a camera-for-hire. His winsome laugh caught in the latest documentary was genuine, but it was not always prompted for his love of life, but also often by the naivete of admirers. He was not always so full of praise for those who now praise him.

[stuart]

Clever but stupid.....This film is precious because it captures for all time the spirit of a very evolved human who created wonderful architectural images and in doing so captured the zeitgeist on an entire generation.