Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Arts / Architecture / All Films

Caribou Kayak

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Otto Apsaktaun and Gino Akka are the last Inuit elders who know the secrets of making a unique Canadian boat built for the Arctic – the Netsilingmeot caribou-hunting kayak. With features like a wide cockpit and long, narrow shape, the kayaks were designed to enhance the speed and ease of hunting caribou, since hunters have little time once caribou are spotted in the water. In the summer of 2002, the elders invited the youth of their hamlet of Kugaaruk and a couple of southerners to join them at a remote tundra camp on Barrow Lake. Using a combination of traditional and modern techniques and materials, the group work ten twelve-hour days on the kayak construction. They also hunt, cook, play music, and teach the children Inuit traditions like the art of throat singing. While completing a pair of highly-crafted, beautiful kayaks, the elders also transmit and preserve their vanishing Inuit culture.

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

Down To Earth

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Down To Earth
Buy Now: $295.00

This fascinating multidisciplinary social history investigates the contributions of New Mexico's diverse cultures to the state's unique architectural heritage. Today adobe is often associated with wealth and the "Santa Fe Style." But adobe architecture also continues to play a vital role in Native American and Hispanic cultures in New Mexico. Adobe is not just a building material. Its formal and structural elements cannot be divorced from its social, cultural, and environmental functions. Down to Earth explores the increasing pressures of tourism and development and illustrates the relationship between the environment of New Mexico and the continuity of cultural tradition.

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

Dani Films

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Dani Films
Buy Now: $500.00

Digitally Remastered 2-DVD Set

This special edition 2-disc DVD set includes:

• Dani Sweet Potatoes & Dani Houses digitally remastered

• commentary on both films by Karl Heider

• a narrated pictorial history (9 min) of Heider's career in archaeology and anthropology

In 1963, under the auspices of the EDC curriculum project Man: A Course of Study, an elementary social studies curriculum, Karl Heider returned to the central highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). Heider had spent the previous two years in the Grand Baliem Valley with Robert Gardner's Harvard-Peabody exhibition, and his intention was to return from this second trip with material to be used to teach American grade school students about digging-stick horticulture and house construction. However, after producing the Netsilik series, the EDC curriculum project fell victim to the political climate of the time. Heider spent the following years presenting Hubula (known as Dani* outside of the community) material himself, eventually producing the ethnographic classics, Dani Sweet Potatoes and Dani Houses.

About the films:

Dani Sweet Potatoes (19 min) A study of the sophisticated process of sweet potato horticulture developed by the Hubula. The film follows the Hubula sweet potato cycle from clearing off the old brush and weeds from a fallow field to planting, harvesting, cooking, and eating. At that time the Hubula had the simplest of tools - long pointed wooden poles used as digging sticks that are hardened in the fire and soaked in water - and they still used their stone-bladed adzes. (By now, most Hubula use steel shovels, axes, and bush knives and make stone adzes only for the tourist trade.)

Even though their tools are simple, their field system is intensive and sophisticated, with an intricate system of ditches. Perhaps the ditches were originally necessary to drain swampy land, but they now serves as both drainage and irrigation ditches, depending on whether rainfall is too little or too much. The ditches also hold compost. Weeds and topsoil collect there, later to be smeared back onto the garden beds. Pigs are part of the ecological system, plowing up the soil in search of food and fertilizing it with their droppings. In this film, we see people from a single neighborhood working alone in their own garden plots or, at times joining together in a cooperative work party.

Dani Houses (16 min) The film observes both round and square house construction techniques of the Hubula. It shows how the ground is cleared, walls are made from boards, poles lashed together, and roofs being thatched. Though it follows the house-building process from beginning to end, one is left asking the question: What happened after the houses were built?

*Note on term “Dani”

The preferred name for the community in these films is Hubula. The name "Dani" as used in these films is an exonym used by Moni, a neighboring group of people living west of the Baliem Valley. The name has been reproduced in many colonial and postcolonial texts, even until today.

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

François Pernet, Carpenter and Sculptor

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

François Pernet, Carpenter and Sculptor
Buy Now: $295.00

Like his grandfather and his father before him, François Pernet is a mountain peasant and works with wood. He trained as a carpenter and cabinet maker and owns the last water-powered sawmill still operating in French-speaking Switzerland. He and his wife have five children, two of their own, and three nephews adopted after the death of their parents in a car accident. So, to earn a living, he makes and carves cupboards and turns bannisters. In addition to his work, Pernet has become a sculptor as well. His bas-relief carvings, which have decorated local cafés, show various aspects of mountain life, including hunters, poachers, chamois and other animals.

Films in the Wood Crafts series

Armand Rouiller, Sledge-maker
Arnold Golay, Toy-maker

The Bapst Brothers, Carriers

Claude Lebet, Luthier

François Pernet, Carpenter and Sculptor
Joseph Doutaz & Olivier Veuve, Shingle-makers

A Little Corner of Paradise

Marcellin Babey, Turner
Michel Marlétaz, Cooper

Pink Mountain Sand

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

Fully Awake

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Fully Awake
Buy Now: $320.00

Hidden in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Black Mountain College (1933 - 1957) was an influential experiment in education that inspired and shaped twentieth century American art. Fully Awake: Black Mountain College is a documentary film that explores the college's progressive pedagogy and radical approach to arts education. Highly democratic and faculty-owned, the school promoted practical responsibilities and the creative arts as equally important components to intellectual development.

During WWII, Black Mountain College was a haven for refugee European artists such as Josef and Anni Albers who arrived from the Bauhaus in Germany. In the socially conservative 1940s and 50s, the college also became a refuge for the American avant-garde, (Franz Kline, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Robert Creeley, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and M.C. Richards). Fully Awake explores how the confluence of this diverse community came together to create a unique educational model.

Through narration, archive photography, and interviews with students, teachers, historians, and current artists, Fully Awake investigates the development of this very special place - the site of Buckminster Fuller's first geodesic dome, John Cage's first 'happening', and the Black Mountain Review - and how its collaborative curriculum inspired innovations that would change the very definition of "art." Through probing the legacy of Black Mountain College, Fully Awake points to a progressive pedagogical model that can continue to inspire students today.

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

J.B. Jackson and the American Landscape

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

J.B. Jackson and the American Landscape
Buy Now: $340.00

J.B. Jackson and The American Landscape, a comprehensive compilation DVD, highlights the pioneering work and lively personality of John Brinckerhoff (J.B.) Jackson, considered by many to be the father of landscape studies in the United States. It includes two significant documentaries:

Figure in a Landscape: A Conversation with J.B. Jackson

45 min, 1988, Produced by Claire Marino and Janet Mendelsohn

Figure in a Landscape explores the origin of Jackson's ideas and animates them with a rich visual vocabulary. Through Jackson's eyes, familiar features of the landscape, such as the front lawn, the shopping mall, and the trailer park, are brought to life. The film presents his radical ideas that inspired a generation of architects, landscape architects and historians.

J.B. Jackson and The Love of Everyday Places
58 min, 1989, Produced by Bob Calo

Filmmaker Bob Calo goes on the road with Jackson as he explores key places in the Southwest from Chaco Canyon to Denver. The style of the film is inspired by Jackson's own approach: informal, anecdotal, and accessible. It offers a look into the mind and working methods of a truly unique interpreter of American life.

BONUS FEATURES

A portfolio of Jackson's drawings, watercolors and teaching slides
Interviews with scholars and artists who discuss the impact of Jackson's ideas and his continued relevance today

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

Joseph Doutaz & Olivier Veuve, Shingle-makers

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

Joseph Doutaz & Olivier Veuve, Shingle-makers
Buy Now: $295.00

The "tavillonneur" or shingle-maker cuts out and fits shingles or wood tiles into place. Shingles (called "tavillons" in Switzerland), are one of the oldest methods of roofing or covering an outside wall. There are no longer any official apprenticeships. The film follows two shingle-makers, Joseph Doutaz and Olivier Veuve, who have very different techniques of cutting and placing their shingles. Joseph Doutaz uses only the traditional "tavillons" while Olivier Veuve works with these, as well as with "anseilles," larger and thicker wood tiles. We see both men at work in Winter and in Summer, and see some of their finished buildings.

Films in the Wood Crafts series

Armand Rouiller, Sledge-maker
Arnold Golay, Toy-maker

The Bapst Brothers, Carriers

Claude Lebet, Luthier

François Pernet, Carpenter and Sculptor
Joseph Doutaz & Olivier Veuve, Shingle-makers

A Little Corner of Paradise

Marcellin Babey, Turner
Michel Marlétaz, Cooper

Pink Mountain Sand

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

Pink Mountain Sand

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:58:00 GMT

Pink Mountain Sand
Buy Now: $295.00

Long ago, there were no roads to the chalets in the high mountain pastures. All the material for a new chalet had to be carried up by man or mule, so the peasants who built and cared for these chalets used the nearest rocks available and found a way to extract the sand needed for cement right on the spot. They used to burn clods of earth for three days until all vegetable residue was burned away and only the minerals remained as pink sand. This custom slowly disappeared at the beginning of the 21st century. However, 83-year-old Henri Chillez remembers seeing his father doing this when he was ten. Thanks to him, we were able, in 1987, to reconstruct the operation and film each step needed to change earth into pink sand.

Films in the Wood Crafts series

Armand Rouiller, Sledge-maker
Arnold Golay, Toy-maker

The Bapst Brothers, Carriers

Claude Lebet, Luthier

François Pernet, Carpenter and Sculptor
Joseph Doutaz & Olivier Veuve, Shingle-makers

A Little Corner of Paradise

Marcellin Babey, Turner
Michel Marlétaz, Cooper

Pink Mountain Sand

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

Qudad, Re-inventing a Tradition

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 08:59:00 GMT

Qudad, Re-inventing a Tradition
Buy Now: $320.00

Qudad is an ancient lime waterproofing plaster that has been used for several millennia in the Arabian Peninsula. In Yemen, where it most likely originated, it is found on religious and secular buildings and archaeological sites. Because of its elaborate and labor-intensive application (it takes a full year to set properly), this strong, resistant material has barely been in use for the past 30 years. As a consequence, very few masons know how to make and apply it.

In 1983, the Yemeni Government and the Dutch Government collaborated to preserve one of the most important and unique monuments in Yemen, a 16th Century mosque in the town of Rada' called the “'Amiriya Madrasa.” The conservation team chose to revive the practice of mixing and applying qudad since it covers most of the surface of the building. In doing so, they not only used the same techniques as originally used in the construction, but also trained a new generation of masons.

Now this tradition will not be lost, and it is hoped that the knowledge can be imparted to other countries whose monuments require qudad restoration, countries where the knowledge of the craft of qudad has died.

The film portrays the qudad work at the 'Amiriya as narrated by the workers, who are all Rada' locals. Because of this project, they are all now part of a government restoration team which will take care of decaying architecture throughout Yemen. In this film, it is clear that their meticulous care and craftsmanship are devoted to restoring the 'Amiriya not only for its significance as a unique architectural structure, but as part of their city's own history and culture.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Society for Visual Anthropology/American Anthropological Association Conference, Chicago, 2004

Middle East Studies Association, Annual Meeting, Arizona, 2004

Third International Conference on Archaeology and Conservation, Jordan, 2004

Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, 2005

Northeastern Anthropological Association Ethnographic Film & Video Festival, Lake Placid, NY, 2005

Material Culture & Archaeology Award of Commendation, 10th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, London, 2005

16th International Festival of Films on Archaeology, Italy, 2005

WorldFilm 2006, Tartu Festival of Visual Culture, Estonian National Museum, Tartu, 2006

AGON, 6th International Meeting of Archaeological Film of the Mediterranean Area, Greece, 2006

Rassegna International del Cinema Archeologico, Italy, 2006

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.

Tubali

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

Tubali
Buy Now: $320.00

The beautiful architecture of Hausa cities in Northern Nigeria is examined in this film. Local builders, architects, and a museum curator explain the development of the Hausa style and traditional methods of construction. Master craftsmen and their apprentices show how traditional architectural forms influence contemporary design. Hausa building technology, as well as the social, religious and aesthetics of Hausa architecture are also discussed.

Visit Architecture to see additional products in this category.