Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9780780621763 Format: Box set, Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC ISBN: 078062176X Label: Turner Home Entertainment Co Manufacturer: Turner Home Entertainment Co Number Of Items: 2 Publisher: Turner Home Entertainment Co Release Date: November 10, 1998 Running Time: 146 minutes Sales Rank: 15460 Studio: Turner Home Entertainment Co Theatrical Release Date: 1998
Description: Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest of all American architects. He was an authentic American genius, a man who believed he was destined to redesign the world, creating everything anew. Over the course of his long career, Wright designed over eight hundred buildings, including such revolutionary structures as the Guggenheim Museum, the Johnson Wax Building, Fallingwater, Unity Temple and Taliesin. Wright's buildings and his ideas changed the way we live, work and see the world around us. Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural achievements were often overshadowed by the turbulence of his melodramatic life. In ninety-two years, he fathered seven children, married three time, and was almost constantly embroiled in scandal. Some hated him, some loved him, but in the end, few could deny that he was the most important architect in America - and perhaps the world. With exquisite live cinematography, fascinating interviews, and rare archival footage, this riveting film brings Wright's unforgettable story to life.
Amazon.com: The beauty of Frank Lloyd Wright is that aside from telling a long and often melodramatic story lucidly, it deals with issues of art and architecture in ways that are approachable but not simplistic. (It's also surprisingly scandalous, although this is seen as part of his art.) Wright was first and foremost a rebel who took his cues from nature, though, as one commentator points out, this is not to say his approach was natural. What he was rebelling against was the clutter and claustrophobia of Victorian architecture. The rooms he designed opened up on each other, and his exteriors seemed to grow laterally out of the landscape. All of these ideas are neatly illustrated--although it perhaps could have been explained how Wright's later, whimsical designs related to his earlier, earthbound ones--with some marvelous footage of a Wright lily pad column supporting a load of sandbags and quiet Steadicam shots of Wright interiors that give the viewer a feeling for his sense of light and harmony. The filmmakers have wisely kept the technical talk to a minimum, but they are also not afraid to step back and let the experts ruminate on the nature of his genius, even when these experts are at a loss for words. Burns has made stars of some of his commentators in previous films, and in this one the late critic Brendan Gill shines. Wright himself comes across as a man who never doubted himself, a lousy father, and self-consciously Byronic. His vitality and larger-than-life persona seemed to belong to the 19th century, making him--and this is perhaps a mixed blessing--the last of his kind. --John Clark
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Average Rating:
Rating: - Good but there are much better Burns works out there
I don't know if it is because it wasn't just Ken Burns or what but it wasn't A+ like his most of his other works. It left out some details that seemed needed for the story. I own most all of Ken Burns work but this is one I just rented and didn't buy.
Rating: - THE "LIFE" OF A GREAT ARCHITECT IS THE MORTAR THAT HIS DESIGNS SPRANG FROM!
IN A NUTSHELL:
Any way one looks at, this was a very well done documentary. Yes, it did stress his life and misdeeds. Apparently, his deeds and misdeeds were the mortar that his designs sprang from.
WHAT IT IS:
Essentially, through this chronological biography of a sort, we see the development of the man being mirrored by the development of his ideas of how to make interior space for living, worshipping, and working more civilized and, in many ways, more functional and ergonomic.
Yes, of course, there were failures, but so many of his designs were experiments, and experiments are prototypes, and protoypes are invariably flawed. Just look at the auto industry! Though he was a self-promoter, he did not stoop to assembly line construction. Even his modest designs were filled with civilized and novel ideas that actually brought about the advent of the ranch house. ... Read More
Rating: - A superb if not all inclusive documentary
In watching this marvelous documentary on the life and career of Frank Lloyd Wright I was reminded of an equally unpleasant creative artist. After Robert Frost spent several days of abusing and attempting to humiliate the poet Archibald McLeish, the historian Bernard DeVoto told him, "Robert, you are a great poet, but a bad man." Contrary to one myth, not all geniuses are jerks. Marcel Proust was exceedingly quirky, but by every account he was a generous and caring friend. Albert Einstein was by accounts a remarkably nice person, Vladimir Nabokov, though a brute in reviews (known as Vlad the Impaler), was in ordinary life a kind and goodhearted soul, while William Carlos Williams was not only a great modern poet, but a thoroughly decent human being. But there are enough people like Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso, Beethoven, and James Joyce to keep alive the myth of Genius as Jerk. Wright certainly did his share ... Read More
Rating: - Ya Gotta Like Ken Burns
The reviewers below are right about this DVD: if you want to see Wright's work, you'd be better off looking elsewhere.
Burns is obviously fascinated by the person. We learn so much about a self-promoting genius who succeeded in such a uniquely American way. Perhaps his most fascinating characteristic is Wright's apparent complete absence of self doubt, carried to such an extreme as to allow him to reinvent himself over, and over, and over again.
Wright was a hornswoggler in the best American tradition. Had a few of his works not attained memorable standing in 20th century architecture, he'd be long forgotten. If the era in which he built were more like our own present, he'd be broke from lawsuits and uninsurable for malpractice.
We live in a more careful, more thoughtful era now. And there are good things about that. But Wright takes his personal place in history now, and ... Read More
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- Good but there are much better Burns works out there
- THE "LIFE" OF A GREAT ARCHITECT IS THE MORTAR THAT HIS DESIGNS SPRANG FROM!
