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Thom Andersen

Reconversao

Documentaire | hdv | couleur | 67:0 | USA, Portugal | 2012

?Reconversão? portrays 17 buildings and projects by Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto Moura, accompanied usually by his own writings. It is a search for his architecture, without critical commentary. Only the tour guide at Braga Stadium offers generalizations, which fit that work well enough, but it may be the exception, not the rule. Souto Moura has the last word: ?If there is nothing there, I invent a preexistence.? Technically, ?Reconversão? combines the crudeness of proto-cinema with the hyperrealism of digital cinema, bringing us back to the ideals of Dziga Vertov. Shooting only one or two frames per second and animating the images, in the manner of Muybridge, produces greater resolution, although not necessarily a greater sense of reality, and brings attention to the movements of water and vegetation that generally pass unnoticed.

Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. In 1974 he completed ?Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer?, an hour-long documentation of Muybridge?s photographic work. In 1995, with Noel Burch, he completed ?Red Hollywood?, a videotape about the filmwork created by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. In 2003 he complested ?Los Angeles Plays Itself?, a video essay about the representation of Los Angeles in movies. In 2010, he also directed ?Get Out of the Car?, about the visual archeology of the city. He has taught film composition at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.