FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Featured Speakers at Hollyhock House
Thomas Hines
The Other Hollywood--Modern Architecture and the Los Angeles Film Community
Wednesday, September 3rd at 7:30 p.m.
Thom Andersen
Hollywood's Anti-Modernism: An Update and Reconsideration
Wednesday, October 1st at 7:30 p.m.
Both talks held in the Barnsdall Gallery Theater.
Free admission
The Cultural Affairs Department, Museum Education and Tours Program for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House is pleased to announce Featured Speakers at Hollyhock House. What plans to be a periodic series of lectures, discussions and presentations will cover topics relating to Los Angeles, its urban and architectural history, as well as architecture’s relation to the arts and to old and new media. The talks will take place in historic Barnsdall Park site of Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Southern California commission, Hollyhock House. Bringing talks like these to this historic setting both highlights and reveals the dynamic relationship of architecture to the arts and to the history and development of the City of Los Angeles.
The program begins with two talks which will focus on Hollywood movies and architecture in Los Angeles. The first talk features Thomas Hines and will take place on Wednesday, September 3, 2007 at 7:30pm. The distinguished professor of architecture history at UCLA will present his lecture The Other Hollywood--Modern Architecture and the Los Angeles Film Community. The lecture takes place in the Barnsdall Gallery Theater, with a reception in Hollyhock House to follow. The next event will be a presentation by Thom Andersen and will take place on October 1, 2008 at 7:30pm with a reception to follow.
Thomas S. Hines is professor of history and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of numerous essays, articles and reviews, as well as several book-length studies including monographs on architects Richard Neutra and Irving Gill that have become essential reading on their topic. He has contributed chapters to other books and been published in Architectural Record, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and the New York Times, among others. He has received many grants and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Getty. In 1994 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In The Other Hollywood, Professor Hines shows that the prevailing taste in Hollywood, despite popular myth, was not all kitsch and glitz. Certain actors, writers, directors, and producers were sophisticated connoisseurs of the most advanced modern art and architecture. Actor Ramon Navarro's house--designed by Lloyd Wright, the son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright--and director Josef Von Sternberg's house, designed by Richard Neutra, were authentic works of art, not merely popular imitations of older styles. On September 3rd at 7:30 p.m. Thomas Hines will explore the two dominant branches of architectural modernism: rationalism, and expressionism in the works of Richard Neutra and Lloyd Wright.
The following month, on Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 7:30pm, documentary film maker Thom Andersen will give a presentation about architecture and movies. Thom Andersen has taught film history and filmmaking at SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University. His films include Melting, Olivia's Place and Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer. His work with Noel Burch on the history of the Hollywood blacklist and the filmic writing of its victims has produced the book Les Communists de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs (1994) and the videotape Red Hollywood (1995). Most recently he wrote and directed the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). Winner of the Los Angeles Film Critic Association’s Independent/Experimental Film and Video Award, the documentary is an extended exploration of the official and unofficial history of the City as it has been portrayed by film.
Thom Andersen’s presentation will take up where Los Angeles Plays Itself left off. By focusing on the role of Modernist design in Hollywood movies, Thom Andersen, narrating a range of examples from movies, will explore the changing attitudes toward Modernism especially evident in the last several years.
These talks are produced and supported by the Museum Education and Tours Program of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs with additional assistance provided by the Friends of Hollyhock House.
Hollyhock House, Barnsdall Gallery Theater
Barnsdall Park
4800 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90027
323.644.6269
E-mail, hollyhock-house@sbcglobal.net
