Father figures
To Be and to Have and My Architect: two dads and two docs.

By Chuck Stephens

A BUILDING, a landscape, and a man who moves through children's lives in mysterious and evanescent ways – as evanescent as the ways light will hit that building, that landscape, and those moments shared and surrendered between one generation, brightening and becoming, and the one before it, already fading. That two of the finest examples of what induced many critics to proclaim 2003 "The Year of the Doc" – To Be and to Have and My Architect, opening one after the other at the Castro Theatre over the next two weeks – are films of the shared affinities described above is but the first of many things that distinguish these remarkable nonfiction achievements. Yes, in both of them, fathers figure and are figured, but in every other regard, veteran French documentarian Nicolas Philibert's To Be and to Have, about a year in the life of a "single-class school" in the French countryside, and newcomer Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect, a troubled portrait of the filmmaker's father, Louis Kahn, one of the 20th century's architectural giants, are worlds apart.

Philibert's To Be and to Have, a huge commercial success in France (some 300,000 tickets were sold in its first two weeks of release), unfolds in a series of scenes and scene fragments organized around the lessons given by a single teacher, the soft-spoken, superpatient, and soon-to-retire Georges Lopez, to a single roomful of children ranging in age from 3 to 11. What we witness are children coloring, doing sums, flipping crepes, and generally struggling with learning, their faces passing all the while under cloud covers of emotion ranging through confusion, delight, fear, bewilderment, anger, and sorrow. Beyond the schoolhouse walls, the seasons progress across the sun-blessed hillocks and valleys of Auvergne as the daily labor of the local populace remains the same: farming, driving cattle, shoveling shit. Eventually the minor miracles of waking up, paying attention, and trying to remember which number comes after six begin to seem but another facet of that labor, and To Be and to Have comes to seem another facet of the spate of recent French fiction films centered on work – though interestingly, Philibert cut his teeth making movies about mountain climbers.

Those wanting to see To Be and to Have as a strictly bright or nostalgic vision of education may be interested to learn that the film's instructor, Lopez, has gone on to media celebrity in France subsequent to the film's success. He's appeared on TV and in magazine interviews with some regularity, and it's easy to see his appeal, both to Philibert as a filmmaker and to the media maw in general: his even-tempered demeanor and unassuming appearance, somewhat along the lines of a long and lean Fernando Rey, are fantastically seductive. Yet it's that very seductiveness that proves one of the darker undercurrents of the film. It isn't difficult to imagine Lopez (who has twice sued Philibert for further financial compensation in the wake of the film's success) as the suave but inwardly seething center of something like The Discreet Charm of the Blackboard-oisie, just as the film's pervasively placid tone makes it seem perverse not to imagine that some of the pint-size pupils will soon blossom into the dead-end dropouts and no-hope moto-misfits of Bruno Dumont's La vie de Jésus.

Told from the vantage of a son who barely got to know his famous father before his death, bankrupt and unidentified in a men's room at New York City's Penn Station, My Architect is a kind of exploded view of a family melodrama. Nathaniel Kahn, we learn, was Louis's third child, the son of the mysterious architect's second mistress, and officially unacknowledged by Louis's wife at his father's funeral. But what comes into focus over the course of the film isn't just the elder Kahn's unconventional sense of domestic relations but also his equally self-centered devotion to the aesthetic ideals of his work (at the expense of commissions and wealth). And what work it is! After a trip to Rome in the '50s, he began to fundamentally reimagine modern architecture with all the open-air monumentality of ancient ruins – whether he was designing a modest public bathhouse in Trenton, N.J., or the magisterial National Capitol of Bangladesh; in filmmaking terms, his mature sense of structure and space is reminiscent of the way Antonioni internalized de Chirico's eternally vanishing perspectives when he designed L'Avventura.

Nathaniel's filmmaking doesn't begin to pretend to equal the mastery of Louis's architecture, and indeed there are some fabulously irritating aspects to My Architect. The worst of these may be the use of one of Neil Young's most syrupy songs, "Long May You Run," during a sequence in which the filmmaker rollerblades around the empty courtyard of the Salk Institute in La Jolla – the bifurcated, ruddy-walled sanctum his father designed to sluice the eye out through a monumental corridor into the unobstructed Pacific Ocean. But as irritating as the music and gesture initially seem, they're both clearly valuable instances of (post-)adolescent acting-out – the filmic equivalent of Kahn the kid playing his stereo too loud or tagging one of Dad's buildings with some spray-paint profanity, both wanting and rejecting his father's attention. And there's no denying the respect and maturity Kahn the younger displays in the way he photographs his father's buildings: he really gets what it means to stand at some crucial vantage point in one of those astonishing creations, watching light murmur through those mysterious angles and cut-ins. Kahn the elder used to carve corners into corners, and those giant polka-dot portholes – in some ways very much like My Architect's journey of self- and family exploration – don't so much let light into a room as push the innards of a wall out into the light.

'To Be and to Have' runs Feb. 30-Feb. 4, and 'My Architect' runs Feb. 6-Feb. 11, Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F. $5-$8.50. (415) 621-6120. See Rep Clock, in film listings, for show times.