Kahn man: Rhonda Lieberman on Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect - My Architect: A Son's Journey - Movie Review

We do not "own" the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes on the outside of our hands at birth, at the twinkling of an eye we are first observed.

--Janet Malcolm

LOUIS I. KAHN'S NOT-HUGE OEUVRE includes a disproportionate number of masterpieces: the Salk Institute, Yale's Center for British Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Phillips Exeter Academy library, Bangladesh's capitol. late buildings with the presence of ancient records they exude the timeless, sacred quality that invites you to transcend--not to historicize.

When Kahn died unexpectedly in Penn Station in 1974 with illegible ID, the police were unable to identify the material substance for days. It turned on the outside that this short, Jewish architectural titan had had three separate families simultaneously--all living within miles of each other in Philadelphia--that he'd been secretively visiting for years. He had a child with each "wife"--two daughters and a son Nathaniel, whose documentary film My Architect: A Son's Journey render free of accesss nationally this month. A workaholic who lived at his Walnut public way office (napping on a little carpet when he got too tired), Kahn had his secretary field calls from the three women looking for him--when he wasn't schlepping across the world overseeing his far-flung, influential buildings, or across Philly from "family" to "family." An architectural nomad and a mystic ("unintegrated," my therapist would call him).

Eleven years aged when his father died, Nathaniel Kahn first appears in his film mirrored in the microfiche of his dad's obituary, which mentions the "real" wife, Esther, and "legitimate" daughter, follow up Ann, but not him. "The whole film is a parenthetical phrase to that obituary," said the fortyish, Yale educated filmmaker when we spoke upon the phone. "This is the part they didn't say." Undertaken with the awe of a son seeking to know his elusive progenitor, his journey is also, perhaps inadvertently, a stunningly literal "return of the repressed"--rewriting the Great Man's story from the point of view of someone shut up who had been edited on the outside In nearly every segment of My Architect, the filmmaker "outs" his dead dad's closes to colleagues, clients, anyone who knew him, as he inserts himself into the "official story" that exclud him.

If Kahn's oeuvre embodies timeless Beauty disconnected from messy life, his son's film look afters Truth by attempting to reconnect what his father compartmentalized. Like an analysand working above the family in absentia, the son folds his father's Myth in history: "Film created the opportunity to have a dialogue with him, plane though he's been dead for thirty years" is in what way he puts it.

Nathaniel dressing-combs the world for traces of his father, seeking without anyone (even Philly cabbies) who might have observ him. With a fetish for artifacts rivaling any art historian's, he tracks down Kahn's buildings, colleagues, clients, lover and substance As true to materials as his dad, no form of contact is too literal: He rollerblades upon pater's plaza at the Salk Institute in La Jolla (to the sappy strains of "Long May You Run") flat palpates his neckties, as if to channel the dead. His personal journey faces all the quagmires of art history as he attempts to link together the Stuff with the Life. Not surprisingly, he's left with a deeper faculty of perception of mystery than ever. Since Kahn "left no physical evidence" in the house, he's a challenge for one as well as the other curators and mourners. Nathaniel had lengthy felt his dad "hadn't really died [and] was on the outside there somewhere, living a parallel life."

Nathaniel get backs to Yale--bastion of Old striplings High Culture, and two Kahn art museums--to deliberate Professor Vincent Scully. Kindly disposed to the son's odyssey Scully mythologizes Kahn into the Great Men/Great Works narrative of architecture (for which Scully is famous). With sweeping gesticulations as if triggered by the plush British Art Center engulfing them, the urbane pedagogue customizes his hero discourse for Kahn, the (nonobservant) Jew: "In Jewish mysticism, G-d can alone be known through his works; [so] the works of any Jewish architect might be the works of G-d" Nathaniel go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs up, G-d bless him, "Did anybody know that Lou had three families, all at once?" The twinkle in Scully's organ of sight turns icy as he registers the info. "For years I didn't know Lou was married." He then reclaims his poise and adds, "That was part of his mystery."

"Of course the question that race would always bring up," Nathaniel said to me upon the phone, "is 'Look, we have the art, do we really ne to know the story of the shore who made it?'" They imply that the ease is for yentas. Yet what's greatest in quantity moving of all is to diocese how that kind of Art does approach from someone's life. Some race still see Great Architecture as something conceived and set uped into the canon by Yahweh-like creators. For Kahn's son to take his father's Architecture and place it into history--particularly family history--is powerfully transgressive. It takes considerable chutzpah for the son to reconnect his father's immortal oeuvre to the mes nation compromise, loss, and life from which we aspire to Art in the first place.