This U.S. documentary from 2008, freely available on Youtube, sells the virtues of the New Urban town centre to the general video-watching population. Unfortunately it uses scare tactics to do so. The first two-thirds warns of impending doom in the peak oil sense. It is only after about an hour of this that we get to their solution, which involves lots of footage of street-side cafes and light rail. The doco supports multi-residential developments alongside transit stops, but not really as a positive in itself, more because doing so will relieve the pressures on ailing freeway infrastructure without breaking the bank.
Wow. I am in the midst of watching a documentary about the suburbs. It isn’t your usual documentary though. Maybe it’s even ground-breaking, and there is a lot of ground being broken out in the neighbourhood of Evergreen, in Cranston, Canada.
This Philip Mark Law film for the Australian Film Commission in 1970 could be a KOYAANISQATSI for the Australian city. A slow beginning pans through tumbledown Victorian buildings. Steadily the modern world is juxtaposed, with jarring musical shifts to suit. After a race through a car park building and a look at what residential architects were up to at the time, the film ends in the new frontier, with a couple emerging from their wedding into an empty treeless subdivision. Sci-fi soundtrack by Leslie Dempsey.
The DVD of the Daryl Dellora directed 1998 film about the rise and fall of Jørn Utzon’s Opera House has been rereleased as a Special Edition with bonus bits and pieces.
The Modernism of Julius Shulman was made in 2008 – a trailer can be viewed on site.