Movies that shake out ideas

 Five documentaries on art, design and architecture are being screened tonight as part of the annual Movies on Design segment of the Bangkok Design Festival. 

This evening at 6 sees the Bangkok’s premiere of director Britt Arthur’s critically acclaimed “Life Architecturally” at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. The 78-minute movie profiles Australian architect Robert McBride and his equally celebrated wife, interior designer Debbie Ryan. 

The authors of groundbreaking concepts earn their applause with dynamic architecture that’s regarded in itself as a work of art, though not without controversy. They’re among the international consortium bidding to design and build a grand Cancer Care Centre in Melbourne.

In New York, directors Muffie Dunn and Tom Piper spent time at a leading design firm making “Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Reimagining Lincoln Center and the High Line”. This 55-minute documentary focuses on the expansion of the famed performing-arts centre and renovation of an overhead rail line for direct community use.

Josh Melrod and Tara Wray left New York for pastoral Vermont in 2007 and began making “Cartoon College”. They spent three years following several students of the Centre for Cartoon Studies, which awards graduates a master of fine arts degree and a resounding “Good luck!” as they face the uncertainty of a career in one of the most drudgery-inducing art forms.

At least they had fun while at school: Cartoon College, as it’s casually called, annually takes 20 promising candidate cartoonists and graphic novelists through what’s described as “a no-holds-barred education in comics”. Some of the best-known doodlers in the business are interviewed, including Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as the movie travels the country visiting comic-book stores, museums and conventions.

“Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present” centres on the 2010 Museum of Modern Art show by the much-discussed purveyor of provocative “interactive performance”. Listed among Time magazine’s “100 most influential people”, Abramovic spent nearly three months sitting opposite anyone who wished to join her, “absorbing their pain”. Co-directed by Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre, the documentary suggests that “seductive, fearless and outrageous Abramovic” redefines what art has been for the last 40 years.

Tim Cawley’s “From Nothing, Something: A Documentary on the Creative Process” is an 80-minute series of profiles of a novelist, a musician, a designer of movie creatures, a pair of chefs, an architect and two cancer researchers. 

 

 BY DESIGN

  Movies on Design, part of the Bangkok Design Festival, runs from tonight until May 29 in the fifth-floor auditorium at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.

 Tickets for each showing are Bt180, for any two films Bt360 and for all five (with a gift) Bt650 at art 4d magazine, (02) 260 2606-8, BACC, (02) 214 3040, and Zerobooks, (080) 817 6050. The schedule is as follows: