Walls Speak

Karim Aïnouz, one of six filmmakers whose short documentaries about certain iconic buildings have been assembled in a unique series by Wim Wenders, talks to Anthony Carew.

In Cathedrals Of Culture, a six-part series doubling as a 160-minute cinematic omnibus, noted filmmakers take one of the world’s oldest clichés —‘if these walls could talk’— to extremes. Assembled by German legend Wim Wenders, the short documentaries give fanciful, literal voice to iconic European buildings with Wenders portraying the Berlin Philharmonic, the late Michael Glawogger the National Library of Russia; philosophical Danish minimalist Michael Madsen the Halden Prison; Margreth Olin the Oslo Opera House; Robert Redford the Salk Institute, and Karim Aïnouz Paris’s Centre Pompidou.

“When I lived in France as a teenager,” recounts Aïnouz, “the Centre Pompidou was like a close friend. More than just being an interesting building, it’s an interesting space. At that time, Paris wasn’t the most sweet city for foreigners, but here was this space where everyone, from all different cultures, could gather.”

The 48-year-old Algerian-Brazilian filmmaker is currently in Oslo for a retrospective program of his work at the Film Fra Sør festival. “You start to feel old when they start doing retrospectives, like you’re entering that phase of life,” he laughs. Aïnouz is used to feeling like an outsider – a queer Arab raised in Brazil, now based in Berlin – so it’s no surprise his films, from acclaimed 2002 debut, Madame Satã, to recently-released Praia Do Futuro, deal with the same. “All my characters are uncomfortable in the world. They always feel a kind of displacement, but also a joy, a strong will-to-live that gives the films this specific kind of energy that they all have...They’re like brothers.”

Befitting his background, Aïnouz’s films are often travelogues, like his 2010 docudrama, I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You, which journeyed ever-deeper into the deserts of Brazil’s distant Northeast, where he grew up. When the film screened at Berlinale, Wenders saw it and flagged Aïnouz as contributor for Cathedrals Of Culture. To Aïnouz, it felt perfect. “I’m actually an architect by training: I went to architecture school, and it was my first dream. This felt like a good way to make peace with the past. Because I quit architecture twenty years ago and here was the opportunity to go back to it; to think architecturally, to film architecture.”

Aïnouz was working under strict parameters. His ‘episode’ had to be shot over five days, in 3D and be 26 minutes. Oh, and narrated in the first-person from the building’s perspective. Working with Deyan Sudjic, architectural critic and director of London’s Design Museum, Aïnouz grappled with the series’ central conceit. “Wim would say, ‘We want to feel the soul of a building!’ But I don’t believe in souls! The way I resolved it was to think of it different: I couldn’t see the building as having a soul, but I could see it as having a real living body, with the people inside it as its bloodstream. A building isn’t just how it’s constructed, but how it’s used.”

Cathedrals Of Culture runs 28 Oct — 11 Nov, ACMI
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