Producer/Director, Simon Mark-Brown Republic Films, 2023
It looks great and the premise of the film is promising. A son seeks understanding of his long-dead architect father, about whom there is some mystery: a changed name, a second family. We have, of course, come across something like this scenario before, in the film made 20 years ago by Nathaniel Kahn, about his father Louis Kahn. But that film is heart wrenching, dwelling from the very start on is (almost) entirely upbeat, its positive tone underwritten by the Dave Brubeck soundtrack of happy sixties jazz. Simon Mark-Brown’s film, until the shock delivered at its end, touches on the personal matters of Peter Mark-Brown’s life rather lightly. There are several slow-motion sequences of him (an actor?) on a golf course – I guess the message being that architecture was not his life. Rather than dwelling on the personal, examines Peter Mark-Brown’s work in relation to the New Zealand architectural culture of the 1950s to the 1970s. The tone is conversational, with many – many, many – expert talking heads setting out the privilege given to New Zealand’s ‘regionalist school’ of architecture led by Vernon Brown and the Group. Architects like Mark-Brown have – by comparison – suffered neglect, identified as internationalists for their disdain for the Group’s autochthonous, shed aesthetic, and for looking to a wider range of influences. concentrates in particular on the impact of Richard Neutra (Simon Mark-Brown shows Neutra’s son Ray photos of their dads’ work in which the Mark-Brown projects are barely distinct only by their diminished scale). The historiographic neglect that Mark-Brown and Fairhead and other like-minded architects and practices – Rigby Mullan, Vladimir Cacala, Tibor Donner, Ken Albert, Adams Dodd – have suffered is despite the considerable success they enjoyed. The film offers plenty of evidence of their accomplishments.
