The film we saw was the documentary My Architect, the biopic of physically diminutive but reputationally giant Louis Kahn, directed and *starring* his “illegitimate” son, Nathanial Kahn. While not experimental in form or approach, the younger Kahn narrates and directs with the kind of earnest simplicity that disarms most viewers and makes them wish they, too, could be less acerbic about their attitudes toward filmmaking and family. The film’s focus is likewise split (yielding, therefore, foci) between the godlike genius of his work and the human failing of his families — and, given Nathanial’s emotional envolvment in his subject, it cheats to the human side.

The documentary is atypical in two ways: its settings and its director’s relationship to the subject. As Emily noted, many traditional documentaries suffer from interviews conducted with stuffy academics sitting in front of their tidy bookshelves stuffed with books (although, as long as the dialogue is stimulating, the backdrop is usually easily disregarded anyway). In My Architect, Kahn successfully chokes up at least two of his more scholarly interviewees by conducting the interview in one of Kahn’s buildings. A younger Bangladeshi architect can barely finish his obsequious praise of Kahn and his masterpiece, the Capital building of Bangladesh, because they’re standing on one of its interior parapets. The man cannot stop his tears. Earlier, on location at Kahn’s Salk Institute, the film swells in spirituality while accelerated photography reveals the ingenius presence of time in this masterpiece by the ocean. Kahn built in stone, iron, brick, glass, and time. Even when trying, in layman’s terms, to explain the qualities of Kahn’s designs that make them art, the specialists cannot help but drift into the spiritual or the irrational. The buildings are too monumental (the film suggests Kahn was heavily influened by the timelessnes of the great ancient works of the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians); his admirers run up against them with their senses and are left too devestated to comment articulately.

Time is also how the Nathanial Kahn — at times purposefully, and others inadvertantly — makes such a unique presence of himself as the interviewer. With all the archival footage of the iconic Louis Kahn spliced into the interviews and footage of Nathanial Kahn on his odyssey, their facial resemblance is irrefutable. Nathanial’s very existence, in the flesh, moves another of his interviewees to tears. As Kahn questions his mother on camera, asking some rather sharp but honest questions, one cannot but feel the tension and reality. This is real reality, even for a documentary. And the questions, about family and committment, are sharp because of L. Kahn’s shady personal life. He managed to father a child with three different women, and be at least part of their lives, secretly, until his death in 1974. Nathanial was concieved when his father was just over 60, and was the legend’s only son. One scene unites the three siblings for a conversation about the funeral, at which the two unmarried mothers were almost banished from the service by Kahn’s wife. Witnessing Nathanial searching the figures and spaces of his father’s past, in order to color this gap in his childhood, elevates the interviewer to subject, while at the same time maintaining his status as director. His roles in producing the film become inextricable from each other: photographer and on-screen presence, director and lost son.

In the closing moments of the film, Nathanial confesses to some sense of closure after completing the project, which was mostly filmed four years ago and had been in post-production ever since. Like any great attempt at biography, most enigmas are unsolved, even if their outlines have been traced. Like trying to define Charles Foster Kane after the closing shots of Citizen Kane, we find the film has only given us tools with which to ponder the mystery of Louis Kahn. He’s still a mystery, and that is how it should be.

Addendum: My Architect has been nominated for an Academy Award, for whatever that’s worth.