Bauhaus: The Face of the 20th Century (1994)

Writer: Frank Whitford
Stars: Frank Whitford, Charles Jencks, Christopher Frayling

Founded in 1919 in the Eastern German city of Weimar, the Bauhaus was the first art school after the World War to put new ideas and controversial thoughts into practice. Called the 'greatest design institution of the 20th century', it has been a major influence on the aesthetics of architecture, painting and other fields of the arts. The utopian aspirations of the disappointed soldier Walter Gropius eventually attracted students from all over Germany to learn with skilled teachers such as Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer or Joseph Albers. Gropius believed in the idea that all arts are one and that in order to become an artist man has to fully understand the tools he is working with. He aimed to produce objects that equally connected functionality and aesthetics. Students who began with workshops in color and geometry eventually took up politics, experimented in theatre and music and formed a strong community. Threatened by the National Socialist Party, the Bauhaus had to move to Dessau in 1925 and continued its work there. As the Nazi terror increased, a new home was found in Berlin in the early thirties but was closed down in 1933. With the help of interviews and documentary material, the film tries to emphasize the meaning of Bauhaus for the industrialised world of today and shows how the spirit of the artist as engineer found its deepest roots in the United States, especially in Chicago.

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