We’ve fea­tured the work of many cin­e­ma-lov­ing video essay­ists (myself includ­ed) here on Open Cul­ture, none of it more artis­tic than that of a man who goes by the name of Kog­o­na­da. Whether deal­ing with the films of auteurs like Stan­ley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alfred Hitch­cock, or Wes Ander­son, he finds new and strik­ing ways — often free of tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tion, and some­times even free of spo­ken words alto­geth­er — to show us how their cin­e­mat­ic visions work, and in so doing to cre­ate new cin­e­mat­ic visions of his own. But when, we Kog­o­na­da fans have long won­dered, would this mys­te­ri­ous fel­low make a movie of his own?

The answer arrived at this year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val in the form of Colum­bus, Kog­o­nada’s fea­ture direc­to­r­i­al debut. “Colum­bus gets its title from the city where it’s set — Colum­bus, Indi­ana, home to a remark­able col­lec­tion of renowned works of mod­ern archi­tec­ture,” writes the New York­er’s Richard Brody, one of the many crit­ics to have already lav­ished praise on the new­ly released pic­ture.

“Those build­ings pro­vide an extra­or­di­nary premise for the dra­ma, which is a vision­ary trans­for­ma­tion of a famil­iar genre: a young adult’s com­ing-of-age sto­ry. For once, that trope doesn’t involve a sex­u­al awak­en­ing or a fam­i­ly rev­e­la­tion; it’s the tale of an intel­lec­tu­al blos­som­ing, thanks to a new friend­ship that aris­es amid trou­bled cir­cum­stances.”

Those trou­bled cir­cum­stances have to do with the par­ents of the two main char­ac­ters: Casey, a recent high-school grad­u­ate who’s stayed in town to care for a moth­er try­ing to kick a metham­phet­a­mine habit, and Jin, a fortysome­thing trans­la­tor who’s flown in from his home in Korea (birth­place of both the Mid­west-raised Kog­o­na­da and the film’s Los Ange­les-raised star John Cho) to watch over his father, an archi­tec­tur­al the­o­rist plunged into a coma by a stroke. “These par­al­lel lines meet when Casey offers to show the stranger her town,” writes Rolling Stone’s Peter Tra­vers in his review. “ ‘Meth and mod­ernism are real­ly big here,’ she tells Jin, as he becomes increas­ing­ly intrigued by this girl who sees the art and the human­i­ty in build­ings.”

Soon Jin and Casey take “baby steps toward a rela­tion­ship, in a man­ner that recalls Richard Lin­klater’s Before Sun­rise.” That film, and its suc­ces­sors Before Sun­set and Before Mid­night, fig­ure heav­i­ly into Kog­o­nada’s video essay on Lin­klater, “On Cin­e­ma & Time.” Oth­er influ­ences, cit­ed by crit­ics as well as Kog­o­na­da him­self, include Ter­ence Mal­ick, whose way with the ele­men­tal he exam­ined in “Fire & Water,” and Yasu­jiro Ozu, whose films got him think­ing about cin­e­ma in the first place. As he put it to Indiewire, he start­ed by think­ing he would “try to fig­ure out what it is about his films that ini­tial­ly felt very unim­pres­sive, but kept haunt­ing me,” to under­stand why Ozu “isn’t easy to just reduce to some­thing — he cer­tain­ly is not this sort of tra­di­tion­al­ist, he’s cer­tain­ly not a west­ern mod­ernist, he is some­thing else and what­ev­er he was explor­ing and offer­ing felt so rel­e­vant, even today.”

Kog­o­nada’s video essays “Way of Ozu” and “Pas­sage­ways” reveal not just the Japan­ese mas­ter’s use of archi­tec­tur­al spaces, but Kog­o­nada’s inter­est in such spaces. Colum­bus brings the depth of that inter­est to the fore: “The direc­tor pro­vokes aware­ness of the Mod­ernist Colum­bus by treat­ing it as one of the film’s char­ac­ters,” writes Archi­tec­tur­al Record’s Dante A. Ciampaglia. “It’s both pro­tag­o­nist and neme­sis for Casey and Jin as they wan­der the city, explore its archi­tec­tur­al boun­ty, and find it both reflect­ing inner strug­gles and inspir­ing epipha­nies.” As Kog­o­na­da him­self puts it, “I think that’s the thing that inter­ests me, the rela­tion­ship between emp­ty spaces and life itself.” May he find many more oppor­tu­ni­ties to explore it onscreen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Cin­e­mat­ic Exper­i­ment: What Hap­pens When The Bicy­cle Thief’s Direc­tor and Gone With the Wind’s Pro­duc­er Edit the Same Film

How Richard Lin­klater (Slack­er, Dazed and Con­fused, Boy­hood) Tells Sto­ries with Time: Six Video Essays

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

“Most of our cities are built with just face­less glass, only for economies and not for human­i­ties.” We’ve all heard many vari­a­tions on that com­plaint from many dif­fer­ent peo­ple, but sel­dom with the author­i­ty car­ried by the man mak­ing it this time: Frank Gehry, author of some of the most talked-about build­ings of the past thir­ty years. You may love or hate his work, the body of which includes such strik­ing, for­mal­ly and mate­ri­al­ly uncon­ven­tion­al build­ings as Bil­bao’s Guggen­heim Muse­um, Los Ange­les’ Walt Dis­ney Con­cert Hall, and Seat­tle’s Muse­um of Pop Cul­ture, but you can’t remain indif­fer­ent to it, and that alone tells us how deeply Gehry under­stands the pow­er of his craft.

And so when Gehry talks archi­tec­ture, we should lis­ten. Mas­ter­class, the online edu­ca­tion start­up that has pro­duced cours­es in var­i­ous dis­ci­plines with such high-pro­file prac­ti­tion­er-teach­ers as David Mamet, Her­bie Han­cock, Jane Goodall, Steve Mar­tin, and Wern­er Her­zog, has read­ied a rich oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so in the fall: “Frank Gehry Teach­es Design and Archi­tec­ture,” whose trail­er you can view above. The $90 course promis­es a look into the cre­ative process, as well as into the “nev­er-before-seen mod­el archive,” of this biggest of all “star­chi­tects” whose “vision for what archi­tec­ture could accom­plish” has reshaped not just our sky­lines but “the imag­i­na­tions of artists and design­ers around the world.”

As with any edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence, the more thor­ough­ly you pre­pare in advance, the more you’ll get out of it, and so, to that end, we sug­gest watch­ing Syd­ney Pol­lack­’s doc­u­men­tary Sketch­es of Frank Gehry, recent­ly made avail­able online by the Louis Vuit­ton Foun­da­tion. “Pol­lack is not usu­al­ly a doc­u­men­tar­i­an, and Gehry has nev­er been doc­u­ment­ed; they were friends, and Gehry sug­gest­ed Pol­lack might want to ‘do some­thing,’ ” wrote Roger Ebert in his review. “Because Pol­lack has his own clout and is not mere­ly a sup­pli­cant at Gehry’s altar, he asks pro­fes­sion­al ques­tions as his equal, sym­pa­thizes about big projects that seem to go wrong and offers insights.”

Pol­lack also “has access to the archi­tec­t’s famous clients, like Michael Eis­ner,” com­mis­sion­er of the Dis­ney Con­cert hall, “and Den­nis Hop­per, who lives in a Gehry home in San­ta Mon­i­ca” — just as Gehry him­self does, in the house whose rad­i­cal, qua­si-indus­tri­al mod­i­fi­ca­tion did much to make his name. Though he also brings in a few of the archi­tec­t’s many crit­ics to pro­vide bal­ance, “Pol­lack­’s opin­ion is clear: Gehry is a genius.” You may think so too, which would be a good a rea­son as any to take his Mas­ter­class. Even if you think the oppo­site, the phys­i­cal and cul­tur­al impact of Gehry’s work, as well as his endur­ing rel­e­vance and indus­tri­ous­ness — he con­tin­ues to design today, in his late eight­ies, espe­cial­ly for his long-ago adopt­ed home­town of Los Ange­les — has some­thing to teach us all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gehry’s Vision for Archi­tec­ture

On the Impor­tance of the Cre­ative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Oth­ers Explain its Essen­tial Role

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.