MODERN RELICS
While its purpose is to track the original furniture from Le Corbusier’s government buildings in Chandigarh, India, Amie Siegel’s film Provenance might be more stirring as a portrait of the buildings themselves, nearly sixty years after they were built. To set the scene, passages show exteriors and interiors of the Secretariat, Assembly and High Court buildings, which were designed, in the 1950’s, as the heart of the new state capitol.
After decades of heat and rain, and no particular concern for scrubbing them clean, the buildings’ facades are mottled with grit and mold. Feral monkeys crawl up and down them. Special piers and partitions that were painted in glossy primary colors, intended as architectural grace notes, are dull. These ultra-modern buildings have given themselves over to time and to the elements; they have a weathered, ancient cast.
Out of necessity, most of the interior spaces seem to have been overcrowded or repurposed to meet current needs. Cars are parked in shaded ground floor walkways. Small offices have been crammed with grey cubicles and padded rolling chairs, and hallways with metal filing cabinets. The most outstanding feature of the buildings, their brise soleil, the immense concrete screens that block sunlight and break their monstrous, blocks-long facades into deep, dynamic micro-rhythms, have been clotted with window fans, air conditioning units, wire mesh and curtains fashioned from old saris.
None of this dims the sculptural excitement of the architecture. One moves inside, through the grilles, into cavernous, multi-story atriums animated with dappled light. Ramps and stairs carry shuffling government servants through forests of slender columns and beams. The pan shots Siegel uses throughout the film (hypnotically slow, sliding consistently from left to right) capture the composition of the spaces clearly and also erotically, instilling desire. These are buildings of considerable beauty. They’ve lost their luster, and most of their furnishings, but their grandeur remains intact.