QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

3[/dropca[]D was once a gimmick used to add come-on value to B-movies, and then, in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), briefly became the required presentation of any would-be blockbuster, before viewers wised up to the notion that it tended to add more cost to the ticket than actual value to the viewing experience, and so stopped paying extra for the effect. Which is to say that stereoscopy is not something that one might normally associate with small-scale, SFX-free documentaries focused on an individual human subject – except that Arko Okk’s I Was Born In A Garage, a profile of Estonian architect Emil Urbel, is so precisely concerned with the uses and abuses of space that 3D seems entirely the right format for it.

Although there are a few parts in I Was Born In A Garage where Urbel gives to-camera interviews from a seat in the living room of his home, for the most part Okk captures him on the move, whether walking, or being driven, past the many houses that he has helped create, and talking through the motivations for his design choices. Always sensitive to the interplay between individual and environment, private and public, as well as to the geometry and materiality of any building space, Urbel offers a masterclass in both the philosophy and pragmatics of urban construction, while he shows – and sometimes critiques – his working by visiting the actual sites under discussion. He is an engaging and erudite informant, and you just know it is considerable reflection rather than thorough ignorance which makes him struggle to define what constitutes a good building (something which he suggests should be left for “God in Heaven” to decide), or even what a house is.

All this dancing about architecture is accompanied by some real wit, both in Urbel’s conversation (e.g. when he tries to appear reasonable and accommodating towards the furnishings of modern life, but still cannot quite conceal his utter contempt for cars), and in the filmmaking itself. Key words from Urbel’s commentary are also projected onto the foreground of the screen in large pink letters – but other words also appear there, engendering their own surreal form of punctuation. For example, once, near the beginning of the film, Urbel has passed a garden greenhouse and commented that there are no tomatoes growing inside, the word “TOMATOES” appears in all-caps every single time one of the red fruits appears on screen. Similarly any ladder spotted is accompanied by the word “LADDER” – and when the sound recordist’s boom mic slips into frame (normally the kind of blooper that would be edited out of a film), instead Okk draws attention to it by adding the word “MICROPHONE”. It is in keeping with Urbel’s principle that once he has designed a house, nature and the residents’ lives take over and make their own mark on the look of the property.

There are other cutaways, which not only prevent I Was Born In A Garage from feeling like a lecture, but which also enrich, or even ironise, the material. After a woman at a property that Urbel and the film crew visit leans out with her arms crossed and suggests wryly that the film had better be good or else Urbel will be calling his lawyers, Okk repeatedly (and hilariously) cuts back to her for what has now become established as the film’s equivalent of a sceptical eyebrow raised. And he also regularly punctuates Urbel’s words with cutaways to carefully chosen scenes (a suitcase full of cash, a car driving) from Okk’s previous feature The Highway Crossing (1999), which starred a much younger Urbel. There is also footage of an interview with Urbel’s now deceased father Valde, wondering where his son’s architectural talents came from. Urbel is not sure either. Yet as he navigates his own way through these spaces across multiple dimensions, Urbel takes us on a guided tour that not only offers insights into his own artful practice, but also celebrates the city of Tallinn for often making considered and captivating use of its plotted seaside terrains.

I Was Born In a Garage just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.