Video presentation about a series of sustainable green infrastructure projects at Burbank Water and Power – including photovoltaic parking lot canopies, a green street demonstrating innovative storm water treatment technologies, and an courtyard built around a salvaged electrical substation. (AHBE, U.S.A., 2012, 6:39)

Architectural narrative about the recently-completed Silverwood Lake State Recreation Area Visitors’ Center in California’s San Bernardino Mountains, designed by Los Angeles-based architectural firm Touraine Richmond Architects. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2012, 3:20)

DIR Evan Mather

“39-A”, Sample #1: Original SD Scan (March 2005)

“39-A”, Sample #1: New HD Scan (August 2011)

“39-A”, Sample #2: Original SD Scan (March 2005)

“39-A”, Sample #2: New HD Scan (August 2011)

“39-A”, Sample #3: Original SD Scan (March 2005)

“39-A”, Sample #3: New HD Scan (August 2011)

“39-A”, Sample #4: Original SD Scan (March 2005)

“39-A”, Sample #4: New HD Scan (August 2011)

“39-A”, Sample #5: Original SD Scan (March 2005)

“39-A”, Sample #5: New HD Scan (August 2011)

#1 – Army of Shadows

I caught Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 film Army of Shadows (Criterion spine #385) when it made its American theatrical debut in 2006. This epic 2-1/2 hour thriller was inspired by Melville’s own experiences in the French resistance.

#2 – Close-up

Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 narrative-documentary hybrid Nema Ye Nazdik (Close-Up) was a revelation to me when Criterion released it on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2010 (spine number 519). The issues of identity and reality were similar to those I had been exploring in Icarus of Pittsburgh, Scenic Highway, and even to some extent, Fansom the Lizard. But Kiarostami took it one step further by having the actual subjects in the real-life event participate in the re-creation for the film itself – including the impersonated film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, himself.

#3 – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

By relocating the narrative from Baltimore to my hometown, New Orleans, Fincher infuses the film with its themes of time and decay – themes that resonate in my work.

#4 – F For Fake

Orson Welles’ 1975 free-form documentary F For Fake (spine number 288) – a movie I found to be right up my alley, and which directly influenced my 2006 film Scenic Highway.

#5 – For All Mankind

This piece is for Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary about the Apollo space program (spine #54) – using footage shot by the astronauts themselves – which I have owned variously on videotape, CD-ROM, laserdisc, and DVD.

#6 – Le Jetée

Chris Marker’s 1963 science fiction short (spine number 387 – coupled with his 1983 free-form travelogue “Sans Soleil”) is a successful cinematic example of using compelling black and white images alone to tell a story. It was this technique of using primarily still photographs that informed the visual grammar of my 2009 documentary short A Necessary Ruin.

#7 – Monty Python’s Life of Brian

For the most part, it is the surreal narrative style of the troope – from their television show through their foray into motion pictures – that I gravitate toward.

#8 – Slacker

This piece is for Richard Linklaters’s 1991 16mm stream of conciousness docu-log Slacker – that become a touchstone for Generation X (spine #247). Included in the DVD set is Linklater’s excellent first feature It’s Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books.

#9 – Stolen Kisses

This is the third film in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle – 1968′s Stolen Kisses (Criterion spine #186). (Honestly, I could have picked any in the series.) I hope that one day my favorite Truffaut film makes it into the collection – 1973′s Le Nuit Américaine.

#10 – The Third Man

Carol Reed’s 1949 noir set in postwar Vienna. Unfortunately, the Criterion version (spine number 64) is out of print – but not before I luckily snatched up the 1999 DVD, the 2007 DVD re-issue, and the 2008 Blu-Ray. This is one of a handful of films I can put on at anytime, and find myself not able to tear myself away until the end.

Prior to its destruction in June 2011, the Phillis Wheatley Elementary School served the historic New Orleans African-American neighborhood of Tremé since it opened in 1955. Celebrated worldwide for its innovative, regionally-expressive modern design – the structure had sustained moderate damage during the storms and levee breach of 2005. DOCOMOMO Louisiana advocated for its restoration via adaptive reuse. A Plea For Modernism is narrated by actor Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”, “Treme”). (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2011, 11:59)

DIR Evan Mather NARRATOR Wendell Pierce TEXT Francine Stock, Evan Mather VOICES John Klingman, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, John Stubbs, Wayne Troyer PROD Hand Crafted Films in collaboration with DOCOMOMO Louisiana and the School of Architecture, Tulane University ANIMATION Evan Mather MUSIC Juuso Auvinen IMAGE Frank Lotz Miller, Emily Ardoin, Meg Holford, John DeFraites, Karen Gadbois, Karran Harper Royal, John Stubbs, Anthony DelRosario, Sergio Padilla, Francine Stock GRAPHICS John DeFraites, Evan Mather

SCREENINGS Modesto International Architecture Festival ’11, 2011 AFFR (Architectuur Film Festival Rotterdam), 4th Budapest Architecture Film Days.

Telly is magnificent film that makes the most out of every frame with a beautiful story of a father and his daughter and the impact of a television. – Chris Garcia, Cinequest Animated Shorts Program Director via Animation Magazine.

Telly is a 10-minute bedtime horror story written, directed and animated by Evan Mather. Set in 1960s London, the film tells the tale of a young girl whose love of reading – and relationship with her grieving father – is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious hand-crafted television set. The digital film itself exists in a child’s analog visual universe: cut-out paper textured elements, dangling puppet characters, pop-up books, grainy film, and a scratchy vinyl soundtrack. Its themes of nostalgia, memory and childhood loss are consistent with Mather’s œuvre. Over six years in the making, Telly was conceived, assembled, and completed in Los Angeles, while Juuso Auvinen in Helsinki composed the original musical score. The artwork was generated in Adobe Illustrator, composited in Adobe After Effects, and edited on Final Cut Pro – the hardware for assembly and rendering was a Quad-Core Xeon Mac Pro with 10GB of RAM. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2011, 10:26)

DIR Evan Mather MUSIC Juuso Auvinen SCREENINGS Cinequest 22, 2012 Atlanta Film Festival, 2012 Athens International Film Fest

A thirteenth century nun’s deathbed vision is hauntingly relevant to contemporary audiences in this hand-crafted animated telling of the story of Saint Clare of Assisi (1194-1253). (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2010, 2:38)

DIR Evan Mather MUSIC Juuso Auvinen

39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable) is an experimental film that challenges and subverts the typical elements of documentaries, thus making us all reflect upon important questions in documentary filmmaking such as What material can be trusted, can the voice-over narrator be trusted, where does documentary end and fiction start? Besides these questions, that the film raises, it has managed to convince the jury by it’s unusual and alienating collage of super 8 footage, by its investigative style and suspense. The film is putting audiences continuously on the wrong track yet consistently intriguing, leaving the viewer bewildred and pensive. Through its hybrid form, 39-A: A Travel Tale Of Interminable is showing inventive ways of dealing with documentary footage and transforming reality into film. – Webcuts.11

Weirdest of all is 39-A: Een Reisverhaal Van Eindeloos (A Travel Tale Of Interminable), which seems specifically designed to make the viewer feel as if he or she is experiencing some abnormal brain activity. In the short, Old Super 8 footage of a trip to the Kennedy Space Center is overlaid with an animated roadmap and a narration track that sounds as if it’s been run through Babel Fish half a dozen times. It’s proof—if more were needed—that finding the festival’s hidden treasures sometimes requires a little digging. – The Onion A.V. Club

… a high brow spoof on art theory, deconstruction, documentaries, and reality itself. – D Magazine

Evan Mather’s short film is one mindfuck of a travelogue. – Film Threat

In this insightful autobiographical mashup of Super-8 home movies, vibrant animated cartography, and Dutch pidgin-speak, a family’s 1981 vacation to the Kennedy Space Center is chronicled in exquisite detail. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2010, 7:24)

DIR Evan Mather NARRATOR Matthew Clayfield MUSIC Protman, Troy Sterling Nies (“American Portraits Theme”) SCREENINGS “COME IN!: A Design Intervention” (July 14-August 30, 2010) at Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, onSCREEN (A+D), Architecture and the City Festival (AIA San Francisco), DOCOMOMO Georgia (Atlanta), SXSW 2011, 2011 Dallas Film Festival, Best Documentary Webcuts.11 (Berlin).

Sprawling over hundreds of square miles, Los Angeles is not organized around a central downtown core. It is a city of individual neighborhoods, each with its own distinctive character. This can best be experienced by a visit to Eagle Rock – small town Americana in the midst of a megalopolis. (Evan Mather/AHBE, U.S.A., 2010, 3:00)

DIR Evan Mather CAST Jason Wishnow NARRATOR Matthew Clayfield

[Evan Mather's] riveting new documentary A Necessary Ruin … manages not only to make engineering sexy and preservation politics compelling, but succinctly tells the tale of one of the most tragic architectural plunderings in recent memory. – Sam Lubell, The Architect’s Newspaper

Upon its completion in October 1958, the Union Tank Car Dome, located north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was the largest clear-span structure in the world. Based on the engineering principles of the visionary design scientist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, this geodesic dome was, at 384 feet in diameter, the first large scale example of this building type. A Necessary Ruin relates the powerful, compelling narrative of the dome’s history via interviews with architects, engineers, preservationists, media, and artists; animated sequences demonstrating the operation of the facility; and hundreds of rare photographs and video segments taken during the dome’s construction, decline, and demolition. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2009, 29:54)

DIR Evan Mather NARRATION Frances Anderton  CAST Ward Bond, Ed Cullen, J. Michael Desmond, Meg Holford, Andrew Lehr, Dick Lehr, Ivan Massar, Evan Mather, Mary Price, Allegra Fuller Snyder, Suzanne Turner PROD Hand Crafted Films ANIMATION Evan Mather IMAGE Mel Borel, John DeFraites, Meg Holford, Andrew Lehr, Ivan Massar, Evan Mather MUSIC Juuso Auvinen THANKS The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Mrs. Bert S. Turner, The Estate of Buckminster Fuller, The Department of Special Collections at Stanford University, The T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at Louisiana State University, The Union Tank Car Company, The Foundation for Historical Louisiana, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and AHBE Landscape Architects.

SCREENINGS 2010 Environmental Film Festival (National Building Museum), Laemmle Town Center 5 (Los Angeles), “Modernism at Risk” (NY/AIA Center for Architecture), Dwell on Design (Los Angeles), onSCREEN (Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles), AIA New Orleans Center for Design, Architecture and the City Festival (AIA San Francisco), Fresh Asheville (Asheville, NC), DOCOMOMO Georgia (Atlanta), Greenbuild 2010 (Chicago), Budapesti Építészeti Filmnapok (Budapest, Hungary), 2011 AFFR (Architectuur Film Festival Rotterdam).

US$15 via PayPal / Educational Use US$125 via PayPal / contains the 30-minute documentary short film A Necessary Ruin: The Story of Buckminster Fuller and the Union Tank Car Dome (2009) by Evan Mather / “A Necessary Loss” essay by Matthew Clayfield / sequence of the deteriorating Union Tank Car Dome from Scenic Highway (2006) / thirteen additional short films: So What? (2007), The Image of the City (2006), Expressions (2005), A Fool’s Errand (2004), My Big Fat Independent Movie – Title Sequence (2004), Pavlov’s Bell (2003), Revert (2002), Icarus of Pittsburgh (2002), Red Vines (2001), Airplane Glue (2001), Fansom the Lizard (2000), Buena Vista Fight Club (1999), and Vert (1999)

Commissioned by the Santa Monica-based architectural and planning firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects under the auspices of AHBE Landscape Architects, this short, silent video was created for the “House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage” exhibition (October 2009 – July 2010) at the National Building Museum. The video highlights several of the innovative, sustainable features of the structure including the use of recycled construction materials, public art, photovoltaic panels, and reclaimed water. (Evan Mather/AHBE, U.S.A., 2009, 3:11)

DIR Evan Mather SCREENING “House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage” National Building Museum

Commissioned by the Santa Monica-based architectural and planning firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects, this presention video was created to promote a Master Plan for the Grangegorman Development Agency in Dublin, Ireland. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2008, 6:55)

DIR Evan Mather MUSIC DIT Conservatory of Music

A landscape architectural firm shreds three months worth of its waste paper and creates a provocative art installation about sustainability. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2007, 6:55)

Creative, innovative, surprising and unexpected! An incredible message that speaks beautifully to designers and the public about an important issue. – ASLA 2008 Professional Awards Jury

DIR Evan Mather PROD Calvin Abe NARRATOR Donna Rawlins MUSIC Juuso Auvinen THANKS AHBE Landscape Architects, California State Polytechnic University (Pomona) Department of Landscape Architecture, Larry Lytle Photography, Museum of Design Art and Architecture (MODAA), Prelinger Archives, Richard Ruthsatz Photography, Vermipro. AWARDS 2008 Communications Award of Honor (American Society of Landscape Architects) SCREENINGS Blue Wire Film Festival, Mid-Valley Video Festival, Modesto International Architecture Festival ’11.

Commissioned by the Santa Monica-based architectural and planning firm Moore Ruble Yudell Architects, this is a presention video for a Master Plan competition for the Chinese University Hong Kong. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2007, 3:00)

DIR Evan Mather

Title sequence for 2007 microcinema tour. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2007, 0:45)

ANIMATION Evan Mather

Due to the recent unpleasantness, Baton Rouge has eclipsed New Orleans as the largest city in Louisiana. Is the city destined for greatness? Scenic Highway is the name of US Highway 61 as it passes through northern Baton Rouge. It is also this trip to the city – and such landmarks as Huey Long’s art deco State Capitol building and Buckminster Fuller’s hidden geodesic dome. This darkly affectionate memoir is also an exposé of the city’s colorful history – told through the use of animated motion graphics, archival Super 8 footage, and re-created & faux-created elements. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2006, 18:15)

***1/2 – Mather uses a combination of archival Super 8 footage, iconic still photographs, animation, and loopy recreations of famous events in Baton Rouge’s history to create his sardonic and irreverent ode. Relevant selected readings from such authors as Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac set to Juuso Auvinen’s moody, dreamy score provide an aural complement to Mather’s oddly engaging visual history. If Scenic Highway were just some sort of bland Chamber of Commerce puff piece about Baton Rouge, Louisiana, it certainly wouldn’t even bear a mention here. Fortunately for Mather and his viewers, Scenic Highway is to the common travelogue what the triple latte is to coffee. – Film Threat

Part diary, part travelogue, part mystery, part filmmaker retrospective, Scenic Highway is a love letter to the hometown of he who must surely be Baton Rouge’s most prodigal son. Evan Mather’s homage to the capital of Louisiana is a pastiche of styles and formats that rewrites the geography of this landscape through a collection of video footage, animated maps and diagrams, written testimonials and guided tours. Bracketing some of the City’s more salient (if bizarre) history factoids within the context of the State and the world at large, Mather manages to write himself right into this urban text with excerpts of his earlier films shot in the region and other Super-8 and video snapshots of him and his friends against the same backdrop. The results are hilarious, deeply touching and often breathtakingly creepy. FIVE STARS! – Liz Dunnebacke, New Orleans Video Access Center

DIR Evan Mather NARRATOR Kirk Hostetter, Evan Mather PROD Hand Crafted Films MUSIC Juuso Auvinen, Troy Sterling Nies (“American Portraits Theme”) AWARDS Best Documentary Blue Wire Film Festival, Best Documentary Short MicroCineFest 2006, Gold Award 16th Annual Louisiana Shorts Festival SCREENINGS New Orleans 5th Annual International Human Rights Film Festival Alvar Branch (New Orleans Public Library), “The Hand-Made Films of Evan Mather” Melbourne Underground Film Festival 8, 2007 Dallas Video Festival, SXSW 2007

Abandoned animated title sequence for feature film. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2006, 1:00) ANIMATION Evan Mather

This short film is an adaptation of the classic urban design tome – The Image of the City – by Associate Professor Kevin Lynch (1918-1984) of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2006, 6:23)

*** – At a first glance, you may think that The Image of the City is a painfully pretentious and awfully presumptuous pseudo-art house documentary short, and in many respects, you’d be correct … but what’s also available beneath the seams is a clear parallel of man to every other worker automaton in nature, from the random animal to the average worker ant that familiarizes itself with landmarks and paths, and is somehow conditioned to follow these pre-destined designs to get them to their destination … in many ways, we are also the worker ants, as Kevin Lynch examines how we’re more so conditioned to follow designs and comfort zones, rather than we are street smart. Much like worker ants of their colonies, Lynch examines how we’re also born with a sense of radar and how the world is more built for the easy ability of production and less for the individual … though it’s overbearing in its presentation, The Image of the City is a fascinating glimpse at the world we live in and our ever growing connection to the common animal. – Film Threat

DIR Evan Mather MUSIC Joe Hahn, Troy Sterling Nies (“American Portraits Theme”) MISC 16mm Source Material from Prelinger Archives SCREENINGS The Hand-Made Films of Evan Mather Melbourne Underground Film Festival 8, Senef 2006, MicroCineFest 2006, onSCREEN (Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles), DOCOMOMO Georgia (Atlanta).