The Man with modern Nerves

Many filmmakers have filmed and cinematically portrayed the city, but only a few have worked with the architectural material itself. With that in mind, the case of the Viennese directors Bady Minck and Stefan Stratil is quite exemplary.
For their film "The Man with Modern Nerves" they built a model based on sketches by the architect Adolf Loos, which he had originally designed in 1923 for a city-hall project in Mexico-City. The step-pyramid of his sketches is not only animated in their mise en scène, but becomes involved in an abstract game of geometric forms, light and shadows, reminiscent of certain films of the 20ies, like Oskar Fischinger's "Orgelstäbe". More than just an animation of the model, the film reveals Adolf Loos's architectural concepts of surface and the volume of space.

A pyramid, not static at all, is instead brought to ever-increasing movement by the use of camera motion, cuts and fades. The cinematic illusion jumbles the individual elements and unites them in a symbolic sketch of Adolf Loos's dynamic thought processes.

Loos, revolutionary of modern living culture, who "imperiously brings forth divisions and transpositions, dissolves old ties, creates new ones and brings everything to seething, foaming motion" (Egon Friedell), fascinated the Austrian film-makers Bady Minck and Stefan Stratil with his imagination on the one hand and his functional thinking on the other.

Their animated film with live action sequences could be described as an homage to Adolf Loos, but is, apart from being a personal, very intellectual approach, also an artistic version of a biographical detail.

Loos, the artist misunderstood by his contemporaries, is shown in stop motion-technique approaching his desk in bandages (being handicapped in his work by society's ignorance), starting his work on a visionary project, a municipal hall in Mexico City in form of a step-pyramid. Here the animated section, using fades and rapid camera movements, develops into a powerful cinematic vision.