Written by editor Claire Edwards
In college, my poetry professor Dr. Grant Jenkins told me about palimpsests. Essentially, back in the day, they were pieces of writing that were written on pieces of parchment on which earlier pieces of writing had been erased—though traces, ghosts of the earlier writing remained. And so the past and present lived together, though separated by years.
In telling the story of Bruce Goff and his architecture, I found it best to view his story and his buildings through this lens. Goff had an ideal of architecture he called “the continuous present.” It’s this idea that we never truly start our work when we start it, but that, rather, we sort of tune into some frequency and become a part of a narrative that has no beginning and no end.
So how do you tell the story of a house?
A film—especially a documentary—is like a house. It’s never truly finished. It grows and evolves as it’s passed down through generations. It takes on new shapes and forms as it’s exposed to new light. Is this the plan of the director? Who can say. As much as we can control the narrative as we shape it, we can never follow our creation around, explaining it, apologizing for it, or imposing our view of it on others.
So too with houses. An architect can shape and design his buildings, and he can even control, to an extent, the way that people live or work in it. But even as the architect passes on into that great mystery, his work still stands, and people pass through it, and they change it as they need to. For the architect, then, they provide a sense of eternity—a physical manifestation of their time on earth. It’s some tangible thing that shows we were here and we are, in our own way, still here.
How do you tell the story of a person?
When Britni first approached me to edit this documentary, I was excited, but a little reticent. I’ve never been a fan of bio-documentaries, and in the early stages, I was worried we were all a little too enamored with our subject. Bruce Goff’s story had a sort of underdog allure to it that any filmmaker—especially in Oklahoma—would find irresistible. He was an outsider in his time, and history has all but forgotten him, as he doesn’t conform neatly with the architectural movements of the mid-century.
And so he was reduced to a blip, a man out of step with time and space. In Oklahoma, we find this erasure of our heroes especially egregious. We own our iconoclasts, our visionaries, our boundary breakers, because if we don’t, no one else will, and if WE can’t provide a sense of eternity for them, then who the hell will preserve our memory? Are we all just doomed to become traces on some future generation’s palimpsests?
But Bruce Goff was not a hero. He was an iconoclast, sure, a visionary, definitely, but he wasn’t a hero, and I don’t think he would have wanted to be seen that way. To quote Goff himself, “each individual soul is a dark forest where we must walk with the utmost precaution.” He was a warm, funny, weird, wonderful human, but he was still human. And to be human is to be tragically, beautifully flawed.
This is a film that seeks to carry on the story of one flawed human being, and, in so doing, to hopefully reveal there are stories within all of us, mere mortals though we are, that deserve to be told.