Consider: The humble shipping container. An essential component of global trade, the 20- and 40-foot-long steel rectangular boxes litter our landscape, rumbling by on the back of 18-wheelers, hurtling up and down the state in mile-long railroad chains, and squeezing under the Golden Gate Bridge, piled on hulking cargo ships heading in and out of the Port of Oakland.
But in the eyes of Italian designers Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, these ubiquitous containers are objects of beauty ripe for repurposing as chic, environmentally friendly shelter. New York filmmaker Thomas Piper’s new documentary, “We Start With the Things We Find,” turns the Naples-born Columbia University professors into delightful company as he traces the evolution of their design firm Lot-Ek (pronounced low-tech).
An award-winning filmmaker known for his inquisitive profiles of contemporary artists and designers, Piper will be on hand at the Roxie for the film’s Bay Area premiere Tuesday, Dec. 12, along with Tolla and Lignano. They’re also in town for the opening of an exhibition of their work at Hosfelt Gallery, “SPILL / from 1 to 29,” which runs Dec. 8, 2023, to Jan. 27, 2024 (with an opening reception Saturday Dec. 9).
Piper connected with Lot-Ek when he was working on a series of short films featuring famous architects walking through their signature buildings. In a conversation with a friend’s niece who was studying architecture at Columbia, he asked her who might make a good subject. She was generally unimpressed with the celebrity architects featured in magazines at the time, but highly recommended her professors Tolla and Lignano, who were known for a whimsical but down-to-earth found-object aesthetic.
“I happened to get a chance to meet them a few weeks later, and they were working on the Carroll House in Brooklyn, which was a couple blocks away from where I was living at the time,” said Piper, referring to a single-family residence built from 21 stacked, diagonally-cut shipping containers.
That project ended up taking years to complete, and “We Start With the Things We Find” follows the fiercely creative Tolla and Lignano as they explore new ways to build dwellings with containers.
Watching the documentary, it’s impossible not to think about the Bay Area’s housing crisis and the potential to create affordable units. In fact, San Jose has been building small houses with shipping containers since 2020. Design-wise, the South Bay development is far less ambitious than Lot-Ek projects, which turn the containers into inviting structures without obscuring the origins of the material.
“Art and creative people can provoke those kinds of things,” Piper said. Rather than thinking in utilitarian fashion, “they do these things that are beautiful and fascinating to look at.”
Piper shot, directed and produced the film, and his camera revels in the striking geometries and patterns that delight Tolla and Lignano. He’s handling distribution of the film himself too, and bringing “We Start With the Things We Find” to the Roxie is something of a homecoming, as he frequented the theater when lived in the Mission in the 1990s. He was working in the nascent wind-power industry at the time, and didn’t reinvent himself as a filmmaker until he moved to New York in 2001. “This definitely feels like a full circle,” he said.
If Tolla and Lignano find beauty in the quotidian industrial landscape, guitarist and composer Gary Lucas has nurtured a passion for monsters since he was an adolescent making ominous soundtracks to scare Halloween trick-or-treaters in mid-1960s Syracuse, New York. A prolific recording artist best known for his work with Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Jeff Buckley (who got his start in Lucas’s band Gods and Monsters), Lucas makes a rare visit to San Francisco to perform his score for the classic 1920 silent film “The Golem” at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Tuesday night.
An early and brilliant example of German Expressionism, “The Golem” is based on Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel, which itself was inspired by a medieval Jewish folktale widely seen as an influence on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Set in the Prague ghetto, the story involves a rabbi conjuring the titular creature, a supernatural being who protects the Jewish community from an impending pogrom.
The SFJCC reached out to him several months ago to present the film, which now feels particularly timely, Lucas said on a recent phone call from the Netherlands. “I’m really concerned, at this present moment, about the uptick in anti-Semitic statements and acts,” he said. “Lots of people don’t need any pretext to hate Jews.”
He debuted the live score for “The Golem” with his original collaborator, keyboardist/composer Walter Horn, in 1989 at the Museum of the Moving Image on a commission from the BAM Next Wave Festival (years later San Francisco’s Club Foot Orchestra created a quintet score for “The Golem” by Sheldon Brown, Alisa Rose, and Richard Marriott). Lucas has toured widely with the film over the decades, presented the project in more than 20 countries, including sold-out performances at the Venice Biennale, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and London’s Royal Festival Hall.
“I trucked it all over Europe with a bootleg 16mm copy and a projector,” he said, noting that the version presented at the SFJCC is a restored print with new footage discovered in a Belgian film archive.
Back in the late 1980s, tracking down a copy of “The Golem” was a feat in itself. Two earlier silent films based on the story were lost and, while the 1920 version, which was fully titled “The Golem: How He Came into the World,” was widely discussed, it was rarely screened.
Building on his childhood fascination with monsters and scary movies, Lucas had founded and run a popular late-night horror film society at Yale, playing campy and genuinely chilling movies for fellow undergrads looking to get away from their books. The Next Wave commission had wide parameters, requiring only that he compose something new for a creative discipline outside of music, “and something guided me to ‘The Golem,’” he said.
“I’d always wanted to see it, and I had to hunt down a copy. Eventually, I found out the Museum of Modern Art had a print, and I arranged a private screening. It’s so modern, in a way. I contacted Walter Horn, and we divided it up into sections and characters. We both came up with a couple of themes. We had a history of making improvised scary music.”
“The Golem” was only the beginning of Lucas’ live music and film work. He’s composed numerous scores for classic silent horror films and solo guitar, work he’s performed around the world, including in Havana and São Paulo.
“The goal is to not be louder than the movie,” he said. “I want to underscore and enhance it. I use a few pedals and guitar changes. I figured out how to do it solo around 1993, when I was regular at the Knitting Factory. ”
In fact, he presented “The Golem” once before in San Francisco, as part of a 1995 multi-act Knitting Factory tour that played at a theater in the Mission. Lucas can’t remember the venue’s name, and internet searches haven’t turned it up yet. Maybe you were there. Please let us know in the comments.