Microcinema DVDs - World of Buckminster Fuller, The

2010-08-06 Educational Media Reviews Online
By Gary Handman

About the time that this film was first released (1971), I was a scruffy undergraduate and Buckminister (“Bucky”) Fuller was hot stuff among some members of my corduroy-and-denim-wearing, Whole Earth Catalog-toting pals. Fuller, an endearingly odd-ball architect, engineer, and all-around visionary and futurist, is best known today as the inventor of the geodesic dome and the nutty, three-wheeled “dymaxion” car. Back in those halcyon hippie days, however, he seemed to possess startlingly unique solutions for the problems of an ecologically imperiled planet, a viable set of blueprints for the future of Spaceship Earth. The Gospel According to Bucky told us that there were more than enough resources on the planet to feed, house, and metaphysically nurture everyone, if we would just learn to harness the handful of universal principles that would allow us to logically restructure our natural and man-made environments, and to do more with less. As is the case with many visionaries, Fuller was considerably more adept at coming up with the visions than at reifying them (or even articulating them). I distinctly recall sitting through a numbingly long and shambling lecture which he gave at UCLA filled with zigzagging, nearly impenetrable gnomic riffs on physics, geometry, and cosmology. In years following, I always attributed my blurry comprehension of this talk largely to the...uh... somewhat altered state of consciousness of the majority of those of us attending. Viewing Robert Snyder’s film nearly forty years later, I’m not so sure. Snyder’s film is largely composed of segments featuring Fuller speaking to various groups (including groups of adoring, long-haired acolytes, any one of whom could have been me back then); Fuller demonstrating vector equilibrium on little Tinkertoy models; Fuller expounding his theories and concepts while sailing or relaxing at home. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of many of these sequences is their almost complete opacity to the lay viewer. Once Fuller gets rolling, it’s often as if he’s speaking in tongues—a kind of mumbled cosmic glossolalia. In short, Snyder’s documentary profile does little to immediately dispel the sense of Bucky as a brilliant crackpot with a pocketful of generally unrealizable dreams—that is, until the last few moments of the film. Toward the end of the film there’s a sequence of Fuller strolling through the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis), a tropical rainforest enclosed in an enormous geodesic dome. Looking around that magnificent structure, it becomes clear that the dome is as every bit as shapely, pure, and perfect as the natural world it encloses, and it’s impossible not to admire and respect the poetic and protean mind that created it.

2010-07-06 blogcritics.org
By Jennifer Bogart

My husband is something of a Buckminster Fuller buff. A thinker ahead of his time, Fuller was a future-minded conservationist who put his skills as an architect, engineer, and inventor to use in a wide variety of inventions (some of which still enjoy wide popularity – think the geodesic dome). While my husband certainly knows more about Fuller than most North Americans we were still very excited to watch The World of Buckminster Fuller. Unfortunately, we were deeply disappointed.

Filmmaker Robert Snyder relies strictly upon original footage of Fuller speaking, with many of the clips taken from dated video reels (understandable, as Fuller passed away in 1983). Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for primary sources, but there is really no commentary or transitions at all, everything is left up to Fuller alone, pulling from various lectures, demonstrations of his inventions, philosophical musings etc.

Unfortunately this makes for dry watching that is hard to follow. The audio quality isn’t quite up to snuff, and Fuller seems to be mumbling much of the time – it’s difficult to clearly make out what he’s saying no matter how loud you crank up the volume. Perhaps the man wasn’t a natural orator – all the more reason to include narration in this film. A short, 15-minute film, “Modeling Universe” by Jaime Snyder (Fuller’s grandson), is also included on the DVD which includes clips that are essentially more of the same.

Some of the most interesting portions of the film are found in the black-and-white footage of Fuller’s early inventions, film taken of his original plans, and hearing him speak about the development of his work. It’s the lengthy (and rambling) philosophical musings about Fuller’s theories on the nature of the universe that will almost certainly lose everyone but the most dedicated Fuller devotee.

There is certainly footage worth digging through the 80-minute DVD for, and the fact that the disc isn’t region coded is certainly a bonus for international audiences, but I’d love to see some of this footage incorporated into a more traditional biographical documentary format. This film was originally produced in the ‘70s, and Microcinema has now picked it up the original and transferred it to DVD. I’ve been so delighted with the high quality of other Microcinema documentary films that I was surprised by the letdown The World of Buckminster Fuller delivered.

2010-05-28 Movie Habit
By John Adams

What is it that separates a visionary man like Buckminster Fuller from the run-of-the-mill cranks and lunatics? It can’t be that he was right because here it is 2010 and we still aren’t living under domes, our cars still steer with their front wheels and our homes still weigh tons more than they need too.

Puzzling over how much my house weighs was one of the quirky insights I picked up while watching The World of Buckminster Fuller, a 1974 documentary by Robert Snyder and Baylis Glascock now released on DVD as part of Snyder’s Masters and Masterworks series.

Fuller on Fuller

This film is not so much about Fuller but rather Buckminster Fuller explaining himself in his own words. As such, it is a fascinating historical document. Fuller was great at pitching his ideas. Appropriately the film begins with Fuller lecturing on the concept of “Spaceship Earth,” a theory that defines the Earth as a closed system. This is in contrast to an infinite one that allows for perpetual growth. It is not an idea that originated with him but he certainly popularized it. A finite Earth seems obvious today but in the 1960’s it was a radical idea, and one we still have yet to accept.

Fuller was an idea man, the definition of a futurist and a real conceptual artist. The film moves briskly from one challenging and intriguing idea to the next. It is no wonder that Fuller developed a devoted following in the counter culture years of the 1960s and that the establishment Time Magazine called him a “nut job.” As Fuller speaks, you can see he has spent his life explaining himself. And as this is his side of the story, there is no counterpoint.

Neither the film nor Fuller flinch at mentioning one of his first schemes from the 1920’s. He proposed to place a string of portable dirigible bases across the North Pole. This is an idea that has stepped right off the cover of Popular Mechanics along with moving sidewalks, flying cars and jet packs and adds some credence to Time’s characterization of Fuller. Well, most anything with dirigibles would do that.

Dymaxion!

The dirigible-born Dymaxion building (“Dymaxion” being Fuller’s word for his thinking-out-of-the-box designs) is the jumping-off point for his post-WWII idea of The Dymaxion house. Like everything else he came up with, there were a lot of good points to the all-aluminum Dymaxion house. It could be mass produced, it conserved water, and was self cooling by way of a clever roof venting device. The plan was to use the over-developed and under-utilized American aircraft industry to meet the post war housing demand. But as Wikipedia points out, “No Dymaxion house built according to Fuller’s intentions was ever constructed and lived in”... so we got Levittown instead.

This was also true for Fuller’s Dymaxion car. With its efficient aerodynamic profile, front wheel drive, and agile rear wheel steering, it should have made it the car of the future... the ultimate in efficient transport. Three were built and one still survives in a museum. It was never put into production. There is just a hint of the Dymaxion car in that ’60s stalwart the VW micro-bus.

A lot of time in the film is spent by Fuller describing his theories of nature and geometry. Fuller believed that nature relied on classical geometric principles. At one point in the film he says that because π is an irrational number, nature does not use it. Yet he lived to see the rise of fractal geometry and I wonder if he had the endless ‘irrationality’ of fractals in mind at the time. If he did, it’s not mentioned. For Fuller, the tetrahedron was the ideal natural shape and he demonstrates his theory with the aid of a D-stix modeling set. I’m not sure if it’s a valid proof of anything, but it is fun to watch Fuller at work.

This film was made when it seemed Fuller’s ideas were at last getting some traction. Grand geodesic domes were being built, ecology was becoming a household word and pictures were coming back from the Moon that showed the real Spaceship Earth. But that was about as far as all that went. Fuller died in 1983 and perpetual growth came back with a vengeance. Maybe Fuller’s ideas haven’t been fully realized because they are rational and human beings are not. I think we are still catching up to this extraordinary futurist . The World of Buckminster Fuller is almost 40 years old and yet he and it are still ahead of our time.

2010-05-21 Pop Matters
By Shaun Huston

There are two sets of shots in The World of Buckminster Fuller (1971) that I keep coming back to as I think about the film. One shows Fuller holding court in a small classroom, or maybe a student lounge, with a cluster of college-aged kids sitting around him in a semi-circle, some on tables, some on the floor, some in chairs, all looking rapt. Another is from a similar scene at the University of Detroit School of Architecture. Once again, an audience of young people is crowded around the older man, listening.

One reason that I keep thinking about these images is that they reflect the experience of watching the documentary. The film is, mostly, the title subject talking about ideas, both to the camera and in lecture and conversational situations like the ones noted above. Fullerâ€™s edited monologue is intercut with images of his designs and tools, the geodesic dome, the Dyamxion map, car, and house, but, for the documentary, these are the equivalent of the hand gestures that Fuller uses to illustrate the principles of his thought: short, visual and symbolic representations of ideas.

The contemporary tendency in biographical filmmaking is to want to dig beneath a subjectâ€™s public identity to find the â€˜realâ€™ person, as if someoneâ€™s childhood, or romantic life, friendships and foibles, is somehow more revealing or interesting than the work that makes them of interest in the first place.

The examination of a public figureâ€™s private life can be of significance, American presidents are bundles of contradictions, for example, and can help to make historical or â€˜importantâ€™ figures appear more as people and less as myths, but not everyoneâ€™s personal history is important to their public works. And just as the college students shown in the documentary came to hear Buckminster Fuller talk about social and environmental problems and design, and not anecdotes from daily life, thirty years later, that is still what one would want to hear. The World of Buckminster Fuller is firmly grounded in that interest, veering into personal biography only as far as it relates to the formation of his thinking about society and nature.

The second reason I am drawn to the images of young people listening to Fuller is that it provokes a number of thoughts about the role of intellectuals in American culture and how that role has, or hasnâ€™t changed, over time.

Fuller was a polymath, a Marshall McLuhan blurb on the Microcinema DVD case calls him â€œThe Leonardo da Vinci of our timeâ€, and one of, at present, a final wave of big thinkers in American life who emphasized universality rather than difference. He believed in a common human future. More particularly, he thought that human ingenuity and technology could be deployed to eliminate material deprivation and conserve natural resources for the benefit of all and for subsequent generations. Not only concerned with conservation, Fuller also derived inspiration from nature. As shown in The World of Buckminster Fuller he saw his designs as following patterns in nature, for strength, for efficiency, for beauty.

Bemoaning the loss of public intellectuals and the coarsening of intellectual discourse in the United States has become clichÃ©, but watching footage of Fuller speaking before groups of huddled youth it is hard not to reflect on whether such scenes would be possible today. What would motivate college students to tear themselves away from their plethora of media to hear an old white man talk about the world?

This may beg the question of why it would be essential that they do this in the first place, except that Fuller is radical in a way that few public figures are allowed to be without being marginalized as cranks, Noam Chomsky, for example, or used as political targets, as with Ward Churchill. It is particularly difficult to imagine someone like Fuller, a person who rails against the idea of having to â€œearn a livingâ€ and who proposes a â€œUniversal Fellowshipâ€ to free people from the need to work mind numbing jobs, being honored by a conservative president in the way he was by Ronald Reagan.

Of course, it is notable that Fullerâ€™s ability to attract an audience corresponded with the fissures in American Cold War culture resulting from reactions to the War in Vietnam and the social movements of the â€˜60s and â€˜70s, a period which saw a shift in policy towards the Soviet Union that allowed for the possibilities of negotiation and co-existence between the two superpowers. Perhaps this loosening also benefitted thinkers like Fuller on the home front in ways that would have been unthinkable in the â€˜50s and early â€˜60s.

Leaving aside the very real possibility that I am engaging in misplaced nostalgia, misplaced both in the sense that I was just barely in the world when Fuller was filmed giving his talks and that the present is never always worse or better than the past, or vice versa, The World of Buckminster Fuller does make it seem as if there was a time in American culture where the broader public sphere was open to the articulation of alternative ways of living in a way that it isnâ€™t now. Today, to speak as if there are ways to live outside of capitalism is to necessarily place oneself in a minor intellectual niche, if not exactly in total isolation from political and social discourse.

The only extra included on the Microcinema DVD is a 13-minute short film, â€œModeling Universeâ€. Made contemporaneously with the longer documentary, the shorter work is a poetic exploration of Fullerâ€™s search for design principles in the forms of the natural-physical world. It extends material included in The World of Buckminster Fuller, and the two work well as part of a larger whole. At the same time, expecting additional material and supplements on Fuller and his work, whether archival or scholarly, doesnâ€™t seem unreasonable.

One quality that makes Buckminster Fuller a complicated figure in the American history of ideas is that it is easy to consider his designs out of their social, environmental, and political contexts, a trick made all the more tempting for the retro-futuristic cool of his structures and forms. However, The World of Buckminster Fuller, by giving its subject free reign to articulate his worldview, makes clear that the man himself never saw his inventions outside of their substantive ends. No doubt this is why he attracted clutches of idealistic college kids seeking to change the world. Maybe he still can.

2010-02-16 L.A. Free Press

"As Pure a record of Buckminster Fuller as would be possible to make. His voice and persona are the film... A holographic portrait of one of the great teachers of our time, transcribed in sight and sound for the archives of Posterity."

2010-02-16
By Marshall McLuhan

"The Leonardo da Vinci of our time."

2010-02-16 Los Angeles Times

"An invaluable record of a major figure... this documentary yields even more with repeated viewings."