Sunday, November 11, 2007

"...a sunken wall, cold, horizontal and black"

Hers was a radical notion for a monument on the mall -- a sunken wall, cold, horizontal and black, etched with the names of more than 57,000 dead soldiers. At the announcement ceremony in the spring of 1981, Jan Scruggs, a veteran and prime force behind the memorial, leaned over the microphone in front of a shy, giggling Lin and said, "I'd like to point out that really the finest architects in the country and some of the highest-priced architecture firms in the country did enter this competition. And they lost." They lost to a 20-year-old kid from Athens, Ohio, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Maya Lin's story is the stuff that American dreams, and documentaries, are made of.

Using old footage, Mock revisits the divisive debate which included vehement opposition from the likes of media personality-turned-presidential-candidate Pat Buchanan.

As people lashed out at her design at a U.S. Commission of Fine Arts hearing, Lin sat in the room neither smiling nor frowning -- stoic, quiet, like a granite wall. She seemed so young, yet so unwavering in her conviction.

"Imagine the courage that took," said architectural historian Vincent Scully, Lin's professor at Yale. "The fiber. The word for Maya is courage. And effrontery."

At one point she says, "An artist struggles to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision."

Lin opines on-camera often -- too often -- in the film. The narrative of her life and work is interspliced with shots of her sitting on a stool talking about her work or in a turtleneck hunched over her drafting table, gooseneck lamps overhead, cold drink nearby. Though she speaks eloquently and convincingly about her creations, the power of the movie, as the power of her art, is when things are shown and not explained.

For example, she tells us that when she designed the Vietnam memorial, "I really did mean for people to cry."

In the next scene, we see men standing at the black wall, crying. It is a power-charged moment.