(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)October 18, 2012

(MAHWAH, NJ)- Director Duki Dror screened and led a discussion of his film Mendelsohn’s Incessant Visions, on October 18. The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Art History program of Ramapo College cosponsored the vent.

Incessant Visions, a seductive and complicated new documentary from Israeli director Duki Dror, tells the story of the German-Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn’s many triumphs, from his rise as an architectural superstar in Berlin and his triumphant designs in the Middle East and America, to bitter disappointments in all the same places.

Mendelsohn was one of the great German architects of the Weimar era who designed a series of iconic structures, from the Einstein Tower (1919-1921) that housed the astrophysical observatory in the Albert Einstein Science Park in Potsdam to a number of modernist department stores for the Schocken concern in the late 1920s. Forced to leave Berlin after Hitler came to power in 1933, Mendelsohn continued his architectural career in England, Palestine and the United States. The film delves into the development of his life and work by blending letters and drawings and interviews with period and contemporary footage.

A native of Tel Aviv, Israel, Duki Dror studied theater and classical studies in UCLA and graduated from the Colombia Collage film school in Chicago. His graduate film, Sentenced to Learn (1993), which tells the story of inmates sentenced to life in Illinois prisons, was selected to screen in a historical retrospective of American Documentary at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Among his other notable films are Radio Daze (1996), depicting the life of a radio-quiz-show-star, and Taqasim (1999),showcasing the work of musicians from Iraq and Egypt, who immigrated to Israel during the 50′s and led their lives in virtual obscurity.

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