Review: A Short History of the Highrise, by Katerina Cizek, director

Abstract

Katerina Cizek, director A Short History of the Highrise Short film and “Op-Doc” for the New York Times launched in October 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/high-rise Henry David Thoreau once noted that “every apartment in which man dwells [should] be lofty enough to create some obscurity where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters.”1 Despite the fact that Thoreau abhorred urban life, the existential human quest for magic from the unlikeliest of places—confined living quarters—is similar to that of A Short History of the Highrise , an interactive documentary conceived and directed by Katerina Cizek and published online by the New York Times in the fall of 2013. The short interactive online documentary, which prides itself on placing the human aspects of high-rise life to the fore, is a hearty yet wistful work whose most striking aspect is its visual interpretation of source material. Cizek’s approach to her sources and narrative style itself flickers with a keen sense of play—as well as a certain amount of obscurity. Highrise is an “op-doc” subdivided into four sections, three of which—“Mud,” “Concrete,” and “Glass”—trace a roughly chronological story of multifamily living from Roman times to the present, while a fourth—a slideshow of apartment life contributed by readers—offers an impressionistic picture of contemporary apartment life from an anthropological perspective. The historical sections are narrated by the singer Feist through rhyming verse, which can feel both entertaining …