Maya Lin - A Strong Clear Vision (Architect Documentary)

I would recommend this film to people interested in the creative process and learning about how a young undergraduate from Yale designed one of the United States most touching and celebrated memorials.


architect's attitude and sensuality   February 17, 2006
dc (Hong Kong)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

i watched this film after viewing Nathaniel Kahn's more personal depiction of his father. The latter one is an intimate conversation with the dead. This one is asking the viewers to share the growing process of a living person, in parallel to and through events in the recent history of the USA. A leitmotif of time and history running along with personal perception and interpretation of these events.
Maya's architecture, funny to say, is a lot about the sensuality of touch, which goes beyond the visual. Never in any other film about an architect's work does the audience being so moved - by the detail depiction of a hand touching a piece of stone engraved with names; the quiet flow of a thin film of water over a piece of stone being interrupted by the tip of fingers tracing the history of a place....tears....
We see in Kahn's architecture an emptiness of self in order to contain the infinity of the universe in the most cerebral way; while Lin's is an embracement of the past, present and future in the most romantic and sensuous. Sometimes i wonder if it is turning architecture into too much an emotional apparatus?
Anyway, i would recommend such interesting parallel viewing of the two films about these 2 american architects.


A talented at the right place at the right time   July 20, 2008
Timothy P. Scanlon (Hyattsville, MDUSA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Ms. Lin is best know, to those of us in the DC area anyway, for the Vietnam War Memorial.

Those of us familiar with that landmark know that hers was one of many--over 1,400--proposals for the memorial. And she, a 21 year old Yale architecture student, won.

That memorial is the beginning of this film/DVD. In fact, I learned a little more about it. I didn't know, for example, that there was some adamant opposition to it. I did know that some Vietnam vets felt it lacked the symbolism on which they insisted. For that reason, the statue of the three troops was added after "The Wall" was completed.

The film also shows some of Ms. Linn's other designs, e.g., the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama and the peace chapel at a college in Pennsylvania.

I appreciated the film because of the references to these other memorials, and also because Ms. Linn was able to describe her artistic reasoning behind all of them. The Vietnam wall, for example, is to allow the living to meet with the dead; the water that covers many of her memorials is to serve a symbolic purpose.

In short, I rather like all her designs. At the same time, if she hadn't been chosen for the Vietnam War Memorial, I don't know that such a film would have been made.

That's not to discredit her work, which, again, is great. And I'm glad the film describes so much about all of her designs that I wouldn't have otherwise known.


asian architect, american icon   January 24, 2007
Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

When Maya Lin was just a twenty-one year old architecture student at Yale, the committee for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial chose her proposal (a class assignment, it turns out) from a national competition of 1,441 submissions as the winning design. Then the battle began. Congress people and even Vietnam veterans opposed it, the latter caricaturing it as a "big, black scar in the earth." Others compared it to a boomerang. Lin was vilified as a communist. And a memorial designed by an Asian, woman, college student? In the end, after congressional hearings at which the young Lin testified, her design was built and then dedicated in 1982. I have taken my family to the memorial when we visited Washington and, along with virtually everyone who has visited, can attest to the incredibly evocative power of this public monument. The first half of this documentary covers the VVM; the last half reviews her other prominent works, namely, the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, the Museum of African Art, the Wexner Center at Ohio State University, a fountain commemorating the contributions of women at Yale, an open air Peace Chapel, and her work with the Presidio project in San Francisco. I am always inspired and encouraged to follow the story of a person whose sense of vocation is so strong and crystal clear. This film won an Academy Award as Best Documentary in 1994.


great artist, lousy documentary   April 30, 2003
a_bucket_of_shoes (Walnut Creek, CA USA)
2 out of 12 found this review helpful

I don't know about the DVD edition... but this is one of the least interesting documentaries I've ever seen. Maya Lin herself is clearly a gifted artist, but this is a standard paint-by-numbers documentary. You don't learn anything you couldn't have learned in a magazine article, it doesn't exploit the film medium at all, there's nothing in the form of this documentary that couldn't be used in a documentary about any successful person.

The fact that it won an oscar just shows how screwed up the Oscar selection process was at that time for documentaries.