FOR the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, the 2011 winner of the Pritzker Prize for architecture, there are two potential responses to the presence of a ruin in a landscape. The first is the default Romantic expression of bittersweet wonder. The second, and more intriguing, is to ask: “What can I do here? What does this suggest to me that I am able to build?” Mr. Souto de Moura is the subject of “Reconversão,” a new film by the Los Angeles filmmaker Thom Andersen, who could be the architect’s cinematic doppelgänger.
Mr. Souto de Moura incorporates shards of the past — half-demolished walls, 14th-century waterworks, even his own disintegrating older structures — into new designs, choosing to embrace, rather than elide, the crumbling remnants of history. Mr. Andersen too has constructed a career around shoring up ruins, recombining and recontextualizing fragments of cinematic history into dazzling new forms. The process has resulted in disparate works of cinematic excavation like “Eadweard Muybridge Zoopraxographer” (1974), about the 19th-century artist who used photography to study humans and animals in motion; “Red Hollywood” (1995), about the films of blacklisted American writers and directors; and “Los Angeles Plays Itself” (2003), an illustrated lecture documenting the film industry’s mixed record of depicting its hometown.
The highly acclaimed “Los Angeles Plays Itself” wound up being as much about the city’s architecture, and the wildly divergent, and often inappropriate, uses to which it had been put by filmmakers, as about the films themselves. For Mr. Andersen architecture, like film, is a way to raise knottier questions of how we live and what we choose to remember.
“When he’s talking about the style of architecture used in gangsters’ homes in ‘Los Angeles Plays Itself,’ that’s sociology, that’s politics, that’s ideology, that’s aesthetics,” said the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, a friend of Mr. Andersen’s and his longtime champion, in a phone interview. “It’s just approaching it from an angle that we’re not accustomed to.”
“Reconversão” (roughly, and according to the director, imperfectly translated as “reconversion”) is a combination travelogue and architectural study. Mr. Andersen, a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, shot the film in Porto and its environs on two brief trips to Portugal during school breaks. A significant portion of his visits were devoted to searching for Souto de Moura buildings craftily tucked into the landscape. “I ended up spending a lot of time just looking for them, and actually just ringing the bell and asking people if we could look at them,” Mr. Andersen said.
Most of the film is composed of rapid-fire, Muybridge-esque strings of still images, broken up by “live-action” sequences depicting the disparate uses to which Souto de Moura buildings are put over the course of time. “It draws your attention to elements of the landscape that you might not see if it was filmed 24 frames a second,” said David Schwartz, chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image, and one of the organizers of its First Look series, in which “Reconversão” will receive its New York premiere on Saturday. “You focus more on the grass or the landscape around the building than the building itself.”
For Mr. Andersen time was the essential element, and the one absent from most other films on architecture. “The thing that I don’t like about architecture films is they are treating the buildings as works of art, and more specifically treating them like paintings that exist outside of time. Souto de Moura says throughout the film that it’s the passage of time that completes the building.”
The passage of time has brought Mr. Andersen, 69, a surprising new degree of attention, given the infrequency of his work. In 2012 he was included in the Whitney Biennial, screening his short “Get Out of the Car” and was the curator for a series of films about Los Angeles. “Get Out” began as an outgrowth of “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” inspired by a peeling billboard. The film became a 30-minute symphony devoted to the remnants of a vanished Los Angeles of neighborhood farms and demolished concert halls.
Mr. Andersen has been shooting his distinctly personal essays since the 1960s, when he was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles. “One of my friends, Don Cooper, said being a major in film was the best thing you could do, because it enabled you to study anything you wanted,” Mr. Andersen said. “I can make films about subjects that I don’t have any academic qualifications for.”
Mr. Andersen can be viewed as part of a tradition of critic-filmmakers like Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard. “We don’t have a lot of filmmakers like that in the U.S.,” said Ed Halter, one of the curators who chose to include Mr. Andersen in the Whitney Biennial. “It’s not a form that we tend to gravitate towards.”
He is also considering a film inspired by D. J. Waldie’s acclaimed memoir of life in a Southern California suburb, “Holy Land,” another way for Mr. Andersen to examine how architecture, history, memory and film are intertwined.
In “Reconversão” Mr. Souto de Moura says, “The image of the city is furnished by the sum of the parts that memory succeeds in restoring.”