Nickel — Dir. Gillian Waldo - Animated sequences
Nickel
Nickel is a 16mm essay film investigating the life of Richard Nickel, a Chicago photographer obsessed with saving the buildings of architect Louis Sullivan, who perished when one of Sullivan's buildings collapsed upon him. The film weaves together the lives of Sullivan, the father of the skyscraper, and Nickel, his disciple, and uses Nickel's practice of salvaging and documenting buildings as a framework to understand the history of the built world of Chicago, the forces of urban renewal, housing policies, labor conflicts, and the evolution of building materials in order to ask, whose vision of a city ultimately wins out? The film traces the lives of both men using contemporary footage of the places they moved through and designed, Nickel's photographs of these spaces, Studs Terkel's interviews with Nickel and his friends, and Nickel's own home movies, letters, sketches, scrapbooks, depositions, and cyanotypes. These materials reveal a complex person who had an incredible eye and was able to save invaluable pieces of ornament, but was also myopic in his quest to preserve buildings without much regard for the plight of those who lived in them.
