Watch the full performance

Totally owlsome: Rice celebrates centennial with a jaw-dropping display of sound& vision

Rice University's ongoing centennial celebration reached new heights last weekend with The Spectacle — an otherworldly 20-minute sound and light show by German art collective URBANSCREEN.

CultureMap was lucky enough to catch one of the few performances Sunday night, as several hundred attendees from a Rice Design Alliance gala event spilled onto the university's main quad.

The outdoor lights began to fade just before 9 p.m., while the sound of chirping insects emerged from six sets of speakers positioned around Lovett Hall, the iconic building that marked the start of the university campus a century ago.

"One of the big questions for us was who would be telling the story of the university," explained Thorsten Bauer. "For us, the answer eventually became the architecture itself."

The image of a flying owl swept majestically across the quad buildings, ending its flight by dropping a lone feather. Lighting effects shook and sputtered Lovett's neo-Byzantine architecture to a soundtrack of minimal techno by musician Jonas Wiese as URBANSCREEN's advanced lighting projectors gave an abstracted visual account of Rice history.

Vintage pictures of early Rice faculty flashed along side abstracted shapes representing scientific breakthroughs like the buckyball, the molecular clusters first created at the university in the mid 1980s. Though it showed no more than three official times, the full performance was recorded by Rice and posted online. (Watch video above.)

During a Monday interview at the Brochstein Pavilion, URBANSCREEN co-founders Thorsten Bauer and Max Goergen explained the manner in which the team generated many of their early ideas from archival university material, including the original hand-drawn architectural renderings for Lovett Hall.

"Our first contact when the project began was historian John Boles and I think he really ended up influencing us the most," Bauer said. "He told us that the founders of Rice built the school on what is basically a swamp . . . Then they invited the whole world here, all the great minds in science."

He noted that the noisy insects at the start of the show represent those swampy beginnings, with the single feather symbolizing the spark that turned the muddy terrain into what it is today. From there, the team's primary goal was to deconstruct and condense the university's timeline to fit the artistic program that would leave audience members with an visual and aural experience embodying 100 years of Rice achievement.

"One of the big questions for us was who would be telling the story of the university," Bauer said. "For us, the answer eventually became the architecture itself. These buildings remember the school's history the better than anyone, so we decided that they alone would tell the story."

Movie Review

Daniel Craig shines in Queer, an unapologetic tale of love and loss

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in Queer

Photo courtesy of A24

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in Queer.

As recently as the late 2010s, if a movie was made about an LGBTQ+ character, it was more than likely about their coming out experience. Romance, if it existed, was typically chaste, and actual sex was almost completely out of the question. Things have changed dramatically in the 2020s, to the point that a major movie star has no issue starring in a film called Queer.

Based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, the film features William Lee (Daniel Craig), whom everyone calls just Lee, a writer living in 1950s-era Mexico City who spends most of his time haunting local bars with friends like fellow writer Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman) and hitting on younger men. His early interactions in the film seem to indicate that Lee has a bad reputation within the local gay community, as multiple people avoid him or give him odd looks.

Lee senses an opportunity when he encounters a newcomer, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Despite some awkward interactions, the two of them start spending time together, although Lee has much more invested in the relationship than Eugene does. Their hit-and-miss bond continues until Lee, who’s starting to get into drugs in addition to the booze, convinces Eugene to accompany him on a trip to South America.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Justin Kuritzkes (making their second straight film together after Challengers), early on the film seems to be mostly about the divide between an older person who’s grown comfortable in his ways and a younger person who’s living a relatively carefree life. The introduction of drugs into the plot changes things, though, with Lee searching out more ways to open his eyes to what the world has to offer.

Guadagnino and his team use some interesting visual storytelling techniques to introduce ideas that may not be present in the actual script. The most successful, demonstrated in multiple scenes, is the superimposition of movements by Lee over what’s actually taking place in the scene. The subtle overlay gives the audience insight into Lee’s true feelings, showing what he can’t or won’t say out loud.

Music also plays a big part in how the plot is perceived, with the use of anachronistic songs from Nirvana and Prince serving to heighten certain moments. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is not as in-your-face as the one they did for Challengers, but it complements the film well, especially when the plot starts to get trippy in its final half hour.

Craig, who appears sweaty and disheveled for much of the film, is about as far from the suaveness of James Bond as you can get in this role. He takes multiple risks with his performance and almost all of them pay off. Starkey’s character is subdued by comparison, but still comes off well. Schwartzman and Lesley Manville are given showy roles, with both using altered appearances that make them nearly unrecognizable to deliver memorable performances.

Queer is not as accessible as Challengers was storytelling-wise, but the fact that it tells a story about gay men living their lives as they see fit with no interference or questions shows how far the film world has come in a short period of time. It also continues Guadagnino’s streak of making audacious films in a way that few other filmmakers are willing or able to approach.

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Queer is now playing in theaters.

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