Film review: Mau takes a brisk, style-savvy, but revelatory look at Canadian design maverick
Fittingly fuelled by block text and striking imagery, documentary also digs into Bruce Mau’s unlikely beginnings for meaning
Mau is a strikingly shot portrait of a design revolutionary who has reimagined entire brands, cities, and countries.
VIFF Centre screens Mau from May 20 to 26
THE MAN BEHIND the seminal design bible S,M,L,XL grew up in a house without books.
That’s just one of the shocking revelations in the briskly paced yet revelatory new Mau, a documentary by Austrian filmmaker brothers Benji and Jono Bergmann about Canadian design maverick Bruce Mau.
So while the film is fittingly driven by zippy montages featuring striking imagery and the block-letter text that Mau so loves, it’s also grounded in a surprisingly moving back story of how neglect, trauma, and cultural emptiness helped shape the vision of a radically optimistic global thinker.
In the film, Mau reflects on the bleak childhood he spent in Sudbury, in a house that sat between a toxic nickel-mine dead zone and thick bush, with a parent who laboured underground. “My father was drunk all the time. He was a violent, alcoholic maniac,” Mau says, dressed in black while being interviewed in a giant white void, where he sometimes thinks while working a Slinky. “It was absolute chaos to [age] 12.”
What makes Mau remarkable, this doc shows, is that he was a boy who could imagine a future beyond that small, horrible world—and go on to design his versions of Utopia. Even more fascinatingly, as the film’s unpretentious subject himself asserts, those dark experiences formed his uniquely acute visual awareness—as he puts it, a “vigilance of seeing”.
As the legions of architects and designers who worship him know, Mau has gone on to revolutionize much, much more than the design of books. He has re-envisioned whole cities—including a bold, seemingly impossible plan for overcrowded Mecca for the next thousand years—and even entire countries. One section in the documentary focuses on his rebranding of Guatemala itself—a nation so plagued by war it’s lost any hope for the future. Mau’s ever-optimistic solution: a campaign to rename the country— a mix of “Guate”, the traditional Indigenous name for the territory, with the later-added Spanish “mala”, meaning “bad”. Mau adds one simple letter to create a project called “Guate! Amala!” (“Love of Guate”) and recruits tens of thousands volunteers to help spread the message in its first few days.
That’s just a single example of the mind-expanding, sustainability-oriented projects across corporations, institutions, and galleries the film traces—all praised and analyzed by big architecture, art, and design names like Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaus, Bjarke Ingels, and Paola Antonelli, all on hand here.
One notable milestone is Vancouver Art Gallery’s Massive Change, a 20,000-square-foot 2004 exhibition in which the big thinker worked with a team over two years to plot the future of design to effect positive global change. It went on to tour Chicago and Toronto, but the film is careful to show the process wasn’t always easy: Mau recounts some in his small army of young design innovators rebelling against his lack of top-down direction and wide-open creative approach.
The documentary is punctuated with Mau’s signature button-pin feel-good jargon— “DESIGN THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE”, “THINK LIKE YOU ARE LOST IN THE FOREST”. For viewers skeptical of his ideas, or the possibilities for design to solve global problems, those maxims are offset considerably by the messier human story behind the glossy graphics here. When the filmmakers finally visit Mau’s decrepit Sudbury homestead, with its peeling paint and upended furniture, it's a world away from his glossy, minimalistic graphics. But it gives a whole new, profound meaning to his push for what he dubs Massive Change.
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