Richard* Bello’s life is a testament to the fact that there’s no single way to measure
success – or the sum of hard work. As a young man, Bello lived in Los Angeles,
working for the influential modernist architect Richard Neutra. It was a
prestigious position that left Bello utterly unfulfilled – a ‘creative’ job
that involved no creative work.
After
leaving to build his own ‘speculation houses’ without ready buyers in mind, he
found that prospective customers loved his designs, but were less enthusiastic
about actually inhabiting the somewhat precarious-looking structures.
Disenchanted by urban life and struggling to make ends meet, Bello and his late
wife, Vanna Rae Bello, bought 400 acres in a remote, redwood-covered stretch of
northern California and started a family together.
‘Two’s a
multitude … one alone is not fun,’ Bello offers in the short documentary A
Little Piece of Earth, which finds him, at age 86, 10 years widowed, but still
driven by a desire to keep a small slice of the planet all his own. His voice
is good-humoured but touched with melancholy as he reminisces about building an
off-the-grid life from the ground up alongside his wife, and without outside
obstruction. And yet, resigned that he’ll never find another love comparable to
Vanna and unsure what will become of their beloved Bello Ranch, he’s able to
shake off depression by living out the mantra ‘be active, and be creative, and
be alive.’
The US
director Ryan Malloy crafts a moving account of Bello’s twilight years in his
short documentary. Deploying sweeping shots of Bello’s serene architecture,
built to look as if it’s sprouted from the soil of the scenic northern
Californian landscape, Malloy blurs the lines between person and place,
crafting a poignant portrait of a singular life.
* he's actually called Charles...
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