For better or worse, because of Visconti’s classic film the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony now inevitably means Venice in its gloomiest moods. So there turned out to be a grim timeliness in a performance on an evening that coincided with the most devastating “acqua alta” to flood the city in half a century. Yet, in keeping with everything he does with the London Philharmonia Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski’s reading at the Royal Festival Hall made us think afresh about an iconic work and dispel its more hackneyed, reach-me-down associations.

This is a book about experiences that go beyond reading about art. Martin Gayford’s 20 short essays about press trips and self-motivated travel concern meetings – in the flesh, in real time and space – with art that includes murals, sculptures and glacier waters, and with artists through interviews and studio visits. For a book whose title is a riff on Nancy Mitford’s touching novel, The Pursuit of Love, it is also a subtle paean to the enormous variety of objects, buildings and paintings that we deem art, as well as its history and practitioners.

Under a turbulent sky racked with jagged clouds suggesting bolts of lightning, pale figures hurl themselves into a spitting expanse of water. Swathed in white towels, other figures mingle with the pink bodies, seeming to process along the pier as if towards a baptism. Swimmers’ vigorous arms overtop their submerged heads; on land, no individual face is distinguished. As if exuberance could tip at any time into anarchy, a sense of threat pervades the depiction of communal leisure.

Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect.

The centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus (literally, “Building House”) art school is on us, prompting publications and exhibitions worldwide.

At first sight, performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – premiered in 1913 and sometimes seen as presaging the whole world of modernism – in the centenary year of the 1918 Armistice might seem to be lagging behind in timing (if centenaries float your boat).

The director of this deeply charming debut feature is the Korean-American film critic who writes under the pseudonym Kogonada; one of his principle interests over the years has been the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, and there’s something of the same considered emotional restraint of feeling in Columbus, which takes its title from the Indiana location where its slight action is set.

The small Midwestern town turns out to boast – or rather not, since it seems to remain rather little known – a remarkable selection of contemporary architecture, buildings commissioned over the years by enlightened patrons from major industry figures such as IM Pei and Richard Meier, Eero Saarinen and Myron Goldsmith. It looks like something of a paradise of modernism, the sheer pleasure of the shapes all the more striking for the quiet and green location in which they are set.

Subtlety is supreme, as is restraint of pace

If ever you felt that buildings could become characters in a film, that is true in Columbus, where they act almost as a sounding-board for emotions that develop, in the quietest possible way, between its two main protagonists (both have their own connections to architecture). Twenty-something graduate Casey (played beautifully by Haley Lu Richardson) has absorbed the visual experiences that her world offers, and is biding time working as a librarian, reluctant to leave her vulnerable mother, who is recovering from addiction. Any realisation that her world lies beyond the borders of her small town is temporarily soothed by a closeness – but so far, no more – with her fellow librarian Dave (Rory Culkin, sweet, the family allegiances very evident in that face).

Fate brings her together with Jin (John Cho), newly arrived in Columbus after his famous architect father, who was in town to deliver a lecture, collapses with a stroke: they meet (pictured below) between the library where she works, and the guesthouse where he is staying in the room that had been booked for his father (there's something strange in his inhabiting another’s space). His only other company is the older man’s companion/amanuensis Eleanor (Parker Posey, how good to see her back on screen), but while she will eventually move on, the rituals of Korean society suggest that he should remain with his father almost indefinitely, although their relationship in life had clearly been distant.

In terms of what happens, that’s about it… Casey is also training as a tour guide, so it’s natural for her to show Jin around; at first there’s a quiet distance between these two loners, both preoccupied by their parental bonds, and any sense of growing intimacy comes slowly. It is principally unspoken: Columbus is a wonderful film for its treatment of silence, the absences and presences of words somehow mirroring the forms that architecture defines in space.

Subtlety is supreme, as is restraint of pace: he proves that what may not keep our attention can nevertheless maintain our interest. Elisha Christian’s restrained cinematography is perfect in drawing out the delights of the spatial world through which these characters move, as does the ambient electronica of Nashville band Hammock.

The only extra here is a short booklet interview with the director (taken by Jason Wood), but Kogonada’s sparse words convey rather a lot: for instance, when he talks of how Columbus the town offered “magnificent buildings [that] exist within the context of everyday life, made ordinary in their everydayness”. Or how, partly in its balance formalism and humanity, he finds Ozu’s work helps him in “being modern in this world without losing my soul”. An enticing debut, one that stays with you, growing incrementally, after viewing.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Columbus