The Brutalist - Not a Review

What is a masterpiece today? Who is a master?

I thought I would take some screen captures while watching the film The Brutalist, but this is what I got: just the subtitles. Very disappointing of Apple TV to block screen capture like that. Brutal actually, but such is the copyright fanaticism of the media industries now.

This is not a review of the film The Brutalist. It is some stills from the movie with my comments. I’m not sure what to think about the film.

Brutalism is a little-known style of modern architecture that does not deserve more attention than it has gotten. It is an unattractive style, but is based on an interesting theory, which is worth knowing about. I would encourage you to look it up if you’re interested, starting with Wikipedia.

The Brutalist movie storyline is interesting enough, but more interesting to me was the film technique when it veered into brutalism itself. It could have been filmed even more “brutally” if you will, but doing so would have made the film avante-garde, appealing to a small minority of people who “got it.” Instead, The Brutalist movie is sort of avant-garde lite. The claims that is an “epic,” or “instant classic” are hype. But it is a good and interesting movie.

Unable to capture any images from the film myself, I surfed around a bit and found this website, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8999762/mediaindex/, which has 327 images from the film (some are publicity shots) which are a fair sampling of stills.

The opening sequence of The Brutalist shows the massive steel Statue of Liberty weightlessly pivoting in a counterclockwise motion. Powerful.

Brutalism, as an aesthetic movement or style, is about raw materials. Brutalist design is blocky and undecorated. There is little to look at or appreciate other than the materials. That is the whole point. There are a few glimpses of the architect that the film is about sketching in a brutalist way.

Brutalist architecture is ugly and hostile, aggressively so. But sidle up to some exposed concrete sometime and you will find it surprisingly warm. Which is part of the theory of brutalism: honest, humble materials for straightforward useful buildings.

Intercutting the film with documentary films from the period anchors the story in a kind of historical realism. The film is fiction but has a kind of authenticity.

The primary narrative is about survivors of the brutality of World War 2 and their efforts to re-establish themselves in America. One character manifests her WW2 trauma by being unable to or refusing to speak. We are brutalized by the rawness and impermeability of her silence.

Other characters embody other forms of brutality: a child loses his mother at a young age. The father goes to war but is profoundly motivated to survive and return to look after him.

There are allusions to the cultural undercurrents of the time: post-war New York — jazz, heroin, underground clubs, prostitution. These allusions vaguely invoke bohemia, the fomenting creative class to which artists mythically belong, including the Hungarian architect (played by Adrian Brody) who is the main character.

Architects create models apparently. This is the model of the Brutalist architect’s brutal project for a community centre in rural Pennsylvania.

For a movie about architecture, The Brutalist has relatively few scenes of the construction or finished architectural monstrosity. Those few scenes attempt to convey the massiveness of the design.

I previously have said I might review The Brutalist in the context of my series On Conservative Aesthetics (index here). The reason is that I am working on the idea that there is something conservative about cultural modernism that we are missing. And I thought I might explore that idea by looking at the film.

Modernism has always been claimed by the liberal, left-wing avant-garde as the embodiment of progress; social justice, inclusiveness, tolerance and, dare we say, overall civilizational advance. The myth of modernism holds that rule breakers in the arts were intent on finding forms to express the experience of the modern world, to match the revolutions that were happening all around them in science and technology, the liberal arts (psychology, social science), etc. The lifestyles of modern creators have also been mythologized for rejection of norms; experimentation and exceptionalism being regularly equated with genius.

But the modern, as a movement, was also undeniably intellectual and elitist. The traditional rules of composition may have been changed or discarded entirely, but the avant-garde never lacked for rules. In the esoteric-ness of every new ism in the 20th C were (often unspoken) rules about aesthetics: not beauty exactly, but form, composition, narrative, and underlying concepts of who the audience for such works is or should be.

In the post-modern period, through institutionalization (the museums) and academicization (the universities), any dynamism of invention that may have been associated with the modernist isms has been thoroughly reified. Artworks today merely symbolize experimentation or progress.

I would like to believe there are still outliers — that they are only rare and hard to recognize — but the degree to which we are presented with ideological conformity as cultural and political progressiveness today suggests otherwise.

Would it not be useful therefor for us to reconsider modernism today? If we were to look at it in terms of rules and traditions, values and virtues, might we not find in the art of the 20th C a culture heredity that is worth preserving and building upon?

To be discussed.