The case for The Brutalist

One of the first images of The Brutalist who circulated was that of three men in a coal work. One is on a mound of that material and with a shovel in his right hand. The other waits down. Both have interrupted their work due to the surprising arrival of a man, a guy immaculately dressed and with a particular voice. The kind of character that is noticed even before saying anything.It is Harrison Lee Van Buren, a powerful businessman who seeks Lás…

The fictional work about the plight of a Holocaust survivor in the United States is a favorite to win the Oscar for best picture this year.

I’m an art historian who researches the Holocaust — here’s why I hated ‘The Brutalist’

I’m an art historian who focuses on turn-of-the-century and Nazi-ruled Vienna, and the research associate of a small Holocaust Center, so I was about as excited for the opening of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist as I have been for any film. It promised a complex, multi-layered portrait of a brilliant Eastern European survivor, an exploration of a Bauhaus-trained architect’s best works, and a look at the cultural and social tensions of post-war Amer…

The case for The Brutalist

Add The Brutalist to your watchlist Like Lady Liberty on the Hudson River in its opening scene, The Brutalist looms large. The third film from American writer/director Brady Corbet is, in our RT review’s words, an “epic in length, weight and ambition” — and at three hours and 35 minutes, it stands aloft on this year’s ballots, as striking and bold as any of the buildings designed by its architect protagonist. [image id="2187566" size="landscape_…

‘The Brutalist’, fakery and Zionism.

The Brutalist and the Teleology of Israel A friend of mine found the film The Brutalist to be ‘epic, beautiful, disturbing’. It was but I’d like to look into what ends these attributes serve. Its effects are contrived – like all art – but I would suggest that this movie is weirdly self-conscious in its contrivances, and that this distancing itself serves a Zionist-imperialist political end. The first hint of this (unironic) detachment is the ret…