notes for The Brutalist
Writer Abraham Joshua Heschel poses the question: "Is the joy of possession an antidote to the terror of time which grows to be a dread of inevitable death?" -- The Sabbath (1951) From the chapter "Architecture of Time"
Heschel goes on to posit: "It is impossible for man to shirk the problem of time. The more we think the more we realize: we can not conquer time through space. We can only master time in time." (The Sabbath)
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Adrien Brody is Laszlo Toth, an architect, in The Brutalist (2024), a new film by Brady Corbet. The story is framed around one long term project. It's to be a civic center, though one with shifting utility or lack thereof. A mid century modern; with hard sought stone and arduous processes. Its creation, and the film's narrative, arc and descend. Its pace tempered by a failure to suppress a recent torture; an interruption of living. Before we learn he is an architect, we learn Laszlo is a Hungarian Jew fleeing WW2 Europe; arriving in America.
Corbet has us enter the film inside a temporal ellipse. We see a solemn young woman; she is not speaking, and she is seemingly somewhere in Eastern Europe. Another woman's voice speaks over the image. We try to discern who she addresses, but bodies and voices appear displaced. We see fragments of a crowded hull, immigrants; we succumb to some visual disorientation . We finally gather that the female voice is of a woman, Erzsebet, in Europe, writing a letter. Her voice bridges non contiguous spaces the film cuts between: a woman in Europe and men (including Laszlo) in a crowded ship hull, about to dock in Liberty Island. The voice of Erzsebet emphasizes the lack of tense --present, past, or after. Ghosts linger on the outlines of voices and profiles.
Our eyes see, though it is hard to make out what we are shown care of obscured frames and canted angles, who to track and how to feel about it. The sounds and images also rush over us; there is little time to do anything but catch up.
Corbet's movie is interested with both architecture and temporality. For much of the story, Laszlo's concerns are building, building, building, and building. The concern is less the experience of time than it is the stoppage. Laszlo turns to external means to elicit mind altering and mind numbing sensation. Drugs, sex, drunkenness. He takes action to stop memory from intruding into the present. These exterior distractions are an echo of his craft, which is also, at his start in America -- merely a job. It is consistent material construction. Within the first quarter of the film Laszlo's interpretations of these jobs and spaces is recognized as art. We learn, without full context, that Laszlo had been an architect of some renown in Europe. So he is fulfilling a utilitarian role in America (this is Pennsylvania), but he can increasingly use his job to contribute again as an artist. What he builds he is increasingly also designing. It is architecture; a job with a point of view.
The point of view, when he is finally hired with an apparent promise of artistic election, is unclear. It lacks a decided upon use by the patron hiring him. It is perhaps one thing or perhaps four. His patron's lack of artistic confidence preys on Laszlo to fill his project to fruition. What is its purpose? To be determined. Laszlo designs in the brutalist style; acknowledging the ugliness of the world.
--Like a Cathedral--
"The beauty you see in the world is a reflection of you."
A cathedral, in style, is somewhat inseparable from expectation; ornate, baroque, romantic, perhaps even modern yet only if modernity retains a straightforward beauty and decoration.
Brutalist buildings are often synonymous with the Eastern Bloc. There is an ugly utilitarian quality intrinsic in brutalist architecture. Purpose supersedes pleasure. 1980s Estonian office buildings immediately come to mind. Often concrete in material; the style reflects construction itself, yet laid bare. There is an honesty. Here is a constructed rock. It is being used for: (an office, a convention hall, low income housing, just take your pick.) It will not lie to you with alluring curves or colors. Materialism instructs these forms: never forget the physical thing; preceding and standing over any emotion. There is an aesthetic value some champion in brutalism. That it is evocative for its bleakness; for its lack of pretense. It seems to tell us; to exist and use this is ugly. We will face and reflect the ugliness of the world. The world is made, society is created, and so is a building.
To bring Jewishness into the equation:
In a way, it lays bare a painful secret, one to effect many pained Jewish artists. Artistic creation born of the expression of depths of Jewish trauma and humiliation, will create a "thing" that is doomed to trap and evades its experience.
An old trope; a Jew with trembling knees. The sadness of the Jew's lot. Living an unending pattern of bearing witness. To survive is victory and curse. One lives, but he's unable to escape the ghosts. Is it a free passage in time if one is chained into the same mental space; the same psychic annihilation.
There is a brief minute or so inside a makeshift Synagogue. If you are Jewish or familiar with it, you soon identify this is a Yom Kippur service. Laszlo is shown, with the other male congregants, with a fist beating his chest (when the prayer books tells one to) and it corresponds to moments of solemn confessions.
This is a physical gesture; a concrete thing to do to be written in the Book of Remembrance.
Laszlo exhibits a mournful force as his fist beats his heart.
A later Yom Kippur service illustrates the depth of time to affect destiny and sanctity.
There is, in the movie's scenes, alteration of interiority; emotion and mind state, and scenes depicting shared pain, unsaid yet commonly felt. It stems from a brutal nature. These moments in time build and increasingly inform a tension between a direct narrative (spatial, geometric, materialist) and a more experiential, psychological, and mental one.
Scenes rush; eyes are often tracking rapid (trains, cars) movement into the center of its frame depth of field. Shot in Vista Vision, requiring 70mm projection at minimum not to degrade its image. But the camera bounds or angles us in with confusion. It forces us to catch up. Movement toward and movements inside drug addiction to the artistic output of someone trying to run from and turn off time and its nasty habit of giving one the space to sit and remember unbearable terror.
The attraction of shiny things; materialism, things outside the self. Drugs, transgressions, physical pleasure of all sorts. Money. They are tools, like what an architect builds with. They are the means to be rushing away from sitting with the self; escaping, as they escaped Shoah and the destruction of all the Jews in Europe.
When Laszlo's wife Erzsebet, having been displaced and stuck in Europe (vague indicator of the hurdles American quota systems lent to Jews trying to flee Eastern Europe both during the Final Solution and after) finally comes to Pennsylvania, the two are reunited and resume the marriage. Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) returns in the second half of the film, following an intermission, notable not only in keeping with the film's self reflexive midcentury construction (the film stock itself is VistaVision) but with the theme of imposing any inorganic thing to ostensibly 'stop time'.
But her presence means that the part of the void that drugs and vices were being used to fill has now reinstated itself. Then there is a larger part of that void: the loss of self and humanity and belief in humanity from whatever he experienced in the War). And that aspect is increasingly intruding in the present moments. Now that Erzsebet is there there is a voice not just inside his head but next to his head, physically felt, and speaking. There are scenes of the two of them in bed where she screams or says things to him that evoke or bring about a depth of sadness and pain that he was pushing down just enough to be hidden. While we as viewers get closer to getting information about their experiences, they remain cryptic. She says things to him about knowing everything he went through. She asks him repeatedly if he remembers telling her things about what he has done and where he has been. She shrieks of being in pain due to an injury, but the only injury we know of is her temporary wheelchair confinement due to loss of bone and muscle from hunger ('famine.') Obliterative pain brings her to beg for relief. They merge to seek medicine and share Laszlo's comfort in over medication. To have pain, to have the intrusion of physical and psychic memory annihilated. A connection is made: Drug Addiction and Diasporic Jewry.
__Phoenix Stage.__
A beautiful building; its walls a facade. They impede penetration and here they are also attempts to hide and assimilate an inner distinction. Who he is..it is obscured, and it needs to be for him to propel forward; to continue moving in a living world. It is not that he is not beautiful (he is). It is that the look inward is a shift to the stillness that leads to reflection; to turning and seeing how unseeable and ugly the past that keeps encroaching looks like. The past was Buchenwald and it was terror, it was without spirit, it was too dark to remember, but it is a memory. memory grows a worldview, a world of feelings that may not be able to die when the body moves outside the physical camp. Time keeps intruding and chasing him, the time of the past. He becomes an architect to, in a sense, stop time from brutalizing him again. All the while, his art is soaring above and beyond the category where it originated. In seeking understanding, in attempts to fit in, in attempts to be loved and accepted, the Jewish immigrant, the artist -- has exceeded expectations.
"The manufacture of tools...the building of houses...all this goes on in man's spatial surroundings." (p4, Heschel)
"Most of us...labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face. " He speaks of a psychic effect in the experience of time; as it colors the work of a geoemetric space. A stirring of the spirit. "The memorial becomes an aid to amnesia." (p4, Heschel)
Action in Corbet's film alternates between an imperfect yet hopeful existence of a Jew in a new land. Living in a shelter and comments about fixing his nose follow and precede scenes of financial and artistic success.
Scenes of commitment to craft live in between those of ecstatic heroin and alcohol abuse; sexual transgressions. Escapes. Evasions.
He starts to build the commissioned project that allows him agency; or a promised one. Then a conduit to mold material to a broken ability to live a
In the middle of the film's construction -- building life after spiritual death and ethnic destruction --there is an intermission. It comes in between the beginning and middle of the building construction. Action ceases. A stilled image, one not seen in any scene, appears on the screen; lights go up. Sound cue: A clock appears over the image; a 15 minute countdown. Here is a picture from the Past; the Past before the death (Shoah) that occurs before the film's Present.
Laszlo's years building the convention center is a concealment. A concealment from torture and pain that happened but can't be told.
It's drafted as an all purpose center. But it becomes something; ugly and beautiful as it brutally tells on itself.
It is a cathedral. A temple. A place, but not one to take up space but to spend time. A memorial.
