KULTURA / CULTURE
This film that was shot with a miniscule budget nonetheless impressively presents the beauty and uniqueness of Brutalist architecture, in a very specific way Mighty concrete beauties THE BRUTALIST AND BRUTALISM
Ova upečatljiva arhitektura sve veću popularnost ima kod Instagram generacije This striking architecture is increasingly popular with the Instagram generationw
A drian Brody has made a major comeback to the film world with Brady Corbett’s The Bruta- list, winning his second Oscar some 22 years after he earned one for Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. The plot follows the life of Hunga- rian-Jewish architect László Toth, who survived the Holocaust before moving to America with his wife, in pursuit of the “American dream”. The Brutalist is a very specific film in that it approaches the struggle for a better life from three angles: through personal conflict and a ruthless class stratified society, as well as in the cre- ative form and rise of brutalism. Over the course of the film, the buildings that László designed become charac- ters in the story. They testify to his life, becoming places where all conflicts and
crucial moments occur, but also bear witness to all the evil and arrogance that László endured. In parallel with the construction of these buildings, László also built a new life for himself, with the buildings he designed become his escapism and a metaphorical rep- resentation of his psychological state. The film is impressive in presenting the development of Brutalist architecture all the way up to the 1970s, following László's life to the very end. In direct- ing the work, Corbett made László’s masterpiece the narrator of this tragic story, but the production designer was actually responsible for creating the ar- chitect’s vision. Presenting it on screen without actually constructing it was a real feat of cinematography. Central to the plot of The Brutalists is a gargantu- an structure known as the Van Buren Institute. It is located in Pennsylva-
nia and made of concrete. The sym- bol of the cross is formed by the empty space between the two towers that ex- tend high above. When light floods in- to the chapel, the same emblem illu- minates the marble reflection. Viewers asked where they could visit the insti- tute and received the answer ‘nowhere! None of it is real!’ And while the buildings in the film are imagined, the countries of the former Yugoslavia are still proudly adorned with high rise concrete buildings that lack much in the way of decoration and stand as representatives of bru- talist architecture and silent witness- es of the bygone times that they still testify to clearly to this day. Some peo- ple view them as just old, grey build- ings that lack any significance, while they have a much greater emotional value for older residents of the Serbian
44 | Arhitektura » Architecture
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