Three notes on ‘The Brutalist’

The Brutalist, which has just won three Oscars, offers a romanticized retelling of the career of a famous Hungarian-Jewish architect who survived the Shoah. A brilliant film, it nevertheless takes the risk, through its approximations and exaggerations, of missing one of the dimensions of this story – the one relating to architecture, which is at the heart of the film. An insight by architect Albert Levy.

 

 

A 3.5-hour epic, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a big hit in theaters. Named one of the ten best films of 2024 by the American Film Institute, it has received numerous awards at the Venice Mostra, the Golden Globes, and three Oscars in Hollywood. It is the story of Laslo Toth, a Hungarian Jewish architect and Shoah survivor who was imprisoned in Buchenwald. He left Europe for America in 1947, followed by his disabled wife and traumatized niece.

An architect trained at the Bauhaus, known in Hungary for his modernist achievements, he sought to rebuild his career in this new country, but came up against American society, its WASP mentality, McCarthyism and racism, and when he was commissioned to design a religious community center, he found it difficult to impose his revolutionary ideas and bring them to fruition. He ends up leaving America for Israel, disillusioned, thinking that “The whole country is rotten.” The film, a fictional biopic, is said to be inspired by the life of the Hungarian Jewish architect Marcel Lajos Breuer (1902-1981), who also trained at the Bauhaus but immigrated to the USA in 1937, before the Nazi cataclysm, and has since become a world figure of brutalism, internationally recognized for his work and his furniture. Remarkably produced and performed, the film, which deals with the architect’s creative work and his difficulties, nevertheless contains errors regarding the history of architecture. But, above all, it also deals with the not always easy return of the Shoah survivors and their not always simple integration into their host country.

First remark: the Bauhaus architects, Jewish or non-Jewish, fleeing Nazism, were generally well received in the USA, and Breuer, the inspiration for the film, is a good example. He had a brilliant career there, crowned by the AIA gold medal in 1968, and his work includes the UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1953, with André Zehrfuss and Pier Luigi Nervi). The Bauhaus, transferred from Dessau to Berlin in 1933, was deemed a degenerate art school by the Nazis and closed, forcing the artists and architects who taught there to flee, mainly to America. This was the case, for example, of Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), who were offered important posts in the best schools and institutes and numerous commissions: they left their mark and strongly influenced post-war American architecture. A Bauhaus was even set up in Chicago in 1937 by immigrant artists, which became the Illinois Institute of Design in 1949. It should also be remembered that some of the European Jewish architects from the Bauhaus, or trained elsewhere, emigrated to Palestine (Arieh Sharon, 1900-1984, Erich Mendelsohn, 1887-1953), where they participated in the construction of the country, and in particular of Tel Aviv (founded in 1909) which, with its 4000 “Bauhaus” buildings, was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003 (the White City). Similarly, an important brutalist, formalist and modular school developed in Israel around figures such as Zvi Hecker (1931-2023) and Alfred Newman (1900-1968), who also contributed to shaping the image of the country. Our hero was in Israel during this period, after leaving the USA.

Second remark. The final scene of the film, which celebrates the aged Laslo Toth, coming from Israel to receive recognition for his work in America, paradoxically takes place at the 1980 Venice Biennale, “The Presence of the Past”, is the most obvious mistake: On the contrary, this Biennale was the burial of modern architecture, international style and brutalism, the year zero of postmodernism, of the radical questioning of modernity and its progressive project. The exhibition, which was shown again in Paris, at the Salpêtrière, in October 1981, gave rise to a vast controversy between modernists and postmodernists from which we have not emerged. With its return to the past, borrowings from neoclassicism, eclecticism, regionalism, etc., postmodernism, with its historicist formalism, has produced a new urban landscape, of which the new towns of the Paris region provide a glimpse (Palais D’Abraxas by Ricardo Boffil in Noisy-le-Grand). In the same year, the historian Charles Jencks published The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, putting forward the (absurd) idea that modern architecture is a non-language that communicates nothing. The American novelist Tom Wolf also published, in 1981, his scathing attack on the Bauhaus, From Bauhaus to our house, a virulent critique of the contribution of modern architects from Europe. The 1980s were a turning point in the history of architecture, marking the end of modernity and ushering in the era of postmodernism.

The last remark concerns the origin of brutalism, mentioned in the film: it is said to be inspired by the experiences of the Second World War, the architecture of the camps, their construction, their atmosphere, their configuration, which brutalist architecture is said to have tried to translate in a certain way. This imaginary link does not exist. According to the English historian Reyner Banham (The New Brutalism, 1966), the inventor of the term “brutalism” was the Swedish architect Hans Asplund (1921-1994) in 1949. Generally speaking, this plastic trend stems from the use of raw concrete in the architecture of the 1950s, years of reconstruction when reinforced concrete was used on a massive scale. The defects and technical imperfections of this material, noted by Le Corbusier – another inventor of brutalism – in his Unité d’habitation in Marseille (1952), were exalted, reversed and celebrated by brutalism as a new aesthetic of raw materials and materials, an aesthetic of imperfection to be made visible: “The realization of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille brought to contemporary architecture the certainty of the possible splendor of reinforced concrete used as a raw material in the same way as stone, wood or terracotta”. Le Corbusier was then moving away from his first purist aesthetic period, the white period, where he sought instead to highlight “volumes assembled under the light”, of which his Villa Savoie (1930) is the perfect example.

Corbet’s film conveys the mythology of the Promethean figure of the architect as demiurge, idealistic and visionary creator who wants to remake the world, romantic figure of the artist, misunderstood genius, living in poverty, who fights and sacrifices himself for his ideas, without compromise. But, beyond the romantic biopic of a misunderstood architect who fights to defend his creation, what the film also and above all shows, through the remarkable performance of Adrien Brody (and the other actors and actresses), is the story of a man broken by great History, that of a survivor traumatized by the hell of the camps, who lost the Europe he loved, who saw his family and loved ones decimated. The story of a fragile Shoah survivor, who only holds on through heroin, and who, after a difficult and failed stint in America – the strange scene in the cave in Carrara, Italy, where he is raped by his sponsor is a metaphor for his experiences in this country, which the director undoubtedly wanted to represent in this way – ended up leaving for Israel with his wife, joining his niece there, finding refuge in this new Hebrew state, a refuge which, as we know, is today shaken.

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Albert Levy