Special screening of ‘The Brutalist’ at the Triplex Cinema

Yale professor Elihu Rubin led discussions before and after “The Brutalist” screening at Triplex Cinema on Feb. 2. He highlighted how the film brings architecture into focus, inviting the audience to explore Brutalism as both a style and a theme.

L. Tomaino

Special screening of ‘The Brutalist’ at the Triplex Cinema

A special screening of “The Brutalist” was held on Feb. 2 at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington. Elihu Rubin, a Henry Hart Rice Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Yale, led discussions both before and after the film.

“The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as fictional character, architect Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect. Toth trained at the Bauhaus and was interred at the concentration camp Buchenwald during World War II. The film tells of his struggle as an immigrant to gain back his standing and respect as an architect. Brody was winner of the Best Actor Golden Globe, while Bradley Corbet, director of the film, won best director and the film took home the Golden Globe for Best Film Drama. They have been nominated again for Academy Awards.

Laszlo Toth goes to work in his cousin’s furniture store when he arrives in New York, living in the storeroom and helping his cousin build up the business. When his cousin’s wife falsely accuses him of making a pass at her, he ends up living in a homeless shelter.

A would-be patron tracks him down, finds him working construction—the only job he can get—and asks, “Tell me, why is an accomplished foreign architect shoveling coal here in Philadelphia?”

Eventually, Toth gains a commission but faces prejudice as a foreigner and Jew, even though he and his wife, who he reunites with after she’d been in the concentration camp, Dachau, are both highly educated—she is an Oxford graduate and an established writer in their home country of Hungary.

Rubin began his discussion before the screening by saying, “I am thrilled this film has brought architecture to the forefront. There is something so fascinating and robust about the space Brutalist architecture creates.”

Brutalism is known for using “raw materials,” such as brick and concrete in ways that leave them visible. Rubin said that concrete is “incredibly expressive. It comes to the building site as mud and becomes what it is poured out as.”

“At first,” said Rubin, “optimism was associated with Brutalism.”

Brutalism came to the forefront of architecture in the 1950’s when it was used to reconstruct housing in the United Kingdom after WWII.

Some prime examples of Brutalist architecture include Boston City Hall, Rudolph Hall at Yale University, and the Temple Street Parking Garage in New Haven.

Rubin commented, “Brutalist architecture became the de-facto language of government and institutional architecture.”

Rubin said Brutalism began to fall out of favor in the 1970’s when it began to be associated with urban decay and totalitarian governments, who used it extensively.

Rubin asked the audience to consider two questions as they watched the film: “Why is the main character an architect… what does it bring to the emotional core?” and, “Who or what is the Brutalist in the film?”

After the screening, Rubin commentedtha Brutalist architecture is about “Getting an object to, ultimately, stand by itself.” Rubin explained that Brutalism “Throws off shadows of the past. No extraneous detail is left.” Audience members discussed how this could also be true of the character of Laszlo.

Rubin explained that architects face the challenge of “how to express themselves through someone else’s commission.” Discussion involved how Laszlo finds a way to achieve this.

The audience agreed that the film brought up some timely issues about immigration, class awareness, and acceptance, while asking them to consider how Brutalism applies to these subjects. The movie is at times, as rawly constructed as a brutalist building.

Latest News

Employment Opportunities

LJMN Media, publisher of The Lakeville Journal (first published in 1897) and The Millerton News (first published in 1932), is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit news organization.

We seek to help readers make more informed decisions through comprehensive news coverage of communities in Northwest Connecticut and Eastern Dutchess County in New York.

Keep ReadingShow less
Selectmen suspend town clerk’s salary during absence

North Canaan Town Hall

Photo by Riley Klein

NORTH CANAAN — “If you’re not coming to work, why would you get paid?”

Selectman Craig Whiting asked his fellow selectmen this pointed question during a special meeting of the Board on March 12 discussing Town Clerk Jean Jacquier, who has been absent from work for more than a month. She was not present at the meeting.

Keep ReadingShow less
Dan Howe’s time machine
Dan Howe at the Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.
Natalia Zukerman

“Every picture begins with just a collection of good shapes,” said painter and illustrator Dan Howe, standing amid his paintings and drawings at the Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School. The exhibit, which opened on Friday, March 7, and runs through April 10, spans decades and influences, from magazine illustration to portrait commissions to imagined worlds pulled from childhood nostalgia. The works — some luminous and grand, others intimate and quiet — show an artist whose technique is steeped in history, but whose sensibility is wholly his own.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, and trained at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Howe’s artistic foundation was built on rigorous, old-school principles. “Back then, art school was like boot camp,” he recalled. “You took figure drawing five days a week, three hours a day. They tried to weed people out, but it was good training.” That discipline led him to study under Tom Lovell, a renowned illustrator from the golden age of magazine art. “Lovell always said, ‘No amount of detail can save a picture that’s commonplace in design.’”

Keep ReadingShow less