Word: brzeska
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Russells hands Gaudier Brzeska's life history has become the means to exploit in a richer vein Hollywood drivel about driven genius. His Graudier Brzeska is Artiste Extraordinaire; sacreligious, spontaneous ironic, innocent; ahead his time and shunned for flouting truth that shock prevailing social mores Russell films a disconnected string of melodramatic conceits to give us this bravura story of genius martyred through the neglect of bourgeois complacency...
EARLY IN THE FILM, Gaudier Brzeska is chased by guards from the Louvre for indecent dress, an untucked shirttail. He cludes them to emerge sprawied stop a giant Negro sculpture, screaming with messianic fervor. "Art is alive! People have to be shocked into life!" At a Bohemian dinner Gaudier Brzeska's lack of restraint disgusts his pseudo-sophisticate hosts. An art dealer, Shaw baits him maliciously until his braggadaccio traps him into promising an exhibition of non-existent marble sculptures the following morning. So the irrepressible Gaudier Brzeska drags a simpering homosexual friend out of bed rushes to a cemetery...
...straddling he peak, black cape whipping in the winds, he cuts a lone prophet figure against a clear sea; meanwhile the dances out her care-free spiritual applause on the sand, crying. "It will be a hymn to Truth and Beauty!" Or take the ending of the film: Gaudier-Brzeska's last unsculpted block of stone stands forgotten in a Paris sewer. Through the grating above, all of Paris can be seen celebrating the end of the war, while below Sophic Brzeska circles the stone in silent mourning...
...problem is that Russell's idea of a psychological study probes no deeper than surface sensuality. He is indifferent to the artist beneath. For his empathy with Gaudier-Brzeska is based on no more than the latter's rebellion against society's distrust of freely expressed emotion. It is finally a shallow empathy that perverts sympathy into sensationalism. He sees himself as the artist messiah, bridging the gulf between art and life with a film style incarnating creative energy. But his subject depends on its special social and artistic history for its form and interest, and Russell piles on period...
Russell films as if life were a field day for the senses, but senses robbed of the emotions that give them substance. He makes Gaudier-Brzeska's tragic sex life into a raucous wrestling match, and uses dazzling film effects as if they came off a camera's vanity table. As he wallows in style he turns what should be a tribute into an exercise in his taste for the absurd. This is simply anti-erotic and all too conventional...