BRANCUSI FILMED ☛ Directed by Man Ray, Constantin Brâncuși | France, 1923

BRANCUSI FILMED ☛ Directed by Man Ray, Constantin Brâncuși | France, 1923

In the early 1920's, Man Ray, who had previously taught Constantin Brancusi how to handle a still camera, introduced him to the movie camera. These fifty minutes of film, shot between 1923 and 1939, representing the sum total of all the images ever filmed by Brancusi, have never been shown before.

This is both an exceptional document on the sculptor filming himself at work in the studio and an integral part of his creative output. As with his photography, Brancusi makes use of framing, shadows, incident light and refraction in order to activate the plastic properties of his sculptures, and opens up this visual analysis to movement and to time. Leda and Fish can therefore be seen revolving slowly on their plinths, the coloums are given life in long upward panning shots and the changes in light play on the glass roof of the studio, now transformed into a film set. A long sequence is devoted to Brancusi's journey to Romania and the construction of the endless column in Târgu Jiu.

Constantin Brâncuși; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered a pioneer of modernism, one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century, Brâncuși is called the patriarch of modern sculpture. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1905 to 1907. His art emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Brâncuși sought inspiration in non-European cultures as a source of primitive exoticism, as did Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, André Derain and others. However, other influences emerge from Romanian folk art traceable through Byzantine and Dionysian traditions.