FRI 24 JAN
Coming Soon to
Chelsea Theater
215 mins |
Rated
TBC
Directed by Brady Corbet
Starring Felicity Jones, Isaach De Bankolé, Stacy Martin, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Alessandro Nivola, Alessandro Nivola, Isaach De Bankolé, Emma Laird, Raffey Cassidy, Guy Pearce, Adrien Brody
It’s not the journey, it’s the destination.
From writer-director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux, The Childhood of a Leader), winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, comes the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, after surviving the Holocaust, emigrates to the United States to begin a new life while awaiting the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece following the war.
What László finds upon his arrival in the West is an America far different from the one he expected. The promise of the American Dream proves to be illusory as his stature and reputation as a successful architect in Budapest do not translate to his blue-blood Pennsylvania surroundings.
Writer/Director, Brady Corbet, fought tooth and nail to film this epic, Post-War immigrant story on VistaVision, Paramount's wide format film stock created in 1954. Other wider format, epic film stocks have been created since, but VistaVision is iconic and places the audience firmly in the period in which the story is set. To picture VistaVision think about the Technicolor vistas in John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (1956) or Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958) and NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959).
For a film about an architect and his relationship to the massive architectural world around him, this monumental story requires such a format. One can set up the camera on the curb facing a building and catch the entire width of a skyscraper within the frame. VistaVision stopped being used in the US for principal photography only a few years after its first use in 1954, being used mainly for special effects process shots in the decades since (STAR WARS, INTERSTELLAR), but the stock was used more regularly outside the US, mainly in Japan. Before THE BRUTALIST, the last film to use VistaVision for its primary stock was THE END OF EVANGELION, a Japanese anime film released in 1997. In the US the last film to use VistaVision as its primary stock was in 1961...But VistaVision is back this year for THE BRUTALIST as well as Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming THE BATTLE OF BAKTAN CROSS (Working Title) starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
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It’s not the journey, it’s the destination.
From writer-director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux, The Childhood of a Leader), winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, comes the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, after surviving the Holocaust, emigrates to the United States to begin a new life while awaiting the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece following the war.
What László finds upon his arrival in the West is an America far different from the one he expected. The promise of the American Dream proves to be illusory as his stature and reputation as a successful architect in Budapest do not translate to his blue-blood Pennsylvania surroundings.
Writer/Director, Brady Corbet, fought tooth and nail to film this epic, Post-War immigrant story on VistaVision, Paramount's wide format film stock created in 1954. Other wider format, epic film stocks have been created since, but VistaVision is iconic and places the audience firmly in the period in which the story is set. To picture VistaVision think about the Technicolor vistas in John Ford's THE SEARCHERS (1956) or Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958) and NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959).
For a film about an architect and his relationship to the massive architectural world around him, this monumental story requires such a format. One can set up the camera on the curb facing a building and catch the entire width of a skyscraper within the frame. VistaVision stopped being used in the US for principal photography only a few years after its first use in 1954, being used mainly for special effects process shots in the decades since (STAR WARS, INTERSTELLAR), but the stock was used more regularly outside the US, mainly in Japan. Before THE BRUTALIST, the last film to use VistaVision for its primary stock was THE END OF EVANGELION, a Japanese anime film released in 1997. In the US the last film to use VistaVision as its primary stock was in 1961...But VistaVision is back this year for THE BRUTALIST as well as Paul Thomas Anderson's upcoming THE BATTLE OF BAKTAN CROSS (Working Title) starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
