Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

1968 30mMovie

This is a film about the work of the young French Vorticist sculptor who died in World War I and his ties to London and to Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Much of the commentary comes from Gaudier's letters, his manifestos, and other writings by him. As with the Klippel films, the challenge was to bring the works in 3 dimensions to the film in 2 dimensions. If viewed in the context of a time when we were starting to specialize in art movies (we were trying to make a movie about the Vorticist movement), we noticed that we got bored with the documentary form, realizing that we didn't want to continue making movies this way. It was also around this time that we discovered the large amount of avant-garde cinema being made in America and Europe, at the 1967-68 edition of the Knokke Festival in Belgium, which confirmed our true interest.