Video Producer, Sarah Cowan: What’s really fascinating about Brancusi and these films is that they don’t all function the same way. This film was shot in 1932, and we see Brancusi in the courtyard of his studio, and he’s sawing through this huge hunk of limestone. We slowly discover that he’s installing a massive mantle for his fireplace in his studio.
It feels really special to see, from start to finish, the way he approaches stone. There’s some people helping him at the very beginning, but then you just see him doing all this by himself and working with this dangerous weight of the piece of limestone. He’s picking it up and shoving it into different positions. You can almost taste the dust as it clouds around him. He has his cigarette in his mouth for most of this film, which is also an amazing detail.
He’s really documenting every step of the process, so sometimes he’s almost like a documentarian, but it’s a little posed or it’s a little planned for the camera, and that is the part that, to me, feels like a home movie or something. There are times when you almost see people around him asking him, like, “Is the camera rolling?” And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, just ignore it.” He’s functioning like a filmmaker in that way.
At the end of the film, we see him celebrating this fireplace in front of a fire with his friends and then they all sit down together posing a little bit, and then Brancusi comes out from behind the camera, and they cheers their glasses of wine, and they embrace. It’s a beautiful metaphor for what he cares about: gathering people around the fire and having a nice meal. It makes sense he’d put this much care into something that’s kind of an architectural element.