A Test of Violence

US

Documentary
14 min     6.5     1969     US

Overview

Stuart Cooper's short about the work of Spanish artist Juan Genovés is an inspired introduction to the works of this extraordinary artist, exploring its minimalist aesthetic and storytelling qualities through a variety of cinematic techniques, including rostrum, animation, news footage and live action recreations.

Reviews

CinemaSerf wrote:
This takes quite an interesting look at the paintings of Spaniard Juan Genovés but I found it rather submerges them in a little too much confusing artistic gimmickry that rather overwhelms the artistry in a blur of augmented and sometimes quite oblique graphics and imagery. His paintings, when they do feature, offer us a starkly powerful and often bleakly crafted monochrome look at our inhumanity to each other with the only colour involved being blood red, but as this film’s creator Stuart Cooper starts to add his own perspective to the man’s work it loses it’s focus, especially when the wartime video - that doesn’t look so very authentic, to be honest - starts to superimpose itself and a bit repetitively too. I found this to be a bit messy, busy and disappointing.

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