Of course the other aspect of Brutalism that cannot be ignored is they way creative thinkers have viewed it’s starkly modern profiles as redolent of dystopian visions of the future. And thus it has found its way into science fiction as well as contemporary commentaries on broken societies. Perhaps for this reason it has long been erroneously cited as a cause of rotting social values - something that is probably rather apposite at the moment.
Perhaps the first motion picture to utilise Brutalist architecture in this way was Jean Luc Goddad’s Alphaville, 1965, which opens with the central protagonist Lemmy Caution, posing as journalist Ivan Johnson, (you have to admire the inspired creation of character names here) driving his Ford Mustang past a series of concrete cluster blocks amid darkened Parisian streets.
But probably one of the starkest visions of the future came six years later with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange which chronicles the life of ultra-violent Alex and his ‘rehabilitation’, based on the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel. Here locations like Thamesmead and Brunel University create stark backdrops to the unfolding action. At Thamesmead, Alex brutally attacks the rest of his own gang, his ‘droogs’, sending them crashing into Southmere Lake. What you see behind them in this slow-motion nightmare is the terraced bands of concrete dwellings and overlapping concrete structures which have a curious poetic purity, especially reflected in the water of the lake in a slight early morning mist. The whole scene, its content and location, is unalloyed Brutalism. Richard Sheppard’s superbly visceral lecture theatre E at Brunel University (1972) in Middlesex forms the backdrop to Alex’s correctional therapy, the Ludovico Institute, where he is infamously forced to watch a series of violent images with his eyes clamped open.
Thamesmead, with its scale and variety of shape and height, seems to have been favoured by film makers as it crops up quite regularly. It was used rather more positively by director Anthony Simmons in his film The Optimists, released in 1973 and starring Peter Sellers. Here two children who live in poor conditions on one side of the river, see Thamesmead as somewhere they aspire to living. More recently the site was used extensively as the location for the British television series MisFits, in which a group of young offenders are caught in an extraordinary storm that imbues them with special powers.
Another horrific glimpse at a possible future was directed by Danny Boyle and released in 2002; 28 Days Later which chronicles the trials of Jim, played by Cillian Murphy, as he evades hordes of psychotic crazies following an epidemic of the ‘rage’ virus from which he, and a handful of others, were spared. One of the locations used was Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower in Poplar (occasionally miss-attributed to Trellick Tower) where the character Frank, played by Brendan Gleeson, gives refuge to Jim before they set off for salvation in Manchester. Balfron, like it’s younger sister Trellick, has achieved iconic Brutalist status given its architectural pedigree and extraordinary profile. It is relentlessly powerful, domineering its setting and presiding over its surrounding, equally Brutalist, estate. It seems surprising that it hasn’t been used more frequently.
Trellick, of course, has been used as a visual backdrop more than once. In Martyn Atkins 1988 video for Depeche Mode’s Little Fifteen, the group are seen posing mournfully in monochrome around Goldfinger’s edifice. It also crops up in a 1979 episode of the British TV series The Professionals. In The Madness of Mickey Hamilton, the titular Mickey lives in a top floor flat where he plots acts of terrorism. We are treated to a glimpse inside and on the balcony as well as the building exterior when the CI5 team track their quarry down. As the character Cowley, played by the wonderful Gordon Jackson, looks up at the iconic concrete slab he comments in typical Hibernian drawl “I think I’d go mad if I had to stay here.”
Perhaps the most celebrated and oft referenced use of Brutalism in a film is when Owen Luder Partnership’s Trinity Square car park in Gateshead takes a starring role in Mike Hodges superbly gritty Get Carter. In this cult 1971 Michael Caine vehicle, his hard boiled gangster character travels to Newcastle to find the truth behind his brother’s death. The car park, designed by Rodney Gordon, poses as a building project presided over by Cliff Brumby, played by Bryan Mosley, and features a number of times. But it is the scene where Jack Carter confronts Brumby and ends up throwing him off the staircase that everyone remembers, setting as it did a brutal marriage between content and backdrop. It is recorded that the director, Hodges, knew Rodney Gordon of the Owen Luder partnership but hadn’t realised he’d designed the car park. Gordon, meanwhile, had always assumed the architect character at the start of the Carter-Brumby scene was a send up of him but this was apparently not true.
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