Brutalist Premolition

The image flips, snaps, pictures of this place and that, a boy appears revealing his kick-me-ups to be the driving force of these image turns. He’s enclosed tomb-like in a bedroom, we’ve yet to register that this is the place of the pictures. Snaking concrete blocks crowd around a conspicuous hump of grass, themselves encircled by tarmac channels filtering all else past and away. Its bedrock a utopian team dream for living space. Whilst the sounds of the outside can be heard, we stay within. Satellite television plays persistently, it’s a daybreak show out of time with this one; it’s both background and back-story, like all the other pictures in the frame. The family wait the arrival of the TV actors, since that’s what they are. In a barbarous act of image violence, those that stage the banality of our everyday lives enter here in suspended self-similarity. We know you well, they could say to each other. What proceeds is prism like, whilst they occupy this same space their narratives criss-cross in a kind of tele-visual spatial hallucination, the family congenially host the actors, assuming the characters of a brutal father, vengeful son and poisoned child. (GP)Brutalist Premolition is set within an apartment on the sprawling Robin Hood Gardens Estate in East London, a key example of post-war New Brutalist architecture intended as a utopian form of large-scale social housing. Facing demolition, the estate houses a predominantly Muslim Bengali community. The film sees the introduction of two Asian actors from the British ‘soap’ series EastEnders into a family unit, performing intensive melodramic script fragments. In effect, the hyper-professionalism of the actors is seen against the relatively banal underplaying of the family.