Resisting Power

Cinema, Architecture, and Power

Seen some time ago, it is the season of year-end film rankings that brings The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s film, back to my mind. The film appears in several rankings, since although it is a 2024 production, its international release took place in 2025.

And, by sheer coincidence perhaps, this film resurfaces at a timely moment in my life, as it coincides with a period in which the notion of power manifests itself in all its forms: in its moral perversions, through the Epstein affair; in its arrogance, through the capture of Maduro; in its violence, through the repression of protesters in Iran; and in its new incarnations. I am thinking in particular of the importance now granted to the control of digital space, symbolized recently by Israel’s intention to invest in ChatGPT in order to influence its responses in a direction favorable to its interests.

If I speak of a “timely moment,” it is first and foremost because The Brutalist is a film about power, as is often the case with films that revolve around architects or architecture itself.

Several recent films bear witness to this, such as The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer, with its enclosure wall erected to block out the atrocities committed in the Auschwitz camp, or Megalopolis by Francis Ford Coppola, with its analogy between the Roman Empire and the American Empire.

And even if architecture is not directly at the center of the narrative, I also think of The Apprentice, which, by revisiting the early career of Donald Trump as a real estate developer, reminds us how power is, above all, a matter of controlling space. There is, of course, a vast body of literature on the subject, and in my own case I am particularly reminded of Michel Foucault’s work on disciplinary society.

In these works, Foucault draws on the model of the panoptic structure, a form of carceral architecture enabling constant surveillance, to analyze how power, through its organization of space, seeks to regulate behavior without needing to manifest itself continuously.

And to return to Donald Trump, more than these recent films, there is one film that functions as a mirror to The Brutalist: The Fountainhead by King Vidor, released in 1949 and adapted from a novel by the high priestess of libertarianism, Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand, who was frequently invoked at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, as he was surrounded by figures such as Elon Musk, adherents of this philosophy advocating a minimal state in order to unleash the forces of individualism and what she called “rational selfishness.”

If this film mirrors The Brutalist, it is because in both cases we encounter an architect thwarted in his ambitions, but by two diametrically opposed forms of power.

The power of society and the constraints of the state in The Fountainhead, where an architect refuses to sacrifice his vision to meet the demands of a collective incapable of recognizing his genius.

And the power of the “rational egoist” in The Brutalist, where we follow a Holocaust survivor whose American dream culminates in his rape by the wealthy industrialist who commissioned him to build a community center.

Without attempting to decide which of these two forms of power is ultimately the lesser evil, what strikes me as most compelling is the way in which, despite everything, László Tóth, the architect at the heart of The Brutalist, manages to resist the power to which he is subjected.

Time as a Form of Resistance to Power

This is, above all, why now is the right time to recall The Brutalist. Especially for me, as a Lebanese, and perhaps for others as well, since one of the paradigms of this new form of power, based on control over digital space, lies in dividing individuals between those who are entitled to exercise freedom of expression and those for whom doing so entails risk.

There is the example of Israel and ChatGPT, but one might also think of entry into the United States, where access to one’s social media history is now required.

It is precisely this form of resistance that The Brutalist addresses: the ability to tell one’s story and articulate one’s vision of the world despite these constraints.

In the film, this idea takes shape through the way László Tóth secretly subverts the commission given to him by the wealthy industrialist in order to preserve a trace of his personal history. The building he constructs throughout the film ultimately reveals itself to be a replica of the concentration camp where his family was imprisoned.

More than Michel Foucault, whose analysis focuses on the structure of power, this notion of resistance brings to mind the work of Michel de Certeau.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau analyzes how, in the face of the “strategies” employed by power to control knowledge and space, it remains possible to develop “tactics” of resistance. These arts of tactics share a common feature: they are articulated around the notion of time.

Thus, while power devises strategies to master physical or digital space, the tactician possesses time, enabling them to slip beneath the radar of power and the “discipline” it seeks to impose.

While the example most often cited to illustrate this idea is the chapter “Walking in the City,” where de Certeau shows how one can always invent one’s own path within a space planned by another, The Brutalist above all evokes for me his concept of the “wig” (la perruque).

Through this concept, de Certeau describes the way one can divert time and materials within a workplace in order to do something for oneself.

And alongside time, the other defining aspect of tactics in de Certeau’s thought emerges in this quotation from his essay: “Everyday life invents itself through a thousand ways of poaching.”

It is this art of using time, and this poaching, tinkering subject described by de Certeau, that I find myself thinking about today, as the disciplinary society described by Foucault appears to be entering a new phase with the digital tools now placed at the disposal of power.

The Tomb Instead of the Hut

To conclude with an architectural metaphor, whether one considers de Certeau’s work or what is symbolized by the structure built by László Tóth, this brings to mind writings on the history of architecture that often question which came first: tombs or huts.

Without seeking to answer this question, what interests me most in the distinction between these two architectural forms is that the hut represents the ephemeral, whereas the tomb reflects a desire to leave a trace through time.

And if my own sensibility leans toward what the tomb represents, it is certainly not an invitation for those who resist to dig their own graves, but rather an invitation to take the time to construct metaphorical tombs in order to thwart the strategy of power that seeks to erase certain voices and entire segments of history.