A Test of Violence

Stuart Cooper directs this look at Spanish artist Juan Genoves. And with him as composer is Paul Glass, who would collaborate with him again on their hugely successful "Overlord". Does that make this a precursor to "Overlord"? Despite appearing on that film's Blu-Ray as a special feature, no.

In many ways, this look at art is very much a piece of art itself. Rather than simply interview Genoves or talk about the man's work, Cooper used this film to showcase the art and make it dance, adding a new dimension that is not evident in the paintings themselves. This is an interesting take and it would be nice to know what Genoves thinks of Cooper's work.

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.