Walking to Paris
The twenty-seven-year-old Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi walked from Bucharest to Paris in 1903 and 1904 as a preparation and prelude to becoming the most important sculptor of the twentieth century. Brancusi leaves his small village of Hobitza, south of the Carpathian Mountains and walks through Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and parts of France to arrive in Paris, the metropolis of world culture for the first three decades of the 1900s. He walks in spring, summer, winter and autumn, treading the landscape away from the beaten track, experiencing sights, having adventures, suffering hardships, looking, touching and feeling the world as a preparation of what is to come for him. The film features many versions of certain of Brancusi's later manufactured sculptures and makes suggested inspiration for them on his 1,200-mile walk. It is a film to be seen from an artist's point of view: concentrating on ideas, materials, forms and textures taken from the sculptor's observations of the landscape as he walks across Europe. His journey of fifteen months then ends beneath the nocturnal Eiffel Tower where, illuminated by the Tower's blinding light, he displays to the world his sculptor's hammer and chisel and quietly says, 'I am ready.'
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