A Test of Violence(1969)

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.