The Fountainhead is the title of a recent version of the 1949 film (directed by King Vidor), made by Société Réaliste, a Parisian art collective founded in 2004 by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. Vidor’s film took its name from the famous novel by Ayn Rand and was therefore a true manifesto of objectivism, the ideal society that the Russian philosopher based on individualism and a political-economic system capable of ensuring the full realization of individual values; in a nutshell a pure capitalism in which any form of social assistance is intolerable. In the deconstruction made by the Parisian collective all the actors are removed as well as the dialogues. What is left of the original, then? The only things left are the environments and architectural spaces characteristic of New York in the mid-twentieth century, a stream that – in the interpretation of the Société Réaliste – materializes modernist doctrines and symbolizes the Promethean challenge accepted by the architects of the time.

Vito Campanelli