Dear Mr.
Richter,” the letter began. “I have been working on the idea for a feature
film, about which I would like to talk to you, if you can make that possible.
Could you give me an hour of your time?” The author, the German filmmaker
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, had been trying to get in touch with Gerhard
Richter for quite some time. Mutual acquaintances had refused to make an introduction;
no one wanted to jeopardize a relationship with the man widely considered to be
the greatest painter alive. So Donnersmarck, who is full of what Ulrich Mühe,
the lead actor in Donnersmarck’s first film, “The Lives of Others,” called
“implacable friendliness,” resorted to mailing a handwritten letter to an
address listed on Richter’s official Web site. A few days later, Richter
responded, with an invitation to visit him in Cologne.
It had
been almost a decade since “The Lives of Others,” which explores the Stasi
surveillance of artists in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic,
was awarded the 2006 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Like many European
auteurs before him, Donnersmarck, who was thirty-three when he won, found
himself drawn centripetally toward Hollywood. He and his wife, Christiane, a
lawyer who oversaw the international operations of Creative Commons and now
facilitates Donnersmarck’s career, moved to Los Angeles with their three
children. The family rented a nineteen-thirties estate in the Pacific
Palisades, near the house where Thomas Mann once lived.
In 2009,
Donnersmarck, an unabashed admirer of Hollywood maximalism—he heaps praise on
“The Terminator”—co-wrote and directed a hundred-million-dollar studio movie,
“The Tourist,” in which a spy and her lover, played by Angelina Jolie and
Johnny Depp, evade both the Mafia and Scotland Yard in the canals of Venice.
Critics had applauded the previous film; now many were dismayed. In the Times,
Manohla Dargis was gently damning. “It takes an exceptional director to prevent
an entertainment as flimsy as this from collapsing under its own
weightlessness,” she wrote. “The Tourist” went on to earn two hundred and
seventy-eight million dollars worldwide, but Donnersmarck wasn’t eager to
repeat the experience. “It was a bit like you had stayed at a super-luxurious
spa,” he told me. “It’s beautiful and objectively great, but it feels hollow. I
didn’t have that feeling of: Only I can do this.” His friends began to worry.
“I told him he should be careful not to lose too much time,” Jan Mojto, who
financed “The Lives of Others,” told me. “He said, ‘Between Thomas Mann’s
“Buddenbrooks” and “Royal Highness” there are nearly ten years.’ I thought,
He’s losing his mind, so better bring him back. Then Florian tells me, ‘I have
an idea.’ ”
Donnersmarck
had been looking for a way to illustrate, in film, the healing power of art.
Over breakfast in Los Angeles, he explained how Richter had turned a life of
profound trauma and loss into creative grist. “This man has lived through
everything imaginable,” he told me. “He’s lived through his mother being raped
by the Russians, his father committing suicide, his aunt being euthanized, both
of his uncles being killed on the Eastern Front, his childhood classmates being
killed in the bombing of Dresden, the experience of incredible impoverishment.
Yet he manages to take all these things and charge them, in his paintings, with
this mystical energy that comes from the suffering.” In this way, Donnersmarck
said, art becomes an emblem of resilience, even productivity: “It gives us that
wonderful feeling that our suffering can be of use.”
At eighty-six,
Richter, known for an astonishingly diverse practice that includes
photo-realistic portraits, Romantic landscapes, and conceptual abstractions,
hovers numinously over German art, at once omnipresent and nowhere to be found.
Born in Dresden in 1932, he lived through Nazism, the Second World War, and the
Communist occupation, before defecting to the West in the nineteen-sixties.
But, when faced with curiosity about his person and his work, he has often
deployed John Cage’s witty dodge: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”
His life story is a meticulously concocted living text, mediated by his
paintings, which tell a story of their own.
In the
sixties, Richter started making his photo paintings, recognizable by a
characteristic blur. The paintings purportedly represented random snapshots of
strangers, and their generic titles—“Family at the Seaside,” “Mother and
Child”—encouraged this reading. As Richter grew more prominent, he began to
refer to “cuckoos’ eggs,” biographical truths hidden in his work. Still, when
an interviewer asked about the seeming banality of his source material, he
replied, “It’s all evasive action.” Sometimes he explained himself by saying,
“My paintings know more than I do.”
“I believe
that great art is deeply biographical,” Donnersmarck told me. Anthony
Minghella, the director of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” one of Donnersmarck’s
favorite films, had no direct experience of American expats on the Italian
Riviera, but he drew upon the oppressive class consciousness of his English
childhood to lend authenticity to Tom Ripley’s striving. Studying Richter’s
work, Donnersmarck learned that he had taken unusual pains to control its
reception. Since the sixties, Richter has been compiling his own catalogue
raisonné, an official list of works usually assembled by scholars and curators.
Furthermore, he started the clock on his œuvre in 1962, after his arrival in
the West, erasing a period as a prominent socialist-realist artist in the East,
where he had been commissioned to paint murals extolling the ideals of the
republic. “He was someone who was quite guarded about his personal things,”
Donnersmarck told me. “Although, on the other hand, it’s also partly that he
just tells us he’s guarded about his personal things.” Taken together, he felt,
Richter’s feints amounted to a pixelated portrait. “Here was someone who never
really told the full story, and was steering people in a certain way,” he said.
Donnersmarck had set out to research a master of visual representation; now he
was beginning to view Richter as what he calls “a master of narrative.”
One painting
in particular troubled Donnersmarck. “Ema (Nude on a Staircase)” depicts a
luminous nude, Richter’s first wife, Ema Eufinger, who, as Richter later noted,
bore a resemblance to Brigitte Bardot. Art historians contended that the image
was part of Richter’s dialogue with Marcel Duchamp, who had ostentatiously quit
painting after completing his own “Nude Descending a Staircase,” in 1912. But
Donnersmarck suspected that there was something more than the anxiety of
influence at work.
Richter
typically dates his canvases with only the year; this one is marked “May,
1966,” as if the month held special significance. Where the previous photo
paintings relied mostly on a gray-scale palette, Ema glows with nacreous pink
skin and golden hair—her body “seems to shine from within,” as one critic put
it. In fact, she was pregnant, with Richter’s first child, Betty, who was born
later that year and would become the subject of some of his most arresting
portraits. It was the convergence of two details—Ema’s pregnancy and the
date—that stuck in Donnersmarck’s mind, suggesting a mystery that he was
determined to solve. “I thought, O.K., I’ve now read the major texts on him.
I’ve researched this thoroughly. I’m very familiar with his work. I have to at
least throw my theory at him and see how he reacts,” he said. “I was thinking
that I’d maybe be thrown out after half an hour.”
In
January of 2015, Donnersmarck showed up at Richter’s home. “The most
extraordinary thing happened,” he said. “I outlined to him what I planned to
do, really just thinking I’d glean from his reaction—Was I on a completely
crazy path, or was there something true about it?” Surprisingly, Richter didn’t
turn him out. “That first day, I ended up staying seven hours or so.” After
several more sessions, Donnersmarck said, “I asked him, ‘I have a good memory,
but I don’t remember everything. Do you mind if I record this?’ ”
Donnersmarck
grew up stringently Catholic, a choirboy, and he still attends Mass; as an
artist, he frames his goals transgressively. His intention, he says, is “to
write like I’m wiretapping a confession booth.” He told me that Richter
accepted his presence, though he suspected that Sabine Moritz, Richter’s third
wife and former student, opposed it. Richter went so far as to allow him to
accompany the couple on an anniversary trip to Dresden. “He told me
everything—truly everything—about his life, and was amazingly open,”
Donnersmarck said. “I ended up staying for one month and recording this stuff,
which really I think makes any biography of his completely obsolete.”
During the
next three years, Donnersmarck wrote and directed “Never Look Away,” an epic
spanning three decades of German history. (The German title, “Werk Ohne Autor,”
or “Work Without Author,” is a tag that critics in the seventies applied to
Richter’s art, because of its seeming lack of subjectivity.) The film hews
closely to Richter’s youthful experiences, particularly his first marriage, but
leaves room for conflation and outright invention. Donnersmarck’s protagonist,
Kurt Barnert, is a sensitive and talented painter from the East who marries
into a family that, while outwardly conforming to the new postwar politics,
privately adheres to the most repulsive aspects of Nazi ideology. “I didn’t
want it to be a bio-pic per se,” Donnersmarck told me. “Sticking exactly to
every fact and chronology tends to weaken something. ‘Citizen Kane’ would be a
lesser film if it were called ‘Citizen Hearst.’ ”
“Never Look
Away” is on the shortlist for a best foreign-language Oscar and opens in New
York and Los Angeles on February 8th. When I met up with Donnersmarck this past
fall, in L.A., shortly after the film’s German theatrical run, he was
perturbed. A rift had opened between him and his subject. “Suddenly, there was
this statement from him,” Donnersmarck said. Richter had not seen the film,
but, hounded for comment by the German press, he had let slip that he found the
trailer too “reißerisch,” or thriller-like. The insult stung, a rebuke of the
intimate understanding that Donnersmarck had felt existed between them.
Not long ago,
I wrote to Richter, asking if he could tell me about his interactions with
Donnersmarck. To my surprise, he wrote back within a few days:
I thank you
for your kind letter about the film of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. To
recall all the events, I had a look into the quite hefty folder regarding the
case von Donnersmarck. Unfortunately, this visualization of all the facts
caused such bad feelings, and my dislike of both the movie and the person grew
so much again, that I find it impossible to give you an answer.
I hope for
your understanding, but I can’t help it.
With best
regards,
Gerhard
Richter
Donnersmarck
is six feet nine, with a baby face and an accumulation of gray-blond curls that
look ready to dump rain—a cherub and his cloud. He has storybook grandeur, and
an expansive sense of time. He lets weeks pass between e-mails, then sends
novellas. Our first breakfast lasted four and a half hours, and earned me two
parking tickets. He was unusually interested in being a subject. “Free
analysis,” he called it.
Courtly
manners, a social necessity for a giant living among humans, are also the
inheritance of a family that traces its nobility back six hundred years; he
says that “Donnersmarck,” which he translates as “Thunder Marrow,” is the name
that his Saxon ancestor Henckel was given by Kaiser Matthias in gratitude for
funding a war against the Turks. Donnersmarck, a count, has a booming laugh. He
speaks five languages, including Russian, and has a whippet named Tsarevich. It
is hard to find a car that can accommodate his size, but he makes the best of
it. For a while, he drove around Los Angeles in a vintage white Rolls-Royce, until
the brakes gave out in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. “You can’t buy a car
like that in Germany,” Thomas Demand, a German artist who lives in Los Angeles
and is close to Donnersmarck, says. “You would look like a pimp.”
During the
Second World War, the bankable part of Donnersmarck’s inheritance vanished
behind the Iron Curtain, with family castles reduced to ruins. The family—which
Donnersmarck describes as too cultured to have been Nazis—was uprooted. His
grandfather, a doctor of philosophy specializing in Thomas Aquinas, was drafted
at the end of the war, and immediately found an American to surrender to. His
father, Leo Ferdinand, had spent his childhood preparing to take over the
Donnersmarck mining and agricultural operations in Silesia, an area that was
once easternmost Germany and is now largely in Poland. In 1945, notices went up
in Silesia: all Germans had to vacate immediately, leaving the keys in their
locks, on pain of death. Leo Ferdinand became, at the age of nine, a refugee.
“Because of
all the terrible suffering Germany caused in World War Two, there wasn’t a lot
of focus on what the German people suffered, understandably,” Donnersmarck told
me. “But many people were apolitical, and suffered the way Richter’s family
suffered, and the way mine did.” Donnersmarck’s mother, Anna-Maria, remembers
being four, fleeing to relatives in the West. “Our mother made it an
adventure,” she said. “Women in that time, they were all heroes. They had the
children, their husbands were dead or captive and the women were in Berlin.
They cleaned up the whole city with their hands. They made a mountain where
people go skiing now, formed from the dirt and stones from the war.”
Donnersmarck’s
father was among the first in the family to need a job. He became an executive
at Lufthansa, and when Florian was one and his brother, Sebastian, was three
the family moved to Roosevelt Island, as part of a social experiment to
establish an economically diverse colony on “Welfare Island.” Florian was so
blond that women in the city would annoy him by touching his hair, and so tall
that his mother brought along his passport when they ran errands, in order to
prove that he was young enough to ride the bus for free.
Leo Ferdinand
was deeply religious, traditional, and intellectual. Walking through a European
capital with him was a master class in declinism. Donnersmarck said, “He found
it hard to remember the names of those who weren’t from Catholic noble
families.” Anna-Maria, on the other hand, had been active in the leftist
student movement in West Berlin, and collected sophisticated people. Her best
friend in New York was John White, an Austrian Jewish émigré who directed the
City Opera and was a mentor to Florian. “I grew up in a world in which the
objective quantification of intelligence and eloquence and erudition was valued
above all else,” Donnersmarck told me. Sometimes he performed too well for his
audience’s taste. “He was pretentious,” Anna-Maria said. “When he was thirteen,
I took him to the opera in Frankfurt. ‘How did you like it?’ I asked. He said,
‘I liked it, but I could do it better.’ ”
Anna-Maria had
high standards for art, which extended to her sons’ output. She told me, “When
they made pictures, I did not put them on the fridge unless they were good, and
they were very rarely good. There were not many pictures on my fridge. Florian
thought I was too critical, too strict. I said, ‘Florian, do you want me to lie
to you?’ This is my influence—that he wants to prove that he is the best in the
world to his critical mother. He got the gift from Leo Ferdinand, and from me
the drive to prove me wrong.”
Last winter, I
went to see Donnersmarck in Berlin, where he was finishing postproduction on
“Never Look Away.” It had been eight months since I’d last seen him in Los
Angeles—when he had read me the entire three-and-a-half-hour screenplay, in the
course of two days—and he had been working twenty hours a day on the film. (He
is a sleepwalker, imperfectly cured. Only the first floor of a hotel is safe
for him, and he sleeps with the lights on.) His hair had turned whiter and
wilder, and I got the impression that he’d been sustaining himself with
editing-room chocolates.
In a
comfortable sound studio, overlooking the River Spree, Donnersmarck was doing
dialogue replacement, rerecording some two hundred lines that hadn’t come out
well during filming. It is tedious work for most people, but Donnersmarck
relishes the chance to tune and polish flaws. “Suddenly, you can heal all those
little wounds,” he says. “It’s very, very joyful.” For a scene in which one
character subversively advises another to mutter “Drei liter” instead of “Heil
Hitler,” Donnersmarck instructed the actor on the precise quality of the
stifled laugh he was after. “We have to bring up some of your tonality a
notch,” he said. “It needs to be more nasal. It wants it to be more coming from
the throat, so it’s rattling more. Try to do it as if you’re just about to
clear your throat, a bit more pressure.”
Later
that afternoon, the actor Sebastian Koch came to the studio. Koch, who played a
writer under surveillance in “The Lives of Others,” returns in “Never Look
Away” as Barnert’s sinister father-in-law. In the scene that they were working
on, he orders Barnert to paint his portrait. To prepare Koch for the line that
needed to be replaced, Donnersmarck said, “Du hast ein neues sujet,”
emphasizing certain words in the way of a choral conductor tweaking the
phrasing of a song. “Feel in yourself how superior you are compared to Kurt,”
he said. “Be really aloof, almost arrogant: ‘I descend to your pitiful way of
life by even talking to you.’ ” Koch told me later, “He’s fully formed as a
perfectionist. As in, ‘We’ll do it again. No, we’ll do it again.’ He believes
strongly that, if an actor thinks something wrong, he can read those thoughts.”
As Koch
got ready for another line, Donnersmarck told him, “You’re worried, and it
should come through in your whole demeanor, but you’re still controlled and
that means your breathing is steady, yet there is a certain nervousness about
it.” Koch, visible through a glass wall in an adjacent sound booth, jumped up
and down and fluttered his lips. Fifteen or twenty takes later, Donnersmarck
quickly said, “Sehr schön,” and moved on.
n the
evening, as the city turned pale, Donnersmarck and I got into a taxi. “You’re
best behind the driver,” he said, as he claimed the front passenger side for
himself, pushing the seat all the way back and reclining it as far as it could
go. “It’s a very ungallant way to ride, but the only way it works,” he said. We
were going to meet his mother. I asked if I should call her “Mrs.
Donnersmarck.” He said, “ ‘Mrs.’ is wrong. The correct formal address would be
Countess Henckel. But she’ll want you to call her Anna-Maria. My mother is a
big all-women-are-sisters kind of woman.”
Leo
Ferdinand died nearly a decade ago, and Anna-Maria, who has shoulder-length blond
hair and vivid blue eyes, lives in a cozy apartment in Charlottenburg, the
Upper East Side of West Berlin. Above the coatrack hangs a portrait of an
ancestor Anna-Maria calls “the family prince,” a rake who married a French
courtesan and built her a castle in Silesia, which was bombed by the Russians.
“It’s like ‘Gone with the Wind,’ ” Anna-Maria told me. “Nobody has any money
anymore. They all work.”
Anna-Maria
showed us to the living room, where Donnersmarck’s brother, Sebastian, a
physics teacher at a high school in Berlin, was sitting. On a coffee table was
a silver tray filled with dishes of macadamia nuts, malt balls, mini-Snickers,
and sugary wafers. When Donnersmarck reached for a Snickers, his mother shot
him a reproving look. “Nicht gut für dich,” she said. He ignored her, and took
a wafer, too. She brought a board with rye bread and sliced ham. “My big child
should eat something,” she exhorted him.
After leaving
Roosevelt Island in 1981, the family moved to Berlin, a jarring experience for
the two boys. “My brother and I felt like we’d been thrown into a harsher,
colder, and poorer place,” Donnersmarck said. “All the American products we’d
grown up with were sold in stores here that you couldn’t access as a German
citizen. The American military areas were cordoned off. Those people could buy
marshmallows and peanut butter.”
American
movies offered a reprieve and a way back, even if they were shown a year after
release. The brothers, both tall, with long hair, would dress as girls so that
they looked old enough to sneak into Clint Eastwood movies. Sebastian said, “We
grew up on ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones.’ ” Anna-Maria turned to Florian. “I
pushed you into exhibitions, opera, theatre,” she said. “You hated
exhibitions.” Florian shrugged, and changed the subject. Seeing art with his
parents, he later explained, was complicated. For a Catholic boy, the bald
eroticism of German art in the eighties was both liberating and confusing.
Small wonder if he squirmed in front of a self-portrait of an artist fellating
himself. I asked Anna-Maria if he had evinced any inclination toward art. “Not
a bit,” she said. “He was always interested in psychoanalysis.”
Donnersmarck
attended Oxford, and, egged on by his brother, entered an essay-writing contest
whose first prize was an apprenticeship with Richard Attenborough. He won. As
he walked from the studio to the train station each day, Attenborough would
pass in a beautiful Rolls-Royce. “I always thought that one day he would pick
me up,” Donnersmarck says. “He never did. I remember thinking, If I ever make
enough money, I’ll get exactly that car.”
After
university, Donnersmarck went to film school in Munich. In a book about “The
Lives of Others,” he wrote that, while struggling to come up with movie
premises for an assignment, he put on a recording of the Russian pianist Emil
Gilels playing the “Moonlight” Sonata. While listening, he remembered reading
that Lenin once said that, until his revolution was complete, he would not
permit himself to listen to Beethoven’s “Appassionata,” because it inspired him
to “stroke the heads of people” rather than to “strike, strike pitilessly.” Donnersmarck
began to wonder how history might have been different if Lenin had been
compelled to hear that music. “An image forced itself into my mind,” he wrote.
“A medium shot of a man in a desolate room; he has headphones over his ears
through which comes the sound of wonderful music.” This image—a listener
overhearing something that might make him abandon his deepest beliefs—gave rise
to “The Lives of Others,” which became Donnersmarck’s thesis project and, eight
years later, his first feature.
“The Lives of
Others” centers on Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi surveillance specialist, assigned to
eavesdrop on a celebrated playwright and his actress girlfriend, who is the
romantic obsession of a powerful Central Committee minister. Wiesler wires the
couple’s apartment and installs himself in the attic of the building. The
playwright believes in the basic righteousness of the German Democratic
Republic, while his closest friends are punished for their doubts. When one of
them commits suicide, he becomes disillusioned, and, convinced that his
apartment is the last unbugged place in East Berlin, starts writing a treatise
against the government, to be published in the West. Listening in, Wiesler
finds his own loyalties shifting, and alters his reports to protect his
subject. But, in a skillfully turned plot, the actress, having spurned the
rapacious minister, is threatened by the Stasi and begins informing on the
playwright, betraying what Wiesler has withheld.
The life story
of the poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann echoes through “The Lives of Others.”
Biermann, a Bob Dylan of the G.D.R., was placed under house arrest and banned
from publishing. According to Donnersmarck, Biermann was among the first
Germans to seek out his Stasi files after reunification. Biermann, who
published parts of the files, has written that they contained a plan for how to
ruin him, including “destruction of all love relationships and friendships” and
“faulty medical treatment.” Donnersmarck read the published files, and managed
to find and interview at length the agent who oversaw the investigation of
Biermann. Like Wiesler in the film, the agent was a model of ideological
correctness. Donnersmarck says that even twelve years after the Wall came down
the agent was unsure what he was allowed to say about Biermann. “He was, like,
‘By what laws am I bound right now? Can I tell you details about this guy’s sex
life? I was sworn to secrecy by a government that no longer exists,’ ”
Donnersmarck told me. “It was total confusion of information loyalties, but he
ended up telling me everything.”
Biermann
was far less forthcoming. Donnersmarck thought that he might gain entrée
through Anna-Maria, who, in her student-movement days, had visited Biermann
when he was under house arrest. But Biermann ignored his entreaties. So
Donnersmarck, relentless, approached him in the book-signing line after a
reading. “I know exactly who you are,” Donnersmarck recalled his saying. “And
I’ll tell you one thing: If I’m going to say something about the Stasi, I’m
going to say it myself.”
“The
Lives of Others” created controversy in Germany. Ulrich Mühe, who played
Wiesler, had been a theatre actor in the East. When the film was released, he
disclosed that he had read his own Stasi file, and found evidence that his
former wife had served as an informant. (The documents, Donnersmarck says,
showed that she had even asked the state’s permission before marrying him.) To
critics, the revelation seemed to be part of a cynical marketing campaign.
Mühe’s ex-wife sued him for libel and won, despite the documentation. Mühe, who
had developed ulcers as a young man when conscripted as a border guard, died of
stomach cancer soon afterward.
Easterners
who had been oppressed by the Stasi found the character of the agent too
sympathetic; those who hadn’t been oppressed said the whole thing was
sensationalized. Donnersmarck’s experience of the East was limited to teen-age
excursions through the checkpoint with his parents, to visit his mother’s childhood
friends. It embarrasses him now to remember how he and his brother, alert to
the injustices suffered by fellow-Germans, would roll down the car windows and
call out the lyrics of a popular song, “Thoughts are free! No one can ever know
them, no one can hunt them down!” He was sixteen when the Wall fell, detractors
often noted: What could Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck from West Berlin know
about the G.D.R.?
“I still
meet people from the East who say, ‘This is not a good film,’ ” Sebastian Koch
told me. “But point for point they can’t explain why not.” “The Lives of
Others” was denied a competition spot at the Berlin Film Festival, at Cannes,
and at Venice. It made its première at Telluride, and, after winning the Oscar,
became, with “Das Boot,” the most successful German-language film in history.
“It was loved everywhere except here,” Koch said.
Biermann,
however, praised the film. “The political tone is authentic, I was moved by the
plot,” he wrote. “But why? Perhaps I was just won over sentimentally, because
of the seductive mass of details that look like they were lifted from my own
past.” Or maybe Biermann had already made his peace with up-close observation.
In the seventies, not long before he was exiled while on tour in the West, he
wrote “The Stasi Ballad.” Its refrain, “Stasi is my Eckermann,” refers to
Goethe’s compulsive assistant, who documented his every utterance. “It’s an
amazing ballad, where he said how incredibly grateful he is to the Stasi for
recording everything he ever said for posterity,” Donnersmarck told me.
“They’re trying to destroy his life, but at least they’re paying attention, in
the way that every artist wants people to pay attention.”
Richter’s
cuckoos’ eggs serve as a test of attentiveness: Did you catch that? One of his
earliest photo paintings, a tender black-and-white portrait of a teen-age girl
holding a baby, was first exhibited with the unremarkable title “Mother and
Child.” “It could be any mother and child,” Dietmar Elger, the director of
Richter’s archive and the writer of his authorized biography, told me. “In the
beginning, in the sixties, he was hesitating about making his art too
personal.” Later, Richter renamed the painting “Aunt Marianne,” and over time
it emerged that the woman it depicted was his mother’s younger sister. The baby
was the artist himself, at three months old.
Marianne
Schönfelder, Richter’s aunt, was a delicate, attractive girl, who, by the time
she was twenty, had been institutionalized with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Mental illness was a dangerous label to wear in Nazi Germany. Mentally ill and
physically and intellectually disabled women were subjected to forced
sterilization, and in 1940 the government established a medical-murder program,
with six execution centers, equipped with “showers,” to destroy them. By 1941,
when Hitler shut the gassing program down, some thirty-five thousand women had
been killed at these sites, in what Donnersmarck described to me as “a dress
rehearsal for the greatest crime in history.” By the end of the war, at least a
hundred thousand women deemed unfit for procreation had been exterminated.
In 1938,
Schönfelder was committed to a psychiatric nursing home in the eastern state of
Saxony, not far from the town where Richter’s family had moved. While a patient
there, she was involuntarily sterilized; later, she was transferred to a
psychiatric hospital, where she was deliberately starved to death in 1945, and
buried in a mass grave.
In a childhood riven by catastrophe, the tragedy of Aunt Marianne held a
special place. According to Jürgen Schreiber, an investigative journalist who
wrote a biography of Richter in 2005, she loomed over the household. “If Gerd
was unruly,” Schreiber wrote, “his mother would threaten him, ‘You’ll end up
like Aunt Marianne.’ ” On Richter’s Web site, where his works are
categorized according to subject—Clouds, Candles, Families, Aeroplanes,
Snowscapes, Nudes—the “Aunt Marianne” painting falls under the heading Death.
While at art school, in Dresden, Richter met another Marianne, a fashion
student nicknamed Ema, whose father was a prominent ob-gyn. The couple, who
married in 1957, lived at her father’s house in Dresden. In the course of
researching his book, Schreiber visited the house, and made a significant
discovery. “A woman came to me and said, ‘Here lived a super-Nazi!’ ” he
wrote to me in an e-mail. “I was highly alarmed. And then I started a new
investigation.”
In the federal
archives, Schreiber discovered that Ema’s father, Heinrich Eufinger, had served
as a lieutenant colonel in the S.S., Hitler’s “racial élite,” a leadership
squad entrusted with executing his Final Solution. Eufinger’s files referred to
him as an “irreproachable SS-man,” who was meticulous about proving his Aryan
ancestry. Later, when Eufinger was promoted and assigned to care for future
S.S. wives in Saxony, he evaluated them for their “suitability for marriage
among members of the S.S.”; to his superiors, he recommended a more exacting
process, including a gynecological exam and, for the prospective groom, a
mandatory sperm count. Otherwise, Eufinger wrote, “no certainty can ever be
obtained as to the effective functioning of the procreative organs.”
For nearly a
decade, until he was arrested by the Russians in 1945, Eufinger served as the
director of Friedrichstadt Hospital, in Saxony, where nearly a thousand women
were forcibly sterilized, most of them by him. The youngest victim was eleven
years old. Eufinger did not perform Schönfelder’s sterilization—that task was
carried out by the doctor who had delivered Richter.
As Eufinger
would surely have known, sterilization was a station on the road to death. Many
of the women sterilized at Friedrichstadt Hospital were subsequently murdered
by the state. After the war, other physicians from the region—including the
doctor who oversaw Schönfelder’s case—were tried in Dresden for crimes against
humanity, and some were sentenced to death. Eufinger, however, went on to have
a distinguished career in the G.D.R. and then, after emigrating, in West
Germany. Until Schreiber’s reporting, his portrait still hung on the wall of
Friedrichstadt Hospital.
The natural
question to ask is: What did Richter know? (Richter told Schreiber that Ema had
seen her father preening before the mirror in his S.S. uniform and been
appalled.) In Richter’s case, the more relevant question may be: What did his
paintings know? Richter and Ema defected to the West in 1961, shortly before
the Wall went up. Among the few possessions Richter took with him was an album
filled with family pictures, which he soon started to use as source material.
Within
two years of painting “Aunt Marianne,” Richter painted his father-in-law, as
well as an architect of the euthanasia program, who killed himself rather than
face a war-crimes tribunal. The father-in-law painting is “Family at the
Seaside.” Grotesquely, it depicts Eufinger at the beach with Ema, her sister,
and one of his patients, all grinning in their bathing suits, around the time
that Schönfelder was sterilized. Elger, Richter’s archivist, told me that the
association among the three subjects—father-in-law, aunt, euthanasia
mastermind—was unconscious. “They fit together now very perfectly, but I’m not
sure if they were painted as a group,” he said.
Donnersmarck
takes literally the idea that Richter’s paintings know something, and are
trying to tell us, in spite of their author’s confounding trail of crumbs. “The
things that are the most obvious and the most clear should never be forgotten,”
he said. “If you look at Richter’s catalogue raisonné, you will see all the
photo paintings. Suddenly, at the end, comes the largest painting”—the one of
Ema descending the staircase nude. “He says himself that it’s his wife,
pregnant. Then you say, wait a minute, they’re thirty-four, which is very late
for that generation, and they’d been married forever. So what does that mean?
And why is this the largest painting? Why does he paint it the moment she
announced that she’s pregnant, as if it’s a triumph over something?” With “Ema
(Nude on a Staircase),” Richter broke into color, but afterward veered toward
abstraction, producing a series of paintings based on color charts. “This must
mean something,” Donnersmarck said. “He’s laying his life out. That’s what
triggered my story, that sudden change.”
According
to Donnersmarck, in order to elicit the most candor from Richter, he offered a
strategy for presentation. When the time came, Donnersmarck wouldn’t say what
in the film was true and Richter wouldn’t say what wasn’t. While filming was
under way, Donnersmarck wrote to Richter about his plans: “Whenever the
conversation turns to you, I will say that it is specifically not a bio-pic of
Gerhard Richter but the story of the fictional painter Kurt Barnert. I will
call the film something like a spiritual biography of our country, which was
enriched by the biographies of other artists as well. I will say that the
elements of your biography were merely the starting point for a free,
fictionalized, story.” He went on, “As for things that are shown in the movie
because you told me about them and that are not commonly known anyway and
matters of public record, I will of course continue to be silent about them.
May the journalists speculate over what is truth and what is fiction!”
To me,
Donnersmarck said, “Unless he decides to reveal something that’s true, which
under the arrangement is permissible, he can always hide behind the fact that I
invented things, and I can always hide behind the fact that something invented
could be true.” The understanding was precarious—“a touchy matter,”
Donnersmarck said—but it had implicit safeguards. Richter could disown the
film, and Donnersmarck could validate his sourcing. “All this information is
from Richter,” he explained. “He knows that I have all this incredibly
sensitive stuff on tape. A lot of it involves his first wife, who’s still
alive, and has a right to privacy.” (The former Ema Eufinger now runs a
secondhand-clothing store in Düsseldorf and never discusses “Herr Richter.”)
“It’s changed enough that one can say, ‘Yes, this is the “Citizen Kane”
version,’ but there are these very close proximities,” he said.
Donnersmarck’s
hero, Kurt Barnert, has been profoundly affected by the death of his aunt, a
psychiatric patient first sterilized and then murdered by the Nazis. At art
school in Dresden, he falls in love with and marries a fellow-student, only to
learn that her father, a former member of the S.S., is the doctor who presided
over the aunt’s treatment, condemning her to death with a flick of his red
pencil. Terrifyingly, the father-in-law, who sees Barnert as genetically
undesirable, performs an abortion on his own daughter in an attempt to drive
the couple apart. Barnert assimilates these horrors, some of which he only
partly grasps, into his paintings. In the film, Donnersmarck traps the painter
and his wife in an excruciating family dynamic for which art is the salve, the
solution, and the way out.
As a
young artist, Richter was interested in the lottery: an everyday example of
random elements acquiring unassailable significance. When Schreiber was
researching the biography, Richter found his discoveries fascinating. He
marvelled at the details of his father-in-law’s S.S. past and, in particular,
his participation in the sterilization program. Elger, the archivist, told me
that Richter had coöperated closely with Schreiber, sharing unseen pictures and
private family stories. “But after the book came out Richter was not so happy,”
Elger said. “Schreiber made it a crime story, made too much out of it. He made
a lot of connections, put everything together. ‘He lived on this street
and—surprise, surprise—this other person lived only five streets away! At the
same house number!’ ” Schreiber, apparently, had failed to discern the meaning
of the lottery, and was mistaking every number for a winner.
Richter’s
provisional acceptance of interlopers, Donnersmarck believes, is rooted in his
practice as an artist and in his psychology. “He was both thrilled and shocked
by Schreiber’s book,” Donnersmarck said. “Though he gave him quite a lot of
access, he now considers him an enemy.” Richter does not generally insist on
propriety: he has painted, from magazine and newspaper images, murder victims,
suicides, and Jackie Kennedy weeping at J.F.K.’s funeral. “He himself is so
phenomenally indiscreet in his art—overstepping boundaries, overreaching,”
Donnersmarck said. “There’s a German word, übergriffig, which means reaching
into a space that isn’t really yours. You know how some people just do not
respect your space? It’s usually people whose space was violated in a
meaningful way. They don’t recognize the difference between me and you, and
just go right into your soul.” He paused. “I think he felt that Jürgen
Schreiber had gone a little too far.”
Donnersmarck
knew that he had to tread carefully when he began interviewing Richter. “All
the factual information I was using was from Schreiber, and he knew that,” he
told me. “But he expressed such incredible anger at Schreiber that I had to
pretend that it came to me from the Holy Spirit. I was the Virgin Mary,
impregnated by these facts out of nowhere.”
For an
artist like Richter, whose sources are deeply biographical, inviting others to
collaborate on the story of his life may be both irresistible and highly
dangerous. Donnersmarck read the screenplay to Richter, as he did to me; in his
view, Richter, frailer than when he had sat for the interviews, was profoundly
moved. But he refused to go to a theatre to see the finished film. “He said,
‘Can you send me the DVD?’ ” Donnersmarck recalled. “I said, ‘No, I’ll rent you
a theatre. It’s like me saying I want to see a painting of yours on a stamp.’ ”
The
relationship, which started off with such unexpected warmth, chilled as
Donnersmarck’s project came to fruition. Schreiber, for one, was unsurprised.
“Richter’s reactions to my book and to the film are equal,” he wrote to me.
“First, he was happy and told me on the phone that a friend had told him, ‘Now
you have a biography like Picasso.’ Later, he was complaining.”
After
receiving Richter’s letter about “the case von Donnersmarck,” I wrote to him
again, hoping to understand what had happened. He replied:
What to say—very soon after his first or second visit I told him clearly
that I would not approve of a movie about Gerhard Richter. I also suggested
that the protagonist might have another profession, like a writer or a musician
for example, as the family history that he wanted to tell did not necessarily
need a painter as such. He left all his options open and I gave him something
in writing stating that he was explicitly not allowed to use or publish either
my name or any of my paintings. He reassured me to respect my wishes.
But in reality, he has done everything to link my name to his movie, and
the press was helping him to the best of its ability. Fortunately, the most
important newspapers here reviewed his concoction very skeptically and critically.
Nevertheless, he managed to abuse and grossly distort my biography! I don’t
want to say more about this.
Elger
told me, “I would say, after the Schreiber book, he makes the same mistake
twice.” He went on, “He’s interested in things like this, maybe. Donnersmarck,
he knows how to approach people. He’s very smart, he’s very gentle, like these
film people are. They know how to get people to give them money. ‘Donnersmarck,
the Oscar winner, wants to talk to you.’ He wrote this letter by himself.
Gerhard called him. They met. I don’t really know why he let that in. He was so
charming, Donnersmarck, so Gerhard felt he was betrayed by his charm.” Elger,
with a note of finality, told me that he would purchase a copy of the DVD for
the archive. Case closed.
Sometimes
Donnersmarck’s children play “What superpower would you most want to have?” The
children wish that they could fly, or walk through walls, or turn invisible.
No, he tells them, the only superpower you really need is the ability to read
minds.
Interviewing
Richter, Donnersmarck felt that he was coming close to a profound truth, and
also that Moritz, Richter’s wife, might at any moment cut him off. He wished he
could overhear their evening debriefing, in order to understand his prospects
for continuing. One night, after leaving Richter, Donnersmarck turned on his
phone and found a voice mail from him: a pocket dial. He listened to the sound
of Richter walking down the corridor, calling his dog, Leica, and then sitting
down with his wife and telling her about the day’s interview. It was as close
to wiretapping the confession booth as Donnersmarck could hope to get, and, he
says, it confirmed for him that his insight into Richter’s story was sound.
When I met up
with Donnersmarck for lunch in Los Angeles, in December, and asked what he had
heard Richter say, he told me, “That is truly fruit of the poisonous tree.” He
was preparing for the film’s American release and hunting for a new house. The
family had been based in Munich, with the kids accompanying Donnersmarck on
location, while he made the film. He looked rested—trim, with his hair now
darker and tamed. “Even though it was wonderful and very useful fruit, even
though it made it possible for me to continue interviews with him for a very
long time, because I had a ten times better counterargument against anything
his wife was objecting to.” Now that he feels Richter turning against him, the
recording is a comfort to his conscience.
When I told
him what Richter had written, that he had explicitly objected to the film’s
being about a painter, Donnersmarck was taken aback. Richter had listened to
the screenplay, and even raised the possibility of making the paintings for the
film himself—a notion that Donnersmarck, imagining long delays and the
nightmare of insuring millions of dollars’ worth of original art, had declined.
(Richter denies making this suggestion.) Instead, Donnersmarck hired one of
Richter’s former assistants to re-create key works. It was a pity, he said,
that I had not been able to get Richter to open up to me more, show the real
self he had revealed during their interviews. What he was doing now was
obfuscating, an octopus in a cloud of ink. “I thought he would simply stay
quiet publicly, based on our agreement about the facts,” Donnersmarck told me.
“And, you’ll note, he stayed very quiet on all of that. But then he found the
loophole of talking about the trailer, which is almost a little funny. The
regrets and the remorse are—mostly—part of that game, I think.”
At a public
event not long ago, Donnersmarck told the audience, “Any work that resonates in
some way can only be autobiographical. It just comes in different
crypto-forms.” Only once the film came out was the hazard of the arrangement
between Donnersmarck and Richter laid bare. Just as photographs replace and
alter memories—a transubstantiation that Richter complicates in his photo
paintings—so, too, do films tend to replace facts. The details that Richter had
shared with Donnersmarck, and those he had gleaned from Schreiber’s biography, made
the inventions seem real. “So many details were taken from his history, and on
the other side there were so many things that were alternative facts, as you
say in the States,” Elger said. “If you have fifty per cent historical details
from Richter’s life, you think the others are true. You can’t differentiate
between what is true and what is not true.”
In a
Richter-like gesture, Donnersmarck had freighted the film with hidden meaning.
“I put in a lot of what computer-game programmers call Easter eggs, things only
he would be able to decipher, little love letters to him,” he told me. “It’s
too bad he didn’t see it, but I can understand it a little bit. If I imagine
someone taking my life story and putting a spin on it, either it would be
super-painful, because it would be so close to these painful chapters in my
life, or it would be painful because it was not close enough.” Richter’s story
was complex and difficult; Donnersmarck could not truly fault him for wanting
to maintain control of it. He said, “Maybe the film is for everybody except
him.”
Donnersmarck
and I exchanged many letters in the next few weeks. He wanted to make sure that
I had his motivations straight—that his goal was to exalt Richter, not to
diminish him. “If my film did not portray him as the hero, I would feel on
morally problematic territory,” he told me. “It does portray him as a hero.
Wouldn’t you say?”
Charting the
underpinnings of one’s own creative impulses is a murky, perhaps
counterproductive, business. That’s what interpreters—journalists, biographers,
filmmakers, shrinks—are for. “It’s impossible to do it for your own work,”
Donnersmarck told me at lunch. “Even Richter can’t do it for his own work.
That’s why he wants Schreiber and me. In a certain way, I’m being his analyst.
And he’s the kind of patient who can get super pissed-off at his analysts. In a
way, the fact that he gets so super pissed-off at us shows that we’re pointing
toward something correct. I think he’s kind of, in a weird way, addicted to
this type of analysis.”
In the course
of verifying details of his life for this piece, Richter declined to entertain
Donnersmarck’s ideas about the significance of the Ema painting. “I’ll leave
that to the art historians to figure out,” he said. He did allow that Ema’s
father had been her gynecologist, and that there were mysteries and rumors
around the treatment that he provided her. But that, he said, was not his story
to tell. As for his time with Donnersmarck, Richter had not enjoyed hearing the
screenplay read aloud. The only part of the encounters he took pleasure in was
the tactful, penetrating questioning of the interviews. That had touched him
deeply. Richter said, “He was like a psychoanalyst.”
An
Artist’s Life, Refracted in Film. By Dana Goodyear. The New Yorker , January 14, 2019
The film Never
Look Away, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, is Germany's entry for
the best foreign language film at the Oscars. After making it onto the
shortlist of nine works in December, it was among the nominees revealed by the
Academy on Tuesday. It also obtained a second nomination for best cinematography.
The film tells
the story of a painter named Kurt Barnert, who grew up during the Nazi era. The
artist celebrated his first successes in the GDR, and then escaped to West
Germany to make a fresh start. The epic story is based in part on the life of
German painter Gerhard Richter, who is one of the most expensive living
artists.
As soon as the film was released in German
theaters last October, Richter was quick to distance himself from it.
At the time,
he told the German Press Agency dpa that he found it "too
thriller-like," even though he also admitted he had not seen the film
"for practical reasons." "At my age, I can't get through a
three-and-a-half-hour film," the 86-year-old artist explained. However, he
felt the trailer the director showed him was enough.
Now, in a
profile of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in the US magazine The New Yorker
published ahead of the Oscar nominations, Richter sharpened his critique of the
filmmaker best known for his 2006 Oscar-winning film, The Lives of Others.
The
article details how Richter met with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
several times before the film was made to talk to him about his life. The
director claimed to have let Richter read parts of the script as well.
According to Henckel von Donnersmarck, Richter liked it and even offered to
make special paintings for the film.
But Richter has another story to tell:
"…soon after his first or second visit I told him clearly that I would not
approve of a movie about Gerhard Richter," the painter wrote in a
statement requested by The New Yorker. "I also suggested that the
protagonist might have another profession, like a writer or a musician for
example, as the family history that he wanted to tell did not necessarily need
a painter as such. He left all his options open and I gave him something in
writing stating that he was explicitly not allowed to use or publish either my
name or any of my paintings. He reassured me to respect my wishes."
Richter
feels deceived by the director: "But in reality, he has done everything to
link my name to his movie, and the press was helping him to the best of its
ability. Fortunately, the most important newspapers here reviewed his
concoction very skeptically and critically. Nevertheless, he managed to abuse
and grossly distort my biography! I don't want to say more about this," he
wrote to the magazine.
Henckel von Donnersmarck was surprised by this
reaction, but also expressed understanding for the artist: "It's too bad
he didn't see it, but I can understand it a little bit. If I imagine someone
taking my life story and putting a spin on it, either it would be
super-painful, because it would be so close to these painful chapters in my
life, or it would be painful because it was not close enough," he told The
New Yorker. Richter's story is complex and difficult; Donnersmarck could not
really blame him for wanting to stay in control. His conclusion: "Maybe
the movie is for everybody except him."
Artist
Gerhard Richter feels 'abused' by Germany's Oscar entry. By
Katharina Abel. Deutsche Welle , January
22 , 2019.
The hero
of “Never Look Away” is called Kurt Barnert, and, for the bulk of the
narrative, which covers his early adult years and the start of his career as an
artist, he is played by Tom Schilling. But the movie begins when Kurt is a boy
of six, and the actor who takes the role, Cai Cohrs, exerts, I would say, a
more powerful pull on your attention. You can’t take your eyes off his
eyes—blue and unblinking, as he confronts the world like a camera with the
shutter left open, permitting the images to burn into his brain. The opening
scene is set in Dresden, in 1937, and one thing Kurt stares at with particular
care is a Kandinsky from 1921. It’s a small abstract painting, one of a cluster
of works that have been gathered, under Nazi auspices, to be jeered at for their
decadence and their moral deformity. Kurt is viewing the collection in the
company of his beloved aunt, Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), and she quietly says
to him, as they stand before the Kandinsky, “Don’t tell anybody, but I like
it.”
To all
appearances, Elisabeth is a model citizen, tall and fair. When Hitler visits
the city, she has the honor of handing him a bouquet of flowers as his car goes
by. But what propels the film, in the course of more than three hours, is a
growing awareness that appearances are not merely deceptive but doomed to be
incomplete; they dare us to pierce them, as best we can, and to puzzle over the
truths that they encrypt. Elisabeth, for instance, is profoundly troubled in
mind, and, back at home, Kurt finds her sitting at the piano in the nude. She
stands up, hits herself on the head, drawing blood, and says, “I’m playing a
concert for the Führer.” Still the little boy looks. As she is taken away in an
ambulance, he briefly puts his hand in front of his face, to occlude his final
sight of her, much as Tom Hanks gazes up from Earth, in “Apollo 13” (1995), and
uses his thumb to blot out the moon he will never reach.
Elisabeth
is treated by Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), although the treatment, in grim
violation of the Hippocratic oath, consists of sterilization and, later,
euthanasia. The insanity lies not in the patient but in the society that wolfs
her down. Seeband, who insists on being addressed as “Professor,” is an
obstetrician and a member of the S.S.—a combination so extreme that it belongs,
perhaps, in a schlockier film altogether. Dresden is levelled in one infernal
night, and, as the war crawls to a close, Seeband is captured by the Russians.
After saving his skin, if not his soul, by assisting in the birth of a Russian child,
he slots into the Communist regime of East Germany with the disciplined ease
that made him so capable a Nazi.
“Never
Look Away” is written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who won
an Oscar for “The Lives of Others” (2006). That movie, a saga of surveillance
and baffled yearning, measured the grip of the Stasi on daily existence and the
effects of what you might call intrusive-compulsive disorder. What the new film
suggests, over and over, is that, for a person held in that grip—or, indeed,
for the Seebands who do the gripping—the political shape of the state is
immaterial. Distinctions between left and right mean nothing to the crushed.
What Kurt observed about art as a child, for example, is what he discovers
afresh when, in the East Germany of the nineteen-fifties, he enrolls in art
school and is corralled, like his confrères, into Socialist Realism. The wider
cause is paramount, and to serve one’s private needs, in paint, is to yield to
the bourgeois blandishments of the self. “Me, me, me!” his teacher exclaims,
decrying the modernist mysteries of the West.
Kurt
falls in love with a fashion student named Ellie (Paula Beer), who sews him a
suit. There’s a strange nocturnal sequence, which begins as the two of them,
lying in bed, hear her parents returning unexpectedly. Kurt, minus his clothes,
leaps out of the window and into a fir tree—a dark, primitive, and very
Germanic gag. He climbs down, a bare, forked animal, and comes face to face
with Ellie’s mother, Martha (Ina Weisse). Without raising the alarm, she lets
him scamper off. Meanwhile, Ellie’s father, who saw nothing, goes upstairs and
shuts his daughter’s window. As he leans over to blow out her candle, we see
him for the first time. It’s the Professor.
If you are as
slow on the uptake as I am, you’ll need a few seconds to piece together the
evidence. It’s like this: Kurt adores, and will soon marry, the child of the
man who sent Aunt Elisabeth to her death. And neither he nor Seeband has made
the connection. In fact, it is only Kurt’s work that will—years later, once he,
Ellie, and her parents have fled to West Germany, and after much trial and
error in his creative approach—start to probe the wounds of the past. Even
then, we don’t get the sense that he’s wreaking a conscious revenge; rather,
his paintings are in themselves acts of investigation. Neither purgative, like
therapy, nor sententious, like propaganda, they simply sit on the white walls
or the cold floor of Kurt’s studio and bear witness with a frightening honesty,
so much so that, when Seeband first sees them, you hold your breath. Will he
heed what they have to say?
This is
Sebastian Koch’s moment. He is a handsome presence onscreen, with a formality
that grows more interesting as it is compromised. In “The Lives of Others,” he
was a successful playwright in East Berlin, striving equally to obey and to
buck the system. Here, as the Professor, with his sombre suits and his
clinician’s coats, his stiffness remains intact until he is accosted by the
paintings, whereupon he shies away, folding into himself, and crumples like a
man made of paper. The whole scene is beautifully gauged, and the problem is
that Koch—like Weisse, as Seeband’s anxiously watchful wife, and like
Rosendahl, as Elisabeth—overshadows Tom Schilling, who is suave but anodyne in
the leading role. He is a flimsy successor to the late Ulrich Mühe, who brought
such mesmerizing calm and concentration to “The Lives of Others,” as the
operative who bugged and recorded his fellow-citizens. To be fair, you don’t
envy Schilling in his task. Compared with spying, the ordeal of artistry is
notoriously hard to feign, and only the wisest actors have flourished in the
attempt. Think of the great Michel Piccoli, for whom Emmanuelle Béart so
patiently posed, hour upon hour, in Jacques Rivette’s “La Belle Noiseuse”
(1991), and whose intensity, like Mühe’s, never flagged.
Donnersmarck,
in the end credits, offers thanks to the German painter Gerhard Richter, who is
still alive, and the extent to which “Never Look Away” does or does not mirror
his biography is already a matter of debate. (It was recently explored in these
pages by Dana Goodyear.) The paintings on show in the film are a spirited
exercise in the Richteresque, and it’s no surprise to learn that they were done
by Andreas Schön, a former assistant of Richter’s. Should you seek the real
thing, however, I would steer you toward “Gerhard Richter Painting” (2011), a
fine documentary by Corinna Belz, which reveals the artist to be far more
gnomic than Kurt Barnert, and more puckishly amused. Talking of his pictures,
he remarks, “They do what they want,” and “I don’t like the ones I understand.”
It may
be that the ideal viewer of “Never Look Away” will be one who has never heard
of Richter, and who is at liberty to greet the movie on its own ground. Less
compact than “The Lives of Others,” it ranges much more widely, in both tone
and time, and labors under a musical score so tenacious that you feel half
bullied into the right emotional response. (The composer is Max Richter, and
you wonder: Is Donnersmarck racking up the Richters? If so, why not have Bach
played by Sviatoslav, or conducted by Karl?) Also, the spaciousness of the plot
allows for the gravest errors of judgment. A sequence in which women suffering
from mental afflictions are led naked into a gas chamber ought not to have made
the final cut; many people will ask why it should have been filmed in the first
place.
Then,
there are the contrivances on which the movie turns. I was especially taken
with the lad who just happens to enter a restaurant where Seeband and Kurt are
dining, long after the war, and hawks a newspaper, crying out that a prominent
Nazi doctor, the Professor’s former boss, is under arrest. For chronic storytellers,
though, coincidence is a natural ingredient of fate, and Donnersmarck is
something of a rigorous romantic—a rare breed, unembarrassed by the urge for
melodrama, and by tales that are lavishly upholstered and plainly told. The
most common complaint is that he’s old-fashioned, but that is no crime, and a
more antic or more aggressive style would hardly have improved “The Lives of
Others.” The latest film, stately rather than stealthy, is no match for it, but
you are borne along, nonetheless, by the clash of characters, and by the
ironies of historical momentum. Only by glancing backward into the shadows, we
realize, can Kurt, like his homeland, hope to progress. One brush with destiny,
and the painter comes alive.
The
Encrypted Truths of “Never Look Away”. By
Anthony Lane. The New Yorker , February
1, 2019.
Art,
history, and Oscar bait collide in some incredibly odd ways in Never Look Away,
Germany’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film for the 91st Academy
Awards. It recently earned that nomination, as well as an additional one for
Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography. But the movie has also attracted scrutiny
over the reaction of its sort-of subject. It is not a straight biopic of famed
artist Gerhard Richter, but it is still heavily patterned after his life. He
recently said of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, “He
managed to abuse and grossly distort my biography!” Donnersmarck retorted that Richter
had access to the screenplay beforehand, and had not even seen the film, basing
his reaction solely on the trailer. Having seen the full movie myself, I find
myself sympathetic to Richter’s reaction, regardless of whatever evidence he’s
based it on. The movie seems less like it’s inspired by Richter’s life and more
like fan fiction about him.
Richter’s
analogue in the film is Kurt Barnert (played by Tom Schilling), who from a
young age is encouraged by his aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) to ignore Nazi
strictures about art and follow his own passions. It’s from her that he hears
the movie title’s truism to “never look away” from the truth of life. In the
opening act (which only marginally features Kurt), Elisabeth, who suffers from
schizophrenia, falls victim to Nazi eugenics protocols. She is forcibly
institutionalized, sterilized, and eventually killed. Carl Seeband (Sebastian
Koch), the doctor overseeing the area’s eugenics program who personally
condemns Elisabeth to death, manages to escape prosecution after Germany loses
the war.
The
timeline then jumps to the postwar period, as Kurt studies art in East Berlin
but finds himself stifled by the confines of Socialist Realism (which will
eventually spur him to defect to the West). At the same time, he falls in love
with a fellow student, Ellie (Paula Beer). As it turns out, she is Seeband’s
daughter. All are unaware of their supremely unlikely connection, but Seeband
and Kurt dislike one another regardless. Much of the story concerns Kurt trying
to find his voice as an artist in order to gain success and spite his eventual
father-in-law.
As
unlikely as that synopsis may seem, it’s all taken from Richter’s real
experiences, down to him unknowingly marrying the daughter of a man who was
part of the genocidal machine that killed his aunt. But in Donnersmarck’s
hands, the unlikely becomes ridiculous. When Elisabeth and a group of women are
led into a gas chamber (in real life she was starved to death), the movie
focuses a woman with Down’s syndrome to cynically ramp up the tragedy. When
Seeband is revealed to be Ellie’s father, the score swells with high dramatic
notes. It relishes the dramatic irony of Kurt incorporating both his aunt and
his father-in-law into his art without knowing their connection. (It even hints
that he may be expressing what he subconsciously knows, or that art itself is
somehow leading him to the truth.) Applying this kind of soapy melodrama to the
historical context of the Holocaust and its aftermath is supremely tasteless,
even before one factors in that it’s based on real individuals.
You can
easily see how this would rankle Richter. But even removing his feelings from
the equation doesn’t do Never Look Away any favors. It’s so closely patterned
after Richter’s biography, doing little besides replacing names, that it’s hard
to imagine how exactly it would play out as a purely fictional film. But it
would still feature bland acting, obvious writing, an unwieldy three-hour
runtime, and an overbearing musical score that never fails to tell the audience
exactly how they should be feeling during a scene.
What’s
more, the movie has some very basic ideas about the nature of art and the
artistic process. There are other artists who factor into the plot — fictional
versions of Joseph Beuys and Günther Uecker serve as Kurt’s teacher in
Düsseldorf and best friend, respectively (Richter’s actual teacher was Karl
Otto Götz). Beuys’s counterpart, Antonius van Verten (Oliver Masucci), is treated
as mysterious because he never removes his hat and works only in felt and
animal fat. He eventually explains to Kurt that he has burns on his scalp from
a war injury, and that after his plane crashed, he was saved by villagers who
wrapped him in felt and treated his wounds with animal fat. This was the same
reason Beuys gave for his own use of felt and fat in his art, except that was a
constructed mythology. In the film, it’s a true, sincere motivation — artistic
ambiguity reduced to an easy-to-understand justification.
This
same simplistic framework of art as a one-to-one way of processing trauma is
applied to Richter. Donnersmarck has insisted that the film is about universal
ideas about art’s healing power, but there is no plausible deniability here. Kurt’s
paintings in the film match the kind of work Richter was doing during the same
time period, and were even made for the production by a former assistant of
Richter’s. This is an exegesis of Richter, specifically his famous
photo-paintings. No amount of name-changing can obscure this.
And
Never Look Away‘s analysis wouldn’t pass muster in the lowest-level art class.
It boils down the complex explanations Richter has given about his
photo-paintings over the years to a vague idea that replicating photographs in
painting is a way to convey “truth.” And his hallmark blurring effect? A
literal rendering of his eyes going out of focus when he’s staring at
something. Movies about famous artists have long struggled to articulate the
intangible qualities that make their work renowned. Too often they settle for
pat explanations. Never Look Away is no different, even as it mixes in some truly
absurd, dramatic choices.
Never
Look Away Is a Reductive, Tedious Copy of Gerhard Richter’s Life. By Dan
Schindel. Hyperallergic , January 31,
2019
Gerhard Richter Painting. A documentary ,
written and directed by Corinna Belz, on the German artist that includes
glimpses at his studio, which has not been seen in decades. 2011.
Gerhard Richter turned 80 in February. Is
there a more admired painter working today? The man who emerges in Corinna
Belz’s coolly assured documentary is attractive if slightly inscrutable. When
he says that a painter can “hide” behind his paintings, an off-camera Belz
replies that she doesn’t understand what he means. “Neither do I,” says
Richter. (The film is mostly in German, with English subtitles.)
The man
we meet is intelligent and good-humored. “They do what they want,” he says with
a shrug, indicating a set of just-completed canvases. “I planned something
different.” Richter can be dryly funny, too. Admitting that he doesn’t think
the canvas he’s been painting is coming together, he says to Belz, “Let’s talk
about the film now.”
Richter’s
reserved, even a little wary. (Or maybe it’s just that he and Warren Buffett
have the same eyes.) When one of the men hanging his paintings for a museum
show asks for an autograph, Richter goes off-camera to sign it. Painting “under
observation,” he laments to Belz, “is worse than being in the hospital.” As
soon as he says it, he laughs, but it’s not clear he meant it as a joke. Either
way, he’s not so wary as to have declined participation in the film.
The documentary,
which doesn’t have a voiceover, occasionally uses archival footage of Richter
from the ’60s and ’70s. Belz also includes several close-ups of individual
paintings and now and includes long panning shots of walls lined with Richter’s
paintings. Elegant and frieze-like, they offer a visual counterpoint to the
lion’s share of the documentary, which focuses directly on Richter.
We see him in
various settings: driving through Cologne (where he lives), going over old
family photographs, enduring a press conference, attending a London museum
opening and a New York gallery opening. Nowhere does he seem as comfortable as
in his several studios. As its title might suggest, that’s where “Gerhard
Richter Painting” most frequently shows him.
Sometimes he’s
with one or both of his two assistants, more often he’s by himself. The
studios, with their white walls and floors, look shockingly (Germanically?)
antiseptic. They’re like laboratories for art-making. Richter, wearing
button-down shirts and thick gloves, doesn’t look like any sort of scientist,
though.
One of the
things that makes Richter’s body of work so distinctive is how it encompasses
so much: abstract and figurative painting, photography and photorealism, and an
ability to seem equally at home with very large and very small dimensions. All
the paintings he works on in the film are very large abstractions.
The sight of
Richter going back and forth between two related canvases recalls Roger Federer
playing tennis with himself in slow, deliberative motion. Where Federer uses a
racket, Richter employs a house-painter’s brush or oversized squeegee. Applying
the squeegee, it’s as if Richter’s vanquishing the canvas (applying paint, he’s
negotiating with it). Made of metal and plexiglass, the squeegee looks like a
chunk of girder. It’s the squeegee – death to impasto! — which imparts the
famous Richter “blur.”
Belz’s film
wonderfully conveys the unassailable thingness of painting: paints as
gooey-thick as pudding, the mess they make, the various tools Richter chooses
to ply his trade (sticks and palette knives as well as brushes and that
squeegee).
The documentary
ends with a sequence of Richter applying his squeegee to a series of primarily
white canvases. The paint has largely hardened, in some cases with the squeegee
attaching itself to the canvas. So it takes an extra effort for Richter to do
his scraping. We can feel, as well as see, his exertion. Creativity and labor
become inextinguishable. Then there’s a panning shot of the studio. The various
canvases Richter’s been working on hang on the walls. “Man, this is fun,” he
says.
“Fun” is not
necessarily a word one would associate with the man we’ve spent the last hour
and a half with, or with his art. It’s a measure of how well Belz’s film has
succeeded that we can sense what Richter means.
Getting
inside Gerhard Richter’s studio ‘Painting’ as only Richter can. By Mark Feeney
The Boston Globe , April 11, 2012.
Also of
interest : Gerhard Richter Painting, A Film by Corinna
Belz. By Frances Guerin. Fx Reflects May 19, 2012
