Never Look Away hitches Gerhard Richter paintings to melodrama set in Nazi Germany
ABC Arts
By Sarinah Masukor
Photo: The role of painter Kurt Barnert resonated with actor Tom Schilling because he grew up with aspirations to be an artist. (Supplied: Sony Pictures Australia)
Related Story: Tragicomedy of class relations wins Sydney Film Festival official competition prize
Related Story: Two wildly divergent portraits of Van Gogh hit cinemas this month
Map: Germany
"To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too," says Gerhard Richter in Corrina Belz's 2012 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting.
"You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing, what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that."
This wisdom is lost on director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others), who in Never Look Away attempts to turn the blurred subjects of Richter's grey paintings into a pulpy tale of war, political repression and creative genius.
The film thinks there's a connection between war, trauma and the mysterious force that resides in certain works of art and so it sets about staging scenes that give backstory to several paintings Richter made in the 1960s: Richter with his aunt, his wife on a staircase, his father-in-law in his SS uniform, fighter planes, a war criminal being taken into custody.
Photo: Gerhard Richter with his painting Aunt Marianne (1965). (Getty: Ute Grabowsky)
But confusingly, the film is not about Richter.
It's about a painter named Kurt Barnert (played as a child by a winsome Cai Cohrs and as an adult by a blank-faced Tom Schilling) who has a biography that is similar to Richter's but in which events and people connect in ways that are implausibly loaded.
We meet Kurt in 1937 at an exhibition of "degenerate art", where he and his aunt are following a tour intended to convince the public of modern art's disruptive effect on society and the psyche.
Little Kurt is already a keen sketcher with a penchant for breasts, and his bright blue eyes fix on a small Kandinsky, conveniently placed at child's height. It's bright, playful and absolutely not good for him. His aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) whispers, "Don't tell anybody, but I like it."
Photo: Like 10 year-old Kurt Barnet (Cai Cohrs), Henckel von Donnersmarck experienced an exhibition as a child that had a lasting effect on his life. (Supplied: Sony Pictures Australia)
Shortly afterwards, the free-spirited Elisabeth participates in a Nazi rally, has a breakdown and, after irritating a doctor with a canny remark about a photograph of his wife, is carted off to hospital, sterilised and sent to death. Her case is presided over by Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a gynaecologist so evil his every appearance is accompanied by dramatic music.
These are the film's most affecting scenes. Rosendahl (who made her film debut in Cate Shortland's 2012 feature Lore) has a vibrant screen presence and it's distressing to watch her fate determined by men who view women as breeding machines.
Photo: Saskia Rosendahl plays Elisabeth May, aunt to Kurt Barnert and victim to a Nazi policy aimed at euthanising people diagnosed with psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia. (Supplied: Sony Pictures Australia)
The family try to visit her but it's already too late. No-one will tell them where she is and they're left suspecting the worst, without recourse.
To add to their trauma, the family witness the bombing of Dresden; planes screech overhead in formation and a glittering shower of foil tumbles into the yard as their beloved city burns in the distance.
After the war ends, they're ushered into the equally oppressive communist years. Kurt becomes a successful mural painter in the social realist style, although the film is careful to include scenes that show he's not altogether convinced of the value of propaganda art.
He meets a second Elisabeth (Paula Beer), a fashion student who is pretty, wealthy — and the daughter of none other than Professor Seeband.
Photo: Paula Beer plays fashion design student Ellie Seeband, daughter of Professor Carl Seeband and love interest of painter Kurt Barnert. (Supplied: Sony Pictures Australia)
Needless to say, things do not go well for the young couple. Professor Seeband has retained his Nazi belief in eugenics and is intent on disentangling Ellie from the undesirable Kurt, going so far as to administer an emergency abortion when he discovers she's pregnant.
Kurt and Ellie marry anyway, and in 1961 they defect to West Germany where Kurt returns to art school and attempts to recreate himself as a conceptual artist.
At this point, the film becomes a ridiculous, cheesy, amusement park.
A long sequence in the art school attempts to mock various tropes of 1950s and 60s conceptual art without much accuracy. The school's director is a caricature of Joseph Beuys, here named Antonious Van Verten (Oliver Masucci), a conceptual artist who works only with grease and felt, refuses to look at student work and cancels lectures when he has "nothing to give".
Photo: Never Look Away is director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's third feature film and second to be set in Germany during a period of unrest. (Supplied: Sony Pictures Australia)
After an interminable period sitting in front of a blank canvas, Kurt cuts an image of a war criminal from the front page of a newspaper, paints it, then carefully smudges the painting with his brush.
The painting we see on screen, made by one of Richter's former assistants, is inert and unconvincing so it's difficult to see it as a breakthrough.
Look at Richter's painting Herr Heyde, from 1965, which the scene evokes: the blurring is pronounced, making the image feel unstable, and pointing to the inexactness of history. It's spooky.
It reminds us what a picture both does and doesn't say and it exerts a charge you can't shake. It has an electricity that is felt but eludes language.
Photo: Sebastian Koch previously featured in Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 Academy Award-winning film The Lives of Others. (Supplied: Sony Pictures Australia)
Donnersmarck is not the first to make ties between Richter's early photo paintings and his experience of war, political repression and uneasy freedom (the paintings are clearly partially about these things) but it feels grotesque to make the connection hermetically personal and to bring the underlying history to life with so much melodrama.
And given the complexity of Richter's response to the photographs from World War II — the paintings are pregnant with horror and deeply unsettling — it's upsetting to see them fixed to clumsily told stories of Very Bad Nazis.
Nonetheless, Never Look Away has been successful: it was nominated for Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion and an Oscar; it was recently in competition at Sydney Film Festival, and will get an Australian cinema release through Sony Pictures.
Perhaps part of this film's appeal comes from the fact that it plays into the desire for certainty and accountability currently gripping the world at large. Its characters conform to comforting stereotypes; it feigns understanding without scratching the surface — even at three hours duration.
Frankly, I'd rather spend that time at the art gallery.
Never Look Away is in cinemas from June 20.
External Link: Never Look Away trailer
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, art-history, film-movies, contemporary-art, visual-art, painting, world-war-2, germany, australia
More Arts & Culture News
Abuse at real-life reform school inspires Pulitzer Prize-winner's new novel
Apollo 11 documentary recreates the wonder and optimism of Moon landing