Werk ohne Autor

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2018)

Never Look Away is the film Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck might have been expected to make in the wake of The Lives of Others, his multi-award-winning debut feature of 2006.  It is Donnersmarck’s first German picture since then but it’s his third feature.  In between, came his curious Hollywood venture, The Tourist (2010), starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie – a romantic-thriller-cum-comedy that received mostly bad reviews but turned into a sizeable commercial hit.  (I’ve not seen it.)  What is it that makes this new work a predictable follow-up to a major international succès d’estime (which also made money)?   The combination of its upfront big ideas and inordinate length:  a film-maker who knows people have decided s/he’s a voice worth listening to, may be tempted to abuse that status and abandon economy.  That’s what Donnersmarck has done here.  At 188 minutes (nearly an hour longer than The Lives of Others), Never Look Away is excessively long.  It’s often clumsy too.  But the film is never a hardship to watch and it tells an absorbing story.

By the time Never Look Away appeared in late 2018, it was already publicly controversial.  Although it’s a work of fiction, Donnersmarck’s original inspiration was Jürgen Schreiber’s 2005 book about the German painter Gerhard Richter, which brought to light that Richter’s aunt, murdered by the Nazis when she developed schizophrenia and the subject of one of Richter’s best-known art pieces, was euthanised at a hospital whose director was an SS doctor who later became Richter’s father-in-law.  Richter had long been aware of this man’s SS past but it seems he discovered the particular connection only as a result of Schreiber’s research.  As Dana Goodyear explained in a New Yorker profile of Donnersmarck in January 2019, he was keen to develop Never Look Away in close consultation with Richter, whom he admires.  To his delighted surprise, the famous artist responded positively to his overtures.  The two men met often and Richter consented to the recording of what were in some cases very revealing interviews.

Donnersmarck says that he read the full completed screenplay to Richter for his approval, which seemed to be forthcoming until he offered a private screening of the finished film.  Richter said no.  His subsequent reactions were increasingly hostile.  When Dana Goodyear approached Richter, he replied to her as follows:

‘What to say – very soon after [Donnersmarck’s] 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 [in Germany] 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.’

The New Yorker piece is a compelling, somewhat alienating read.  Donnersmarck and Richter come across as king-size egos:  the former is more annoying until Goodyear’s focus switches to the latter.  It seems that Richter turned against Donnersmarck rather as he’d turned against Jürgen Schreiber years before.  If Richter was aware of Donnersmarck’s intentions and, later, conversant with the screenplay, his suggestion that the film’s protagonist might have a different creative profession is baffling:  the visual art element of Never Look Away is nothing if not intrinsic to the piece.  On the other hand, Donnersmarck’s professed resolve to protect Richter’s identity rings false:

‘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.’

If Donnersmarck needed only a ‘starting point’, already supplied by Schreiber’s profile, why did he gather and record so much personal information from Richter?   (This note won’t, by the way, detail similarities and differences between the latter’s life and work, and the events and art in the film.)  Donnersmarck’s description of Never Look Away as ‘a spiritual biography of our country’ is apt, though:  that’s what his picture primarily is.  This is only speculation but it’s not hard to imagine that Richter might be angry to see his own biography and the account of an artist’s creative development subjugated to a melodramatising of the psychological experience of a generation of Germans.

The action starts in 1937 and ends in 1966.  As a young boy in Dresden, Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) is taken to an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ by Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), the beautiful and wilful young aunt to whom he’s devoted.  When Kurt later witnesses Elisabeth seated nude at the piano, she tells him to ‘never look away’ since ‘everything that is true holds beauty in it’.  Elisabeth’s eccentric behaviour leads to her being diagnosed as schizophrenic.  Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch) is a gynaecology professor and senior member of the SS medical corps.  As director of the clinic to which Elisabeth is referred, Seeband oversees her sterilisation and transport to the prison camp where she’s killed.  In 1945, Seeband, arrested by Soviet forces, is himself placed in a prison camp.  The wife of high-ranking Soviet officer Muravyov (Evgeniy Sidikhin) is experiencing a difficult and dangerous labour.  Seeband offers to assist; thanks to him, both mother and baby survive.  In gratitude, Muravyov releases Seeband, destroys the records of his crimes and continues to help conceal his past for years to come.

In the early 1950s, Kurt (Tom Schilling) studies painting at art school in Dresden – now part of East Germany.  He falls in love with Elisabeth (Paula Beer), a fashion design student, who shares not just a name but, from Kurt’s point of view, a kind of spiritual connection with his late aunt.  Ellie, as she’s known, is Seeband’s daughter.  Her father has successfully resumed a medical academic career and is now a dutiful socialist, as the regime requires, but hasn’t shed his long-standing belief in the importance of ‘hereditary health’.  He sees Kurt as genetically inferior to Ellie and does his best to destroy their relationship.  When she becomes pregnant, Seeband performs surgery on his daughter.  What he claims to be a straightforward abortion is designed to prevent her bearing children in future.

Kurt and Ellie, who are deeply in love, marry.  He completes his studies and starts to paint for a living.  In East Germany, his opportunities are limited to works of socialist realism and, though an able practitioner, Kurt feels creatively constrained.  When Muravyov is eventually transferred back to the Soviet Union, Seeband fears for his safety and moves to West Germany with his wife (Ina Weisse).  For different reasons, Kurt and Ellie follow in early 1961, shortly before the erection of the Berlin Wall.  Kurt lies about his age (he’s thirty but looks younger) to gain admission to Düsseldorf’s famously radical art school.  His charismatic teacher (Oliver Masucci) perceives his underlying talent but is convinced that Kurt’s training in realistic figurative painting is preventing him from truly expressing himself.

The artistic breakthrough comes when Kurt reads a newspaper report about the capture of a Nazi doctor called Burghart Kroll (Rainer Bock).  Unbeknown to Kurt, Kroll was his father-in-law’s former superior in the SS medical corps.  Kurt makes use of his aptitude for realistic drawing to copy a newspaper photograph of Bock onto canvas; he then applies a sfumato technique that makes the image distinctive and mysterious.  He enriches the composition by working in Seeband’s passport photo and family album snaps of his aunt Elisabeth.  Kurt knows from Ellie that her father was in the SS; he doesn’t know what Seeband did to his aunt.  When Seeband sees the resulting collage, he is devastated; hurrying out of Kurt’s studio, he also takes leave of the film.  After years of infertility and early miscarriages, Ellie gives birth to a child.  Kurt’s nude painting of his pregnant wife is the centrepiece of his first show in 1966.  He takes questions at a press conference, his smiling wife and baby daughter looking on.

The story reads as a metaphor for the struggle of Germans born in the Hitler years to overcome their national inheritance.  Ellie’s inability to have children, the result of treatment by her Nazi father, renders her futureless.  The engagement of Kurt’s with Seeband’s identity not only effects a creative advance; it also breaks the spell.  Although this is a remarkable, ambitious premise for a screen drama, it’s a structurally familiar one in that it depends on a single decisive turning point.  And while Never Look Away is inspired by truth-that’s-stranger-than-fiction – a fact of Gerhard Richter’s life that’s both a breathtaking coincidence and symbolically rich – Donnersmarck arguably dilutes the power of this by relying too on chance events of his own invention, like Seeband’s intervention to save Muravyov’s wife and baby, in order to shape and sharpen the plot.

A brief montage describing the deaths of German soldiers on the front line and civilians in the bombing of Dresden has a startling realism that sits uncomfortably with more clichéd elements of the direction.  Elisabeth’s performance at the piano is anticipated by the camera tracking a trail of her discarded clothes from the entrance to the room.  Donnersmarck does exactly the same to introduce Kurt’s and Ellie’s first love-making.  You’re left wondering if Germans maybe aren’t as tidy-minded as popularly supposed.  Kurt’s father Johann (Jörg Schüttauf) is no great supporter of the Nazis:  when the family arrive at a hotel and the clerk on reception greets them with ‘Heil Hitler!’, Johann returns the salute with a joking ‘Drei Liter!’   Even so, he’s a card-carrying member of the party and in due course punished for that.  A schoolteacher before the war, Johann is reduced to cleaning staircases once it’s over and commits suicide.  Seeband discovers this looking into Kurt’s suitability for his daughter’s hand.  When Kurt can’t support himself and Ellie through painting, his father-in-law contemptuously arranges a part-time cleaning job for him at the hospital where Seeband works – as if to try and break the younger man.  There’s an immediate resonance to this, of course, but the device is a bit pat.  Once he meets Ellie, Kurt becomes very suddenly separated from the remainder of his own family.  I wasn’t clear if Donnersmarck was making a point by this or if it was simply a matter of narrative convenience to him.

This ‘work of fiction’ is, however, a stronger art film than most artist biopics.  Some of the painting sequences are dramatically eloquent.  After Kurt’s defection to the West, his mentor in Dresden (Hans-Uwe Bauer) watches tearfully as a socialist realism mural he worked on is whitewashed over.  When Kurt arrives in Düsseldorf, Günther (Hanno Koffler), the fellow student who becomes his friend, shows him round the art school.  The sequence, though overlong, dynamically conveys the excitement that the place communicates to Kurt.  The visualisation and cutting of his lightbulb moment with the newspaper photographs of Burghard Kroll and subsequent construction of the collage elevate the episode.  (Caleb Deschanel is Donnersmarck’s cinematographer and Patricia Rommel his editor.)   Although Seeband’s stunned exit when he sees the results is melodramatic, this is as far as the film goes in having Kurt explicitly confront Ellie’s father.  Donnersmarck does well to omit any public revelation of Seeband’s past.  By leaving uncertain how much Kurt actually comes to know, the film hints at the idea that the pursuit of artistic truth can penetrate beyond knowledge of facts.

While Never Look Away received Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film (in a strong year) and Best Cinematography, its critical reception has been mixed.  Some reviewers aren’t impressed by Tom Schilling in the lead role and though I liked him, I can see why.  Actually in his mid-thirties, Schilling seems much younger:  he’s effortlessly believable as Kurt in his late teens and early twenties.  But his lack of height and slenderness also make him lightweight (he occasionally brings James McAvoy to mind.)   Schilling’s underdog quality qualifies him better for the every(Ger)man aspect of Kurt than for animating his turbulent imagination.  There’s a sizeable stretch of the film when Donnersmarck gives Schilling not only little to say but scarcely any opportunity to react:  he’s almost bound to be inexpressive.  Yet the firm, curious gaze of Cai Cohrs, who plays the six-year-old Kurt, stays with the viewer partly because Tom Schilling never loses it.  As Seeband, Sebastian Koch could hardly be more different.  This actor has a strong presence but lacks a light touch.  As a result, he holds the camera but always comes across as a pretty standard Nazi scientist villain.  The emotionally supple Paula Beer, who impressed in François Ozon’s Frantz (2016), does so again here, even though the role of Ellie is relatively underwritten.

The German title of the film identifies the story with Gerhard Richter more than the English title.   Wikipedia refers to Richter’s ‘habit to [sic] obfuscate the connections his paintings had to his personal life. This led art historians to refer to his body of work as being “without author” … ‘.  Turning ‘Work without Author’ into Never Look Away may have been a commercial precaution (and the movie has fared well enough at the North American box office).  But it also serves to illustrate another feature of Donnersmarck’s film:  although it’s consistently interesting, it’s also less original than the man who made it seems to think.  This comes across in Sebastian Koch’s characterisation and Max Richter’s admittedly effective score.   It comes across too in the script’s almost corny repetition of his aunt’s advice to the child Kurt.  The picture’s name in the English-speaking world inadvertently announces its conventional nature.

11 July 2019