Tag: Artist

Typist Artist Pirate King

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In these days of US-style promotion, branding and media, it’s easy to think of artists as high profile, rich and successful. While some are, that’s not what an artist is: an artist is, quite simply, someone who makes art. (If they’re a good artist, they make good art. Whatever that is.) The subject of Morley’s new road movie is the artist Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) who, although she exhibited her work a number of times during her lifetime, received scarcely any recognition in that period. She suffered from mental health issues and was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her life.

Audrey (Monica Dolan) is regularly visited in her London flat by psychiatric nurse Sandra (Kelly Macdonald). One day, she asks Sandra to drive her to an exhibition which has an open call for artists, as she’s never exhibited and feels the time has come. Sandra first turns her down, but on a later date after some consideration agrees – although she’s somewhat horrified en route when Audrey’s “local” turns out to mean “Sunderland”, the best part of 300 miles North.

Thus, the pair yet out in Sandra’s bright yellow car Sunshine band undergo a series of encounters with people from Audrey’s past. In reality, they aren’t the people from Audrey’s past, but she mistakes them as such in her mind. Just as she isn’t always convinced Sandra is really Sandra or even that she herself wasn’t taken over by an imposter at an early age (following a specific traumatic experience, which the narrative explores in the final reel towards the end of Audrey and Sandra’s journey).

There are many joys to be experienced on the way. A wise vicar (Gary Bates) breaks into a church lavatory after Audrey accidentally locks herself in and, unlike numerous media presentations of clergy, manages to say and do just the right things to help her. A hitchhiker (Issam Al Gussein), who turns out to be another artist, gets thrown out of the car after addressing Audrey as a “freak”. A van driver (Neal Barry), who gives Audrey a lift after a row with Sandra, seems a pleasant chap until he starts trying to take sexual advantage of her (a rare moment when this largely brave and original film lapses into cliché). Eventually, she visits unannounced her Sunderland-based sister (Gina McKee) who she’s not contacted for six years.

Dolan is fantastic as the woman who exhibits both a personality disorder and a talent for expressing herself visually; her performance is ably complemented by short bursts of little sequences showing three or four of Audrey’s works in rapid succession throughout. The role is a gift for an actor, not only because of the wide palette of motion and behaviour undergone by Audrey in the course of the film, but also because she has to interact with characters she believes to be a person from her past when in fact they are someone else she has never met.

Macdonald provides an anchor to Dolan’s out of control persona, while McKee, although she doesn’t appear until late in the story, proves a huge presence in the final reel, a good and generous sister.

There’s a fascinating religious (Christian) subtext to all this, too. Audrey wears a cross and, however messed up her life might be, appears to have a deep-seated faith in God as expressed in the Christian tradition. As well as the aforementioned episode in a rural church building (the name St. Christina The Astonishing can be seen on a notice board inside the premises), there are comforting religious words, there is one in-car conversation about Jesus, there are references to hymns and hymn singing which, as any Christian person will tell you, can carry and communicate great nuggets of spiritual truth, often in a clear and concise, albeit almost subliminal way. Not that the film is proselytizing, or anything like that: far from it.

Morley is far from your typical British director; she tends not to repeat herself, except for the fact that her films are consistently provocative. This new film is well up to par. As a bonus, it has a scene with Morris dancers.

Typist Artist Pirate King premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally. Its UK premiere takes place at the 31st Raindance Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, October 27th. On Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, December 8th.

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.

Six year old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) wants to be an artist. He is taken to Dresden by his Aunt Elizabeth (Saskia Rosenthal from Lore, Cate Shortland, 2012) to see an exhibition of Degenerate Art mounted by the Nazis. He is fascinated. She tells him she rather likes the works displayed, but warns him not to tell anyone else. Later, he finds her playing the piano nude. She extols the mysteries of art to be found in life and exhorts him to “never look away”. She’s both creatively gifted and mentally ill. Being taken away in an ambulance to be incarcerated in a hospital she again issues that same exhortation. She will never leave the hospital system, thanks to Nazi doctors who have the power of life or death over their patients.

During the war, one night Kurt watches tin foil dropped by bombers around his home “to jam radio communication” before they drop bombs on Dresden in the distance, razing it to the ground.

After the war, Kurt – now a young man (Tom Schilling) – works painting signs until his boss, impressed by Kurt’s artistic skill, has him apply to Dresden art school where he falls in love with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer) whose gynaecologist father (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) regards him as inferior stock and tries to destroy the couple’s relationship. After a promising career as a Socialist Realist painter of murals, Kurt with Ellie in tow defects from East to West Berlin a couple of months before the Berlin Wall is built. Kurt becomes a student at that hotbed of modern art Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and later a famous artist.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s difficult to give away much more without spoilers. The whole is based on the life of internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, who has read the script by the writer-director and made one or two suggestions which were incorporated. However, Richter has subsequently disowned the film (despite not having viewed it). Kurt’s tutor at the Kunstakademie is based on equally celebrated artist Joseph Beuys. Von Donnersmarck describes the piece as a work of fiction, although a great deal of the material appears to be historically accurate with names changed.


This is masterful storytelling with top-notch performances. More importantly, it seems to pick at the soul of a nation (Germany). There’s a lot of very nasty material festering beneath the surface and as you watch certain elements really start to get to you. Having watched it twice, this writer can attest to its being even more powerful on a second viewing: lots of little details elude you first time round as you grapple with the shocking overall story only to make themselves known second time around as you have a chance to take in the detail.

Never Look Away garnered two well deserved Oscar nominations earlier this year, for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography (it was shot by Caleb Deschanel whose impressive credits include The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard, 1979). Alongside The Lives Of Others, which dealt with the Stasi (the East German secret police), it feels as if von Donnersmarck is building a panorama of German history through a series of historically grounded narratives of which this is only the second.

Finally, the German title Werk Ohne Autor translates literally as Work Without Author in reference to the artist’s claim that the photographs which form the basis of paintings “are just photographs”. This film suggests there’s a lot more to these apparently random images than that. Possibly the most effective slice of narrative storytelling we’ll see in the cinema this year. Supremely powerful, dirtylicious stuff.

Never Look Away is out in the UK on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th.

Never Look Away is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

Memorable (Mémorable)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The techniques used in this remarkable short include both computer and puppet animation, with all the surfaces of both the puppets and the sets resembling that of a canvas painted with oils. It’s the perfect artistic form in which to express the story the film wishes to tell.

Louis is a painter suffering from dementia. Neither he nor his wife and model Michelle are coping well. He struggles to recognise different items of food by name at the dinner table – a bit of a problem when Michelle asks him to pass the pepper – and attempts to eat a banana without taking the skin off it first.

He jokes about degenerative mental diseases when being interviewed by a visiting health professional, but can’t recognise the mobile phone on the table in front of him. As his memory banishes the very concept of a mobile phone to beyond Louis’ mental grasp, the already disfigured object breaks up into little black droplets floating upwards before him.

Worse is to come: a system of post-it notes each containing a simple drawing attached to its appropriate object, such as a sun to indicate an anglepoise lamp, starts to break down. The notes fall from their designated objects creating a sea of incomprehensible imagery to wade through and for Michelle to tidy up on the floor. Louis is shocked to discover the bathroom occupied – his wife has to point out that the alien occupant causing her husband such distress is in fact only his reflection which he no longer recognises as such.

At one point in the proceedings, she’s had enough and sinks to locking him in his room so he can’t pester her. At another, she explains there are no fish in the fish tank because Louis failed to feed them.

Finally, he mistakes his wife for a hired carer. He comes on to her, but pulls back telling her, heartbreakingly, that his wife gets jealous and waltzes round the room with her instead. As they dance, she is reduced to an empty space parts of whose surface is defined by her husband’s sparse brushstrokes to which he adds a few more.

This is dangerous, emotionally charged and highly challenging material underscored with commendable humanity.

Memorable (Mémorable) played in Annecy where it picked up three awards – a jury distinction for powerful storytelling, a junior jury award for a short film and an audience award – making it a likely contender for this year’s Best Animated Short at the Oscars. Watch an extract below (French no subtitles):

At Eternity’s Gate

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Another Vincent Van Gogh biopic, but with a synthesis of Willem Dafoe in the lead role and Julian Schnabel behind the camera, who can resist? Despite being a legend of the New York art world, Schnabel’s cinema comes under criticism for leaning too middle-brow. But these artists are always fascinating beasts, constantly examining how artists communicate the indescribable in their head into some kind of language. Think of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) learning to write by blinking.

Schnabel turns here to perhaps the most famous artist ever, who had to create an entirely new language to communicate the things that he saw. Schnabel and Dafoe do a great job of contrasting that interior genius with a man who can barely speak to others, who is so overwhelmed by his visions of nature that he appears to be entirely mad.

Willem, a 65-year-old in the role of a man who died at age 37, plays the part as myth. And perhaps that casting inherently allows us to see heretofore unseen shades of the man, his old soul, and Willem’s youthful exuberance. It’s a part that allows the actor to show off everything that makes him such a beloved character actor, the wild energy, the sadness behind his eyes, the controlled physicality. It does a service to both actor and subject, and one hopes that the Academy goes the same way as Venice and gives Willem the Best Actor Award for a role that works perfectly with his persona.

I did have to laugh at the appearance of the postman Joseph Roulin and his gigantic beard, though, ‘May I paint you?’ intones a shitfaced Vincent. Willem gets strong scene partners, in the form of a moustached Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin, Mathieu Amalric as the famously painted Dr. Gachet. A stand out scene towards the end has Willem sparring with Mads Mikkelsen as a priest, who charges that Van Gogh’s painting is an insult to God.

Schnabel shoots the process of painting with an urgency. These scenes are so vibrant, the paint pops off the screen as though in 3D – what might Bi Gan do with this material? There is an effort to relate Van Gogh’s style to photography, through the abstraction of rain on a window. With coloured lenses and hurried camerawork, Van Gogh’s form becomes the film form.

So how well does this fit into the Van Gogh canon? The recent Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela/ Hugh Welchman, 2017) is a glorified kids film, that plays to the silver screen crowd, and these American takes – including Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo (1990) and Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) – are too respectful and stately to really capture the genius. More successful are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) and an old episode of Doctor Who, which treat the artist in terms of his influence and confront our wish to reach back to him. This lands somewhere in the middle.

For despite the formal tics and a game Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate still follows the expected beats of a Van Gogh biopic. The Ear. The kids throwing rocks. The insane asylum. The notion of tortured genius isn’t really challenged by Schnabel, who doesn’t really bring anything new to our understanding of events surrounding Van Gogh. It’s a straightforward depiction of his last years, which may be enough. Its pleasures are varied, and the Dafoe performance is wonderful, but this is a tribute act, rather than an earth shattering new take.

At Eternity’s Gate showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam,when this piece was originally written. It is out in UK cinemas and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, March 29th.