This review was first published for the theatrical release of “Werk ohne Autor” in October 2018. Now that the film is out on the first at 8:15 p.m. on January 2nd, we’re republishing the review.
The demand is high, right from the start. “Werk ohne Autor” has greater ambitions than the usual film biography, than the usual picture spread of German history. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, author, director and producer, took eight years to return to the cinema. Now he wants to go further than anyone else, namely to the essence of artistry in and of itself. And he wasted no time in sending his protagonist Kurt, who is supposed to be a world-famous painter but is only six years old here, to the “Degenerate Art” exhibition.
Dresden 1937: Kurt, shorts, wide-open children’s eyes, is shaped in these moments. He stares into the disturbing face of Eugen Hoffmann’s sculpture “Girl with Blue Hair”, lingers in front of works by Max Ernst, Kirchner, Klee, Kandinsky. A confident exhibition guide (Lars Eidinger in a guest caricature) assures him that anyone can pull off this kind of nonsense, even he, and also dutifully formulates the aesthetic theory that has to be overcome in the following: “Because art comes from ability.”
Whether Klein-Kurt (Cai Cohrs) can already classify all this is not entirely clear. But his nineteen-year-old, strikingly attractive aunt Elisabeth, who accompanies him (Saskia Rosendahl), can do that. She understands a lot about dissolution of boundaries and ecstasy. A little later she even makes one herself, with the help of the waiting drivers at the central bus station. At Elisabeth’s command, they honk their horns at the same time, creating a powerful, vibrating sound like angel’s trumpets, in which she bathes with closed eyes and outstretched arms, while the camera circles her wildly several times. Elisabeth afterwards, breathless: “To paint a picture that feels like this. That’s what they’re trying to do, these degenerate artists.”
Joseph Beuys, Günther Uecker and Sigmar Polke appear under other names
Is that, at its core, already Donnersmarck’s theory of art, which is now to be unrolled here in more than three hours? First of all, it is striking how easily the classic modernism hated by the Nazis, but naturally revered by Donnersmarck, should coincide here in terms of art philosophy in a moment of ecstasy that the director himself stages. And that according to all Hollywood rules of overpowering, with an overly loud booming soundtrack and the stylistic device of the camera circling, which has been worn out since its origins with Fassbinder and Ballhaus, and which is now very well placed in the toolbox of the braggart cinema.
In any case, after this scene one understands better why the film has had a certain reputation since its world premiere at the Venice Festival. Critics have already accused him of the predatory appropriation of an artist’s biography, a tasteless gas chamber scene, and even relativizing Nazi crimes. It all has to do with a certain lack of restraint in the use of resources; and with – to put it mildly, fearlessness – in the face of the greatest imaginable issues: guilt and atonement, truth and beauty.
Brief positioning before going deeper into the analysis: The film invites quick fatal judgments, that’s clear – and in a social media present that rewards speed and lethality of judgment more than anything else. Basically, however, it can be said that it is good that there are still filmmakers who come up with such enormous claims, the prevailing intellectual wasteland is bad enough; and it’s also good to work on stories that have something to do specifically with this country. “The Lives of Others,” Donnersmarck’s well-received Oscar-winning debut, is closely related to this new work. At that time, the core question was also negotiated as to what truth art is able to produce and what that can do to the soul of even a Stasi officer.
But now on with Kurt, who soon has to find out that his beautiful, ecstatic, aesthetically clear-sighted aunt is schizophrenic. Desperately protesting, she is transported to an institution. This would open up a new field that others have already eagerly cultivated: madness as an ally of art, with more direct access to the truth, and so on. After a few scenes in which Elisabeth begs for her life, she falls victim to the Nazi “euthanasia” program and is led into the gas chamber, which you can also see – until the door is locked and the gas tap is turned on by one hand with SS skull ring.
Gerhard Richter comments on the finished film with an iron silence
You can get out with good reasons, but it gets even harder because the scene is part of a montage. At the same time, Kurt experiences from an elevated position how Allied bombers darken the sky and Dresden is burning, and in the middle of this flaming hell a mother and her children are also burning. This sequence of cuts can be interpreted as an equation. It is probably not meant that way, which is indicated by a third element of the montage – two Uncle Kurts also die on the Eastern Front during the Winter War.
Assuming in the filmmaker’s favor that he just wanted to stage some sort of cataclysm of horror that befalls Kurt and his family in the Third Reich, some kind of worst-of-picture arc – does that make things better then? A little. But even then the use of the means seems strange: everything is allowed to show what will shape the soul of the future great artist Kurt, and consequently also what gives the great artist Donnersmarck a kick in the editing room. He wants to see his virtual Dresden burn like Nero once did Rome.
Against doubts of this kind, however, Donnersmarck has drawn an intellectual line of defense into the film. It is based on two core sentences, both of which also come from the mouth of the schizophrenic aunt, but which the film grants a deep truth to. “Never look away, Kurt,” she says. “Then your gaze will become strong as steel. All that is true is beautiful.” Apart from the completely insane steel metaphor, this means that the film can show whatever it wants, as long as it ultimately creates truth and even beauty. One can have that hope. It is as old as art itself.