Monday, December 29, 2008
Baselitz gets the Seven Up treatment
Our Netflix Queue is kind of cabinet of curiosities. One of the most curious and fascinating things in it I viewed recently was a disc with two different interviews with Heinz Peter Schwerfel that were filmed more than fifteen years a part from each other.
As in Michael Apted's Seven Up films the juxtaposition of these two short films from 1987 and 2004 illustrate films amazing power to capture an individual in one era or stage of their life and to get a sense of time travel when it is presented in a comparative setting.
In 1987, Baselitz is a fifty year old man with a cigar, a beard, who is spending his nights in the years just prior to Berlin Wall falling and reunification painting dark expressionist visions of the human condition at night as a self described sort of self described assassin/murderer who sorts out his kill in the morning. His images are sort of Bosch meets Expressionism, eating oranges upside down created from hard fast uncompromising brush strokes.
The then contemporary images featured in the 2004 film are not nearly as dark and stark as the 1987 ones. His palette has gotten lighter, light blues, pinks and lots of white left on the canvases. More importantly, Baselitz, now moving towards seventy is no longer a defiant figure with beard and cigar. It is evident that his output is still prodigious and many of his figures still hang upside down in limbo, but he seems not to be engaged in a kind of sensory assault on the viewer.
Schwerfel's Baselitz films are exceptionally well crafted. There are some lovely moments of moving camera, especially when it passes through several galleries in a major German museum with a comment by Baselitz about the tradition of ugliness in German art, to where the shot ends on a balcony overlooking a retrospective of Baselitz's work.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 AM
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