Beuys (film)

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Movie
Original title Beuys
MJK34483 Beuys (Berlinale 2017) .jpg
Country of production Germany
original language German , English
Publishing year 2017
length 107 minutes
Age rating FSK 0
Rod
Director Andres Veiel
script Andres Veiel
production Thomas Kufus
music Ulrich Reuter ,
Damian Scholl
camera Jörg Jeshel
cut Stephan Krumbiegel ,
Olaf Voigtländer

Beuys is the title of a biopic in documentary style about the artist Joseph Beuys by Andres Veiel from 2017 . The film from German production celebrated its world premiere in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival 2017 . The cinema release in Germany took place in May 2017.

content

The film begins in black and white with a close-up of Beuys, who, like a fourth wall , speaks to an audience that is not visible. In his address, Beuys reflected with humorous objections on the expanded concept of art and the effect and importance of art for the life of the individual. The sequence comes from the 16 mm film 400 m IFF by Lutz Mommartz made in 1969 (Joseph Beuys: "What are people's inner questions?")

In addition to early works and drawings, there are excerpts from the actions Celtic + ~~~ (1971), How to explain the pictures to the dead rabbit , I like America and America likes Me , the öö program , as well as the installations honey pump at work , Das Rudel , Plight and tram stop / tram stop to see. In addition, previously unshown color film footage of the artist, for example, the Guggenheim Museum or during the art event Salto Arte by Klaus Mettig from 1975 in which Beuys targeted a knife-throwing Katharina Sieverding device is shown. Furthermore, excerpts from the television dispute Provokation Lebenselement der Gesellschaft - On Art and Anti-Art between Beuys, Max Bense , Max Bill and Arnold Gehlen on January 27, 1970, as well as the occupation of the secretariat of the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1972 or Beuys' engagement are presented shown in the context of his later failed candidacy in the course of founding the Greens .

The boxing match for direct democracy by referendum on October 8, 1972 against the Beuys student Abraham David Christian-Moebuss is documented in excerpts.

Towards the end of the film, Joseph Beuys sums up: “Everyone has to wear out. If you are still good when you die, that is a waste. You have to burn to ashes alive, not just in death. ”The homage ends with rare photographs showing Beuys without his obligatory hat, as well as photos from Venice, where he realized his last installation Palazzo Regale (not shown in the film). At the end, the opening sequence is taken up again and Beuys turns once more to “his” audience, thus closing the dramaturgical circle of the artist's biography.

shape

The documentation largely dispenses with an explicit biographical sequence.Instead, with the aid of unpublished archive material , it illuminates the socio-ecological and political aspects of the artist, which are established on the basis of selected works, primarily installations and actions as well as interviews with Beuys. Stations in the artist's life are briefly sketched on the basis of private photographs of the family or from the studio, while humorous scenes bring out the people behind the alleged "Beuys myth". Current interviews let the companions Franz Joseph van der Grinten , Klaus Staeck , Johannes Stüttgen , Rhea Thönges-Stringaris and Caroline Tisdall have their say.

A variety of cinematic design elements are used in the documentation, for example a moving scene is “frozen” as a still image while the camera zooms out and reveals a contact sheet . The camera moves over the individual images in order to zoom into a new film scene. The canvas-filling contact sheet with its various picture and film windows functions repeatedly as a split screen , from which the focus shifts to a single detailed image, which directs the narrative thread to the next episode.

Elsewhere, the effect of a developing photo is used: the image of the installation slowly emerges on the white canvas, showing your wound . Further stylistic devices of the film, which is mostly in black and white, are animated single image recordings (structure of the installation Das Rudel ) or snapshots of Beuys' life that fold away like index cards, as well as split-screen montages. In addition, the numerous photographs are integrated into the flow of individual film passages like a collage, put together to form independent sequences or animated into animation sequences. The camera often glides over or into the photographs, searching for them, removing the boundary between moving film and rigid photography.

The film dispenses with a commentator, instead using Beuys' off- screen sound documents .

production

The archive material appearing in the film was selected from 400 hours of image material, 300 hours of audio material and over 20,000 photos, although Veiel initially planned only a third of his documentation with footage . The cutting time was 18 months.

Beuys was produced by the Berlin zero one film GmbH in cooperation with Terz Filmproduktion, SWR , ARTE and WDR . The production was funded by the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW , the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg as well as the Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA), the BKM , MEDIA and the German Filmförderfonds (DFFF) .

Reviews

Diedrich Diederichsen remarked in the taz that Beuys “was constructed here rather nostalgically by the provincial public of the old FRG”, “not by a global art”, whereby “the 'ugly Beuys': the anthroposophist, esoteric, top candidate of the AUD and Inventor of his biographical legends “is missing; According to Diederichsen, “would do well” “a critical appraisal”.

Peter von Becker summed up in the Tagesspiegel : "The material is brittle, the assembly is sparkling with intelligence". Becker also misses a criticism of the “artist guru”: “Veiel simply relies on the historical distance given by his pictures and the reflexivity they trigger. The only problem with the 107 minutes of film is: Beuys usually stays the same, from hat to toe. He is a self-promoter, not an actor ever surprising as a converter. "

Christoph Petersen von Filmstarts concluded: “Instead of explaining Beuys' works, Andres Veiel primarily lets the art provocateur speak for himself in his attractively designed cinema documentary - so his political, social, moral and aesthetic ideas are brought back to life still brought up a brand new debate. "

Joachim Kurz from kino-zeit : “Of course, Beuys does not offer any answers to existing questions, but rather sows the seeds to deal with them yourself. This and the uncommented form of the narration , which emerges solely from the artist's auratic nature, turn Veiel's approach to a West German myth into a sometimes cheerful work that turns the effort of appropriation on the part of the viewer into an ambivalent matter. "

“How much humor and how much courage does it take to open up as unreservedly as Joseph Beuys did again and again with his actions, discussions and his art? Who was Joseph Beuys? "Asks Ula Brunner on rbb-online .de and states:" In an almost tender way, Veiel lets us find an answer to these questions ourselves in his documentary. "

Boyd van Hoeij from the American Hollywood Reporter is disappointed: “There's little doubt that Joseph Beuys, the German performance artist and sculptor, deserves a feature-length movie that explores his fascinating and complex body of work and his unique position in not only 20th-century art history, but also in German history in general (his work could be very political and he was part of the country's nascent Green Party). But the documentary Beuys , directed by Andres Veiel, doesn't do much more than scrape together bits and pieces of archive footage and photos into a cacophonous collage without a real structure and without a clear aim. "

Lee Marshall from the British Screen Daily , on the other hand, can gain a lot from the film: “Working engagingly with material culled from years of archive footage, it presents the work that was Joseph Beuys - as well as reminding us why this most political of contemporary artists is still relevant today, more than thirty years after his death. […] In the end, the film is just as interested in Beuys the thinker, activist and German Green Party founder member, the generous teacher, a man whose engagement with social issues and agit-prop attacks on the power of big money anticipate the ideas and methods of Occupy Wall Street and other recent grass-roots protest movements. "

In a three-page article in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Ulrike Knöfel says that the filmmaker Andres Veiel dealt with the artist “without critical distance”. The esoteric folk ideas of Joseph Beuys are faded out: “One rarely learns anything about this Beuys, despite the many exhibitions about him, and he does not appear in the film either. In the anthroposophical world it is almost as sacred to many as its inventor Rudolf Steiner. "

Christina Tilmann criticized in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung : “Unfortunately, Veiel's decision to rely entirely on the charismatic persona Beuys falls by the wayside. Veiel is little interested in biographical information (including critical questions that should have been asked regarding Beuys 'own mystified time as an Air Force pilot in World War II or his temporary involvement with the right-wing nationalist party Aktiongemeinschaft Independent Deutscher), and little in Beuys' art either it goes beyond political engagement. "

Jens Hinrichsen from Monopol Magazin, on the other hand, sees Veiel's film biography as an answer to the attempts to dismantle Beuys. “Veiel is also interested in the question of how far Beuys was involved in the Nazi era. But the filmmaker recognizes the life story as a process. Contrary to the statement 'The Eternal Hitler Youth', Veiel wants to know what became of the Hitler Youth. In Veiel's opinion: an artist whose political ideas have lost none of their topicality 30 years after his death. "

For the art historian Eugen Blume , Beuys himself takes any suspicion of a völkisch, racist ethos to absurdity with “his universalistic message 'everyone is an artist'. Everyone is everyone, whatever gender and culture they belong to. "For Blume," the film is not a hagiography, but rather shows a vulnerable, contradictory and humorous person who stood up for his ideas. "

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of release for Beuys . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF; test number: 167430 / K). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ Lutz Mommartz: 400 m IFF , 1969, 16mm, bw, 21 minutes
  3. ↑ "Beuys" at the Berlinale. The great artist as a self-promoter , tagesspiegel.de, February 15, 2017, accessed on March 18, 2017.
  4. ↑ Eugen Blume (inlet): Joseph Beuys. Provocation of the vital substance of society / art and anti-art (panel discussion "open ended. Art and anti-art" between Max Bense, Joseph Beuys, Max Bill, Arnold Gehlen; Wieland Schmied , January 27, 1970). Bookstore Walter König, Cologne 2003 (No. III of the publication series of the Joseph Beuys Media Archive); (Booklet with DVD), ISBN 3-88609-077-9
  5. ↑ Harald Martenstein: Unhealthy living with Beuys. Tagesspiegel, February 15, 2017, accessed June 26, 2017 .
  6. ^ Berlinale film "Beuys": Artist biography worth seeing in the Südwest Presse , accessed on February 17, 2017.
  7. ↑ Stuttgarter Zeitung, Stuttgart, Germany: Berlinale: The dust on our shoulders . In: stuttgarter-zeitung.de . ( stuttgarter-zeitung.de [accessed on March 17, 2017]).
  8. ↑ Beuys , zeroone.de, accessed on February 17, 2017.
  9. ↑ Diedrich Diederichsen : Unrestrained Hagiography. taz.de, February 15, 2017, accessed on February 17, 2017 .
  10. ↑ Peter von Becker : The great artist as a self-promoter. Der Tagesspiegel , February 15, 2017, accessed on February 17, 2017 .
  11. ^ Christoph Petersen: Beuys. Filmstarts.de , accessed on February 17, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Joachim Kurz: Beuys. kino-zeit.de, accessed on February 17, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Ula Brunner: The man with the felt hat on rbb-online.de, accessed on February 17, 2017.
  14. ↑ 'Beuys': Film Review | Berlin 2017 . In: The Hollywood Reporter . ( hollywoodreporter.com [accessed March 17, 2017]).
  15. ^ 'Beuys': Berlin Review . ( screendaily.com [accessed March 17, 2017]).
  16. ↑ Ulrike Knöfel: A German artist. In: Der Spiegel, No. 18, April 29, 2017, p. 117.
  17. ↑ Christina Tilmann: Laughter promotes the revolution. In: www.nzz.ch. May 31, 2017. Retrieved May 28, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Beuys, the eternal Hitler Youth. Retrieved July 21, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Beuys - a right thinker? Retrieved July 21, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Eugen Blume: Mysteries in the Central Station . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2018, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed on July 21, 2018]).
  21. ↑ Filmkunstmesse Leipzig: Awarding of the Gilde Film Awards 2017 . Article dated September 29, 2017, accessed September 30, 2017.