First and Formost, the bottom line:
I cannot say much about this film. It would be to reveal my vision for humanity, but you had better listen to the art teacher in the film rather than me. I can only tell you how this film came to have such a massive impact upon me, to the point it made me buy a scarlet red outfit, yesterday, for my first invite to a reception in 21 years (the retirement of one of my booksellers, Saturday a week from now).
I cannot begin to tell you about this film. You either get it or your don’t. You either feel the call to liberate yourself and be an artist (as a binman, or a greengrocer, or a civil engineer) understanding that freedom is the only true individualising force, and the one path to a true life, a beautiful life, or you don’t. This film is about you. Otherwise it is based on the life of Gerhard Richter.
Never Look Back (English Title)
I don't know why this film has such a different title in English. It has been suggested by my literary advisor that they used Google Translate. We could get very complicated about it, though, I suppose: the works of art are only about looking back with the inherent paradox that in the looking, the creating and the recollecting that is the painting as well as the viewing, there lives only the present continuous. If we never look back, however, in the traditional sense connoted with nostalgia or regrets, we cannot fall into the trap of a delusion that is not right here and now leading into the future; we shall find ourselves in the true spaces of our lives.
We shall all be co-creators of the All-becoming.
But that is me superimposing my ideas upon a film that also is just about the danger of abstraction and art for art's sake, instead of life for art's sake. Without art there can only be an alienating from your real self. Life leads you ever farther out from your simple starting point, working to accumulate a story that is everything around and about you. I am is not about you. We need the other "you" (or "that") only to help feel I-Self best. At the most rudimentary level, the film uses the socio-political template of indoctrination (illustrated here in the oppressed East/free West German divide) to contrast with the intuition that we are Spirit beings indellibly interconnected for better or worse. Until we see how a dualist and polar world (fundamentally of I against the rest) is necessary but not real, we will remain resistant to innovation (and the direct evolution of man's consciousness).
It is a film about how tragedies thrown at you by life and its competitive streak, breaking you or making you more resolved to connect. It is about finding out that you are all the others you must be better than and still not an I-Am; you are not even just the best you can be; it is not about becoming isolated on your holy mountain, either; it takes the other by which to know yourself. It is why we love the other body. It is why we make another body. It is why we are supposed to be somebody, with a name, authentic. So that in our art we can channel precisely only that which is mine to move and make and love. Ever since Isaac was spared, we are allowed this choice, by which to govern our Voice (that aspect of the All Creative Word/Logos). Let us love the whole world less, and our loves better.
What Really Happened on the Mount of Olives?...
The work above is far from spontaneous. It may take you, like it took me a while to “get” Richter, since I was never partial to the German modernists. It helped me to watch a video of him at work.
He is a very technically accomplished artist (with roots in Social Realism, having left East Germany shortly before the wall was built in 1961). At this stage in his carreer, he has a vast and highly organised studio complex and several assistants, which did not help endear me to him, at first. But then I remembered Tracy Emin and how she, too, failed to appeal to me at first, with her seemingly self-obssessive expressions of the chaos that has been her life. However, again thanks to a couple of BBC documentaries, showing also "what an artist does all day" (to be found on YouTube) I gained an enchanted persepective of her as a pioneer for all of mankind in the artist she is. Both Richter and Emin understand that life is Eros and the Artist is Venus, if I am to superimpose my own Rosicrucian terminology (cf the mysterious closing scene of Christian Rosenkreuz's Alchemical Wedding).
Both artists are highly disciplined, decicated to their work above and beyond any personal satisfaction, and therefore acutely self-reflective (instead of self-indulgent). Both artists are highly accomplished draughtsmen. But above all, we can see in both how the truth and beauty of their work may only be derived from who the I-Am is that they specifically are. We are handed work that feels infused with subjective code (and illusive hyper personal meaning), yet it means rather to resonate the intensity that exists only in the engaged consciousness. The end results are meant to convene very accurately with the image that is pure idea, such a volatile, intangible thing yet best captured by the exposure to time; and once fixed marks that a work is finished.
Richter at work with his giant squeedgee, smearing the paint across the canvas with much strength, pulling layers of mounted (colourful) paint up and covering others back up. He begins generally with a mood, determining the base painting; this he has to let go again for the actual representation of his "idea" to come to the fore, seemingly automatically, but always judged by his own eye as the right or wrong path to follow. See here the results after many days work: the black and white canvas, which started off very spontaneously colourful.
"Betty, 1988", the above painting(!) is a copy of an old photograph he had taken of his young adolescent daughter, he dug up out of a vast collection of unorganised prints to paint once she was an adult. He calls this random selection (not unlike what happens for me now, because of my vast stores of things collected which were relevant at the time as moments in time with seed potential for art. Only I don't use the word random or coincidence ever, because time is the great sequencer.)
The painting was not put in an exhibition till years after that, besides. All this layers up in the work proper, which adds to its cosmic relevance. This particular realistic copy of a photograph is not blurred like is the signature of many of his earlier works, which at first, made me no fonder of him as an artist, since I deplore blurry pictures as irritating for needlessly testing my already challenged eyesight. But since I know, by now, I have no personal preferences when it comes to my research, I also understand that it was important to experience this hurdle, I am sure most of us will fail to clear (this life time). The blurriness reminds one of the need to believe rather than develop a theoretical method (doctrine) in order to see most clearly.
Richter is not a hyper-realistic artist for the clever sake of it. He does not represent reality photographically. He retrieves the idea behind what is fixed in reality (the photo the epitomy of this). His art counteracts the reproductive and stagnating force of the depicted. His seeing is not a subjective imposition but a channel by which you too can be lead out on your own free will to see what is. You can become the author of this work owned by no author.
By borrowing a reality (already a memory fixed by its exposure to time) Richter loosens it into a living stream of consciousness: sets it free into the light where it's true colour may dance, swirl, blend veil upon veil of memory.
Only in the seeing can we find a true belief of who I am.
The film suggests we are all in the same dance with the Ur Hum; only some of us can really hear this (the sounding claxons of a few busses pin this Hum for the protagonist's aunt - sadly a little too far taken along by this "insight", and subsequently carted off as a degenerate lunatic by the Nazis for this ability to see the intangible reality behind our things and stuff of substance). The artist called Kurt in the film hears it in the wind in the trees; not unlike would a proper gypsy - i.e. they who know themselves to be impermanently fixed to any given locus and remember to be pilgrims or nomads as befits the soul roaming through the cosmos. (I am reminded of the duende [mourning/the Grace of Agony] soughing in the pine trees, in that other crushing - Indian Summer of the year 2000 - film, "Vengo"; but also of David Sylvian's song "Wanderlust" or his tiny gem, "September Is Here Again".).
Life Serves You Instead of the other way around.
The best we can do to survive this eternal dying is to try and liberate our memories from subjective sympathy or antipathy and rebirth them into an uncomparative, and unsuperlative realm: equinaminously being your foundation for free thinking. Here the personal tragedies are not insignificant but purposeful: to fall away in layers swirling and tumbling like tides of time. In giving away your lived life as a medium for enlightenment in others (it is not about you), detached from shame, pain, grief, personal loss (but not in denial of it!), meditatively, you live life authentically. Rothko aims to arrive at as similar life as artwork (with his meditative chapels, but I'm not sure he practiced what he preached down to the core, seeing as how he ended up). In any case, without the illusion of narrative and its all definitive importance to the best life lived, a life makes for a Gesamt-Extraction of oneself. As such you are no longer God's scribe, but a godMan yourself. No longer bound (buried alive) by the (karma) specific, only coordinated by it.
In Richter I already saw, as next I did in a great many "clues" (prompts I am sensitised to) in the film, that there is only one thing that matters in all of life and that is to liberate ourselves from political and social opinion to endorse Free Will and submit ourselves to the human cause of creating memory out of I-Amness and nothing but I-Amness. Much more on this I cannot say at this point.
Stills from the film. Be advised it is a long (3hr) film which may feel a bit obvious and certainly unspectacular to anyone already familiar with Das Leben der Anderen, another movie by the same director depicting the Communist regime in East Germany, or by those with much knowledge of the history of art and the uprising of modern post-world war movements, with the emphasis on Performance, Installation and Action Painitings, and the prevailing climate that painting was passé and belonged to the bourgeoisie.
