Gerhard Richter and "A Masterless Work"

Mauricio 2022-01-15 08:03:05

Twelve years after his famous work "Eavesdropping Storm", Florian Henkel von Donnersmark returned to historical and political themes and wrote and directed the three-hour biographical drama "No Master" "", the film represented a German film hitting the Oscar for best foreign language film last year, and was successfully selected as the top nine candidates. Different from general biographical films, the protagonist prototype Gerhard Richter’s artist identity and his unique artistic concept invisibly provide a preset starting point and path of thought for the director’s creation. As we all know, collecting and sorting out the life material of characters, and using this as an opportunity to perceive the inside of the characters is a necessary work for shooting biographical films. Therefore, we have reason to believe that based on the mutual influence and penetration of artistic styles, in the process of deeply understanding Richter’s artistic ideas , Donas Mark, who is also the creator, is very likely to integrate the artistic style of the recorded person with the film, even if it is not the director’s intention. Based on this speculation, the author made a horizontal comparison between Richter’s public art philosophy, especially the part of the photo copied and painted in the film, and the image itself, and found that the two are inherently related in style. Although Richter was quite dissatisfied with the content of the film from the perspective of his subjective experience, and even claimed that the film "seriously distorted his personal experience", he himself may not have noticed that his artistic style has quietly reacted with the characteristics of the feature film. , Forming a valuable modern German image masterpiece.

The content of the film is mainly taken from Richter’s personal experience. Gerhard Richter was born in Germany in 1932 and studied fine art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1956. After graduation, he was engaged in painting work there. . However, the conflicting consciousness between East and West at that time made the GDR abandon Western art as if it were a mess. Dissatisfied with the current creative situation at the time, Richter fled to West Germany in 1961 and entered the Dusseldorf State Academy of Fine Arts to study fine art again. In the mid-1960s, Richter began his unique photographic painting creation, that is, through the copying and blurring of photographic works to realize his own artistic pursuit, and this series of works is the "work without an author" presented in the film. Richter believes that, based on the balance of immutability, autonomy and style, photos themselves are perfect paintings, and this is the main reason why he chooses photos as his creative materials. Richter also gave reasons for the personal iconic blurring. He claimed that this blurring makes the internal elements of the painting appear equally important or equally irrelevant, eliminating the meaningless sense of carving and maneuvering artistry. All parts of the work are perfectly combined. It is not difficult to find from this that Richter-style fuzzy processing is based on the pursuit of a sense of balance and harmony. It adopts methods such as removing the subject and removing the core, and strengthens the overall effect by breaking the subjective manufacturing center, thereby eliminating the prominent parts to drive the whole. The inconsistency that may be caused by a line of thought.

Gerhard Richter himself

As a career that runs through Richter's life, the art of painting is involved in the story. When it comes to painting, I believe that most people will have words such as "similar" and "imitation" in their minds. Indeed, the judging criteria for painting in childhood is often whether it can faithfully reproduce what you see or whether it can accurately express what you think. What you see is a certain degree of entity, and the pursuit of similarity does not need to be said. Even if the subject of the painting is an imaginary thing, the purpose of the painting is to achieve the closeness of the painting and the imagination. In summary, the initial pursuit of painting, or the basic goal, is the external similarity between the painted object and the person being painted. Even for most adults, if they don’t know much about the art of painting and cannot appreciate it from other perspectives such as the subject or artistic conception, they will use “close” as a personal criterion for evaluating the quality of paintings. This concept can also be regarded as the art of painting. General stereotypes. However, "likeness" can also provide an additional scale for painting, thereby breaking the solidification and reverse constraints of the strong desire for independent expression on the style, and making the work show the "freedom without style" in Richter's concept. Because of this, Richter chooses to copy and reproduce the extreme form of expression that is realistic and faithful reproduction of photos, and this creative method can also be regarded as an tentative return to the stereotype of painting art. In the film, the protagonist, like Richter, went through a series of failed pioneering attempts (newspaper collage, free ink splashing, symmetrical circles), and then began to create by selecting photos and copying them, but this kind of return to realism The practice of painting is not about self-abandonment and creation extreme after encountering setbacks, but looking for a state of harmony and freedom in the seemingly stereotyped "likeness".

Richter's photo blur paintings

The art of painting is only an element of the film content, and returning to the film itself, there are also stereotypes in the minds of many people. Following the above analysis of painting, if children who are new to movies are asked to give their own definition of film, the answer is likely to be: "A story shorter than a TV series and can be watched in one go." For most audiences In other words, it is extremely common and reasonable to retain the initial impression without deep understanding and thinking about the film field. Therefore, in the eyes of many people, the artistic purpose of movies is to present attractive stories, or to present stories according to certain rules, and movies are often regarded as a limited-length story carrier. Take the movie "The Last Night on Earth" at the beginning of the year as an example. It is true that the film itself has flaws, but it is not enough to make its word-of-mouth decline on some websites. The root cause of this phenomenon is the story structure and most people's stereotypes of the movie. Deviation of impression. However, although "movie is a story" is a stereotype, and movies are never limited to stories, properly used stories will not damage the artistry of the images. On the contrary, it is like Bazan praised the simple plot, naive and naive traditional western movie. Like full of poetry, reasonable and ingenious story arrangement can be used as an effective means of inspiring empathy, and then become an excellent medium for conveying movie themes or image emotions.

1888 "Landsea Garden Scene": The content of this earliest film seems to be more similar to today's vlog. Soon after the film was invented, images with story as the core content became the mainstream and continue to this day.

Like Gerhard Richter's return to the art of painting's stereotypes (copying photos), "No One's Works" also embodies a close integration with storyliness (film stereotypes). From a macro perspective, the film follows the traditional three-act structure (the death of a young aunt, the young East German learning and the budding of love, and the adult West German personal artistic exploration and style establishment), so that the narrative object's experience is divided into three layers clearly and progressively. At this stage, through this most classic and most widely accepted structure, Kurt's life story is clearly and directly presented from the audience's perspective. From the perspective of the details, the drama as a major element of the story is fully created in the film. Professor Sibande, the murderer who killed his aunt when Kurt was a child, became his father-in-law many years later; Professor Sibande became his father-in-law after his daughter fell in love with Kurt and became pregnant because of his dissatisfaction with Kurt. The excuse that her daughter had an abortion made her infertile for many years; Professor Sibande’s status as a Nazi war criminal was accidentally revealed at the end when his immediate boss was arrested. These direct or potential theatrical conflicts become the link between the image and the tragic emotions in the turbulent era, and a sense of powerlessness breeds in the dislocation of the identities of enemies and relatives. Just like using the "perfect resemblance" of photos to approach the reality, the concise and efficient structure and carefully designed details of the film eliminate the era and cognitive barriers between the content and themes and different audiences, making the social thinking under the image easier to perceive.

Kurt dedicated to creation: the character prototype is Gerhard Richter

Merely returning to the "stereotype" in the field of self-art is not enough to fully correlate the artistic style of the film with Richter's ideas. The more interesting thing about the film is that the director has intentionally or unintentionally used similar Richter's method of blurring photos and achieving similar effects makes the artwork feel harmonious and balanced. If blurring makes the main body of the composition and the rest of the elements in the photo have a status change and secondary fusion, then for movies, especially those with storytelling at the core, the use of blurring will undoubtedly suppress the plot that should be focused on. , So that each story clue is in a balanced and hard-working state. As mentioned above, the director has designed many plot clues with a strong sense of drama. The development of any clue can be used as emotional traction or a closed ending. However, the director did not play up any contradiction: at the end of the film, only Spanish Professor De unilaterally knows that Kurt is the family member of the person he killed in the past, and there is no stage in which his enemies meet; and his fate as a remnant of the Nazis and his personal extreme racism infiltrating many details in the film are not. The plot advances; Kurt's wife has not yet begun to suffer from the contradiction of infertility due to abortion for many years. Instead, she uses her final pregnancy as a handy conclusion. This seemingly evasive plot arrangement actually enables the film to achieve a balance between emotions and content, and the sense of drama is assumed to be a faithful transmitter, rather than overly highlighting a certain part of the film to fall into the personal consciousness of excessive force, just like Richter The blurred photo is generally copied, and the parts are tightly interlocked to form a whole that advances and retreats together.

In the film, Kurt’s work after determining his artistic style perfectly reproduces Richter’s blurry picture painting

Through the analysis of "No Master" and Richter's style, it is not difficult to find that the story structure is not the key to the film. The real focus lies in the theme and creative motivation behind it, just like the battle conveyed by the story in this film. Post-society and humanity issues are the same. This view is also expressed in the film by the lottery number metaphor mentioned by Kurt, "A string of random numbers is meaningless, but if they were the winning numbers in today's lottery, they would be different in an instant." Just as Richter said when he talked about his creation, the important thing is not the artwork itself, but the purpose of the artwork. Therefore, regardless of style return or innovation, the fundamental lies in the loyalty and aesthetic pursuit of personal creation. The essence of blurring is the restraint of human intervention. Only by restricting the desire for excessive rendering can the impetuousness and sense of design be eliminated, and the work can maintain its natural state. If the intention of the film author is regarded as a kind of subjective motivation, Richterian regression and blurring correspond to the emphasis and restraint of subjectivity, respectively, so that the image can form a perfect balance under the opposing forces.

This article was first published in a comment, reprinted in the DeepFocus public account

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Extended Reading

Never Look Away quotes

  • NKWD Major Murawjow: Whoever saves a life saves the entire world.

  • Kurt Barnert: You're so beautiful, it's almost unromantic. It's far too easy to love you. Do you love me? Do you love me? Otherwise it doesn't work for me. Without love, it won't work.