When taking into account that the last movie Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck released was the under appreciated, generally poorly reviewed The Tourist (the final Hollywood movie that displayed Hitchcockian glamor, to be honest) in 2010, it’s no wonder that the German writer-director would wait another eight years to release something to “offset” this “faux pas” with a narrative sweepingly epic in a far different way. Returning to the roots of his first film, the Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others, von Donnersmark takes us back to the start of the Cold War, when Berlin was divided into four zones subsequently rent in two by Western Ally and Soviet Communist influences that reached a climax of tension when the ironically titled German Democratic Republic put the Berlin Wall up overnight, its complete formation appearing on August 13, 1961, marking the beginning of a twenty-eight year literal and ideological divide.
However, this portion of quintessentially sordid German history is not where the narrative of Never Look Away begins (after all, it’s a three-hour affair, leaving plenty of opportunity to cover much historical and emotional ground). No, we begin, like Inglourious Basterds, at the start of Nazi ascension, a time when art is considered subversive just for existing, let alone offering up something “indulgent” in the style of Kandinsky. And, speaking of, it is at a “Degenerate Art Show” where our protagonist, a six-year-old Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) first sees a Kandinsky. Taken there by his Aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) to encourage his natural gift for painting, Kurt’s eyes are opened to the so-called self-indulgence of art before all the isms infiltrated the nation to rein it in. And as the two paint the portrait of Dresden 1937 while leaving the show to the ogling eyes of Nazi soldiers, the sensitive perceptivity of Kurt is crystallized when he makes note that everyone is staring at her, not precisely aware that it is because of lechery. As they return to the outskirts of town, forced to live there as a result of both ostracism and self-imposed ostracism thanks to Kurt’s father not wanting to be a part of the Nazi party in any way, Kurt’s adoration of his aunt is best explained not through her earnest encouragement of his talent, but in a moment of pure innocence that finds her asking the bus drivers at a depot to all honk their horns at the same time so that she can hear the perfect note. The one that unlocks the key to the universe. For, as she puts it simply to Kurt, “Everything true is beautiful.”
It is one of the last pieces of wisdom she is able to impart him with after her slight crackup, involving a hair-raising scene in which she tells Kurt to keep watching her play the piano nude and then says now that she’s hit the right note–the one that holds the key to understanding the universe–she can play it on anything, including her own skull as she taps her head with an ashtray that prompts her to gush blood. Of course, it was not an ideal time to have a mental breakdown in the Nazi era, what with ethnic cleansing and eugenics figuring into whether or not your brand of “crazy” should result in sterilization so as not to give credence to a faulty or “worthless” bloodline. And that’s just what responsibility falls into the lap of creepoid obstetrician Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch, who plays the much more empathetic lead character in von Donnersmark’s first film), both head of a hospital and key member of the S.S. It’s a highly powerful position that very overtly goes to his twisted head.
In keeping with the “everything is connected” (even various incarnations of political parties) spirit of the film and the Richter message conveyed through the canvas, Elisabeth comments on a drawing in Carl’s (who insists on being called Herr Professor in expected douche fashion) office made by his daughter. Using her intuitive powers stemmed from being slightly cuckoo, Elisabeth says she can tell that his child (who we ultimately find out is also named Elisabeth [Paula Beer]) is big-hearted and kind, that he ought to think as a father in terms of being so callous as to sterilize her against her will. “I could be your daughter, you could be my Papa,” she pleas, screaming, “Papa!” over and over again as she’s led to the operating room. Little does she know, Carl is all too willing to perform the same fucked up procedure to preserve his own bloodline in one of the more perverse plot points of the movie, of which a top twenty list could be made.
Through the loss of the most important people in his life as the war comes to an end, Kurt still feels the energy of Elisabeth’s words, “Everything true is beautiful,” within him. So as Nazi Germany becomes Communist Germany, Kurt enrolls in an East Berlin art school that touts its curriculum as “Socialist Realism”: a form that leaves no selfish room for an artist to be an innovator. “Me, me, me,” his primary professor mocks of artists like Picasso. It’s not exactly a nurturing environment for creativity and experimentation. But he remains for the sake of his love and fellow student, Ellie (he has to call her something besides Elisabeth as she already reminds him of her to begin with), who, in turn, remains out of obligation to her father, a man she gradually can’t deny she despises as, for Carl, it does not matter what shapeless form political oppression takes, just so long as he can be passionately militant about whatever faction of German politics is most subjugating. Thus, from Nazism to communism, he makes the effortless transition.
In the midst of the jig being potentially up for Carl in terms of being able to hide from the comeuppance deserved for his Hippocratic oath-breaking past, Kurt has, by now, moved to West Germany with Ellie, starting over yet again in the face of everyone telling him that all great artists put out their masterpieces before the age of twenty-six. Hence, he enrolls into art school under the pretense of being said age (he looks quite young for thirty). As he struggles to heed the advice of the school’s director, to tell the viewer who he “is,” Kurt taps into the photographs of his youth in such a way as to coincidentally and fortuitously unearth the truth about Carl. Because yes, even that ugly truth is beautiful when rendered to canvas.
With the paintings of the movie done by Andreas Schön, a former assistant of Richter’s, it is clear that despite lending his own impressionistic spin on the biography of Richter’s life, von Donnersmark has nothing but the utmost admiration for him, commenting to The New Yorker, “He’s lived through his mother being raped by the Russians, his father committing suicide, his aunt being euthanized, both of his uncles being killed on the Eastern Front, his childhood classmates being killed in the bombing of Dresden, the experience of incredible impoverishment. Yet he manages to take all these things and charge them, in his paintings, with this mystical energy that comes from the suffering.” Though von Donnersmark didn’t precisely tell the story this way, it is, at its core, a fair and honest portrait of an artist’s nonstop barrage of pain and suffering turned into something beautiful. Because there is no other choice if one wants to be successful in the equally as important art of self-preservation. At first collaborative with von Donnersmark, who recorded many of their initial meetings because of his compulsive need “to write like [he’s] wiretapping a confession booth,” Richter has since dubbed Never Look Away as von Donnersmark “manag[ing] to abuse and grossly distort my biography.”
That the German title of the movie, Werk Ohne Autor, means Work Without Author (this is what German critics billed his work as at the outset, when it ostensibly seemed as though there was no personal history attached to the paintings) is perhaps what Richter wanted to remain with regard to his amorphousness. With the presence of von Donnersmark’s unofficial biopic in the world, Richter is no longer really capable of such.
While Richter himself has now famously lambasted the film, it bears noting that, in von Donnersmark’s defense, no one has yet taken such a thoroughly classic and melodramatic approach to presenting the life of an artist (not even Julian Schnaebel with his recent biopic of Van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate). If the film is a reductive interpretation of Richter’s decades’ worth of politically-induced trauma that can be boiled down to being a story about “the healing power of art” (which Ariana Grande has recently iterated with thank u, next), then so be it. As von Donnersmark phrased it: it is the difference between making Citizen Kane and Citizen Hearst. There has to be elasticity in the retelling of an artist’s life in order for art to beget art.
