Creating Beauty From Trauma
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won an Oscar for his 2006 film debut. Now he’s produced another masterpiece with a story inspired by the remarkable life of the artist, Gerhard Richter.
As a nine-year-old child, German film director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was taken by his mother to see the 1982 Zeitgeist art exhibition in Berlin – a combination of the best of modern American artists and up-andcoming German painters. With the von Donnersmarck family having recently returned home from six years living abroad in New York City, young art fan Florian was expecting the American creatives to blow away the more old-fashioned works of his countrymen. “They had assembled all the cuttingedge artists of Germany and the United States – it was very exciting to me because in the States there were all these famous names and young geniuses,” he recalls, close to 40 years later. “But you also had a new German group of artists called the Junge Wilden (‘the young wild ones’) and somehow their stuff was even cooler and edgier than what the Americans were doing.”
This power of art to inspire and elicit strong emotion stayed with von Donnersmarck, who grew up to be an acclaimed cineaste. His first work, The Lives of Others, about the secret monitoring of East Berliners by the Stasi secret police in the 1980s, won him the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. After a brief detour into Hollywood to make the blockbuster, The Tourist in 2010, von Donnersmarck returned to his European roots for his third film, Never Look Away, an historical masterpiece whose story draws inspiration from the stranger-than-fiction life of arguably Germany’s best known visual artist, Gerhard Richter.
Von Donnersmarck, 46, who is an Oxford graduate and speaks five languages, had become intrigued by a German newspaper article he’d come across about Richter years earlier. The article revealed that one of Richter’s more famous portraits, ‘Tante Marianne’ (Aunt Marianne) was a
depiction of his aunt together with Richter (her nephew) as a baby; and that the aunt, who had schizophrenia, had been killed during World War II under the Nazis’ eugenics programme, to which Richter’s own father-in-law-tobe, gynaecologist Dr Heinrich Eufinger, belonged. The chilling coincidence linking Richter and his wife’s father fascinated von Donnersmarck. “It was a really interesting connection between art, history and politics – that you have this young artist living under the same roof as the man who caused the very trauma that maybe prompted him to become an artist.”
TWO FAMILIES ENTWINED
This kernel of a story refused to go away. “I believe in fiction; I believe that fiction can actually be more truthful than just an enumeration of facts, and the great thing about being a fiction writer is you don’t have to stick to facts,” says von Donnersmarck. “So I kept on developing in my head what I imagined the story could be. I thought, ‘I’ll use this discovery that the journalist made about Richter’s life as a jumping-off point for a fictitious story and develop the story how it seems true to me.”
The result, Never Look Away, tells the story of Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), a young East German artist who, after marrying the love of his life, Elisabeth, and escaping with her across the border to West Germany in the 1960s, discovers her father was the SS doctor who ordered his beloved aunt’s sterilisation and murder during WWII. The power of this discovery enables Kurt to find his own voice as an artist and to finally escape the tyrannical hold his father-in-law has over both him and Elisabeth.
The film – which was written, directed and produced by selfconfessed perfectionist, von Donnersmarck – is an absorbing, stunning and, at times, shocking work,
that took three and a half years to produce. Von Donnersmarck spent nine months writing the screenplay (“I never want to spend more time on a screenplay than it takes to ‘weave a body’, so after nine months, I close my laptop and say ‘Okay, whatever I have at this point, has to be good enough’.”) Then financial backing needed to be raised to support such an ambitious undertaking – a three-hour film spanning from pre-war Fascist Germany of the 1930s to the 1960s and which necessitated filming in several German cities, Poland and Prague.
HISTORICAL VERACITY
“Every time I came onto the set, I’d pass dozens and dozens of trucks, and think ‘Are they really necessary? Do I really need all this?’” mused von Donnersmarck, who is now based in LA with his wife and family. “But to create a film where nothing distracts from the experience, that doesn’t feel like a cheap television movie, you do need ‘all this’. We felt a big sense of responsibility to our parents and our grandparents who lived through this period to re-create it – to have the audience understand that human emotion was no different 80 years ago. For that, you have to create something that feels real and smacks of reality.”
“I miss that visual expression of love in contemporary cinema.” FLORIAN HENCKEL
VON DONNERSMARCK
The intimate scenes between a young Kurt and his girlfriend, Elisabeth (Paula Beer) bear a particular authenticity. “My favourite scenes would probably be the erotic scenes because that’s something I miss in contemporary cinema – that visual expression of love – sex scenes that are not just athletic or random, but that are tied into what you’re trying to say about the relationship at that given point,” von Donnersmarck says.
“I was really happy the actors were game to develop these scenes with me. I think it’s a little awkward for some [directors] to think up choreography for something as intimate as sex and so they just say, ‘Well we don’t really need it for the story’. So in a way, we end up in a sexless world. But it should not be awkward for the actors ... I always said to them, ‘It’s not you having sex – it’s the character’. It’s important because if you have a scene depicting some other passion – be it desire or revenge or justice – those are equally intimate things, right? And yet we tend to show those and leave out the sex part.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, the man who inspired Never Look Away, Gerhard Richter, is yet to see it and claims he does not wish to. Is that a source of disappointment for von Donnersmarck? “You know, I read him the full screenplay and when it was done, I called him and let him know which parts [of his life] I used and what was fictitious,” the director says.
“I don’t know if I’d like to live through the most traumatic things of my life again on-screen. Either it’s too close to what happened and then it’s not so much fun to see, or it’s not close enough and that could also be really traumatic.
“Of course, I would have preferred for him to have seen it but I can understand how it would be a little bit draining. He just doesn’t feel up to it emotionally. When I was reading him the script, he was already extremely emotional. Maybe this film is for everybody except Gerhard Richter.”