Never Look Away

Never Look Away
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Written by	Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Produced by	Quirin Berg Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Jan Mojto Max Wiedemann
Starring	Tom Schilling Sebastian Koch Paula Beer
Cinematography	Caleb Deschanel
Edited by	Patricia Rommel
Music by	Max Richter
Distributed by	Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Release dates	4 September 2018 (2018-09-04) (Venice) 3 October 2018 (2018-10-03) (Germany)
Running time	188 minutes
Country	Germany
Language	German

Never Look Away (German: Werk ohne Autor, lit. 'Work Without Author') is a 2018 German drama film directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It was nominated for a Golden Lion at the 75th Venice International Film Festival and for a Golden Globe by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. It was nominated for two Academy Awards at the 91st Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography categories. This was only the second time that a German-language film by a German director was nominated for an Oscar in multiple categories, the other film being Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot 36 years prior.

Plot

As a small child during the Nazi era, Kurt visits the traveling exhibition "Entartete Kunst" ("Degenerate Art") in Dresden with his beautiful and eccentric young aunt Elisabeth. He is especailly, mesmerized by the Girl with Blue Hair, a sculpture by Eugen Hoffmann. Elisabeth tells the boy to "never look away" because "everything that is true holds beauty in it". He will keep this advice close to his heart for the rest of his life, even when his aunt is "euthanized" by the Nazis because she is suspected to be schizophrenic. The doctor who orders her forced sterilization and sends her to her death is gynecology professor Carl Seeband, the director of the Dresden women's clinic and a high-ranking member of the SS medical corps.

After the war, Seeband is arrested by the Russians and placed in a prison camp where he saves the life of a Russian officer's child during a complicated birth. The grateful Russian officer protects Seeband and releases him, destroying the records of his crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, Kurt Barnert begins to study painting at the Dresden art school where he falls in love with a young fashion design student Ellie Seeband partly because she reminds him of his aunt. What he does not know is that she is the daughter of the very Nazi doctor responsible for his aunt's murder.

He successfully continues his studies, but is forced to complete paintings that reflect social realism which is an ideology and field of art that he cannot come to terms with. Although he is very good at it, he knows that he can never find his own voice through this kind of art.

Eventually, Kurt meets Elisabeth's father, who has left his Nazi past behind and now follows the socialist ideology of East Germany. Kurt still does not know that Carl Seeband is responsible for his aunt's death. Seeband does not approve of his daughter's relationship with Kurt, whom he sees as genetically inferior. He goes to great lengths in his attempts to destroy the relationship. However, Kurt and Elizabeth's love grows even stronger and eventually the two get married.

Fearing prosecution after the Russian officer who protected him is transferred to Moscow, Seeband flees East Germany for West Germany. Shortly afterwards, Kurt and Elisabeth, too, flee to West Germany. He does not know what kind of art he wants to make, but he knows that socialist realism is not it.

Since Kurt is already 30 years old, he has to lie about his age to be admitted to the famous Düsseldorf Art Academy. Here he can study and practice art more freely than in socialist Eastern Germany. His teacher (based on Joseph Beuys) recognizes Kurt's deep personal experience, but also sees that he is struggling to find his own voice, having been trained only in figurative painting, a medium considered outdated and "bourgeouis" by the standards of the school.

Only when Kurt finds a newspaper article about a captured Nazi doctor, Seeband's boss, does he have his artistic breakthrough. He starts using his figurative painting skills to copy black-and-white photographs onto the canvas, adding a mysterious sfumato blur. He also paints Seeband's passport photographs and photographs of his aunt from his own family album. When Seeband sees a collage painting of Kurt's aunt, the Nazi-doctor and himself, he flees, destroyed, not understanding how his despised son-in-law of all people was able to uncover his greatest secret. However, Kurt may not have understood what he was doing, at least not on a conscious level. He realizes that when you are true to your artistic instinct, you can reach a truth your intellect could never hope to attain.

After years of infertility, Elisabeth becomes pregnant. Kurt gets his first art show where his art impresses the critics even though they completely misunderstand and misinterpret it. But he can look his past in the eye without fear and has finally found his voice. And that is all that matters to him.

Cast

• Tom Schilling as Kurt Barnert
• Sebastian Koch as Professor Carl Seeband
• Paula Beer as Ellie Seeband
• Saskia Rosendahl as Elisabeth May
• Oliver Masucci as Professor Antonius van Verten
• Ina Weisse as Martha Seeband
• Rainer Bock as Dr. Burghart Kroll
• Hanno Koffler as Günther Preusser
• David Schütter as Adrian Schimmel / Finck
• Johanna Gastdorf as Malvine
• Jeanette Hain as Waltraut Barnert
• Hinnerk Schönemann as Werner Blaschke
• Florian Bartholomäi as Günther May
• Hans-Uwe Bauer as Horst Grimma
• Jörg Schüttauf as Johann Barnert
• Ben Becker as foreman
• Lars Eidinger as exhibition manager
• Cai Cohrs as young Kurt Barnert
• Jacob Matschenz as Arendt Ivo

Historical background

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck explained extensively that Never Look Away was a work of fiction but that the point of inspiration had been an article by famed German investigative reporter Jürgen Schreiber about the German painter Gerhard Richter. Richter's aunt Marianne Schönfelder had been murdered by the Nazis because she developed schizophrenia. Richter immortalized her in a painting entitled Aunt Marianne, in which the aunt is holding Gerhard Richter as a baby. This painting was originally released under the title Mother and Child as it was Richter's habit to obfuscate the connections his paintings had to his personal life, leading to art historians referring to his body of work as being "without author", as it purportedly had no connection to its author's life.

What Jürgen Schreiber's investigative research uncovered in 2002 was that Gerhard Richter's father-in-law, Heinrich Eufinger, had been a high-ranking SS-doctor and fervent Nazi who himself performed over 900 forced sterilsations on women whom the Nazis considered unfit to reproduce. While he did not perform the operation on Marianne Schönfelder personally, he was the director of the hospital where it was performed.

Even though Gerhard Richter only found out about this connection between the families through the article at age 70, his body of work shows that – at least on a subconscious level – he must have known. One of his earliest paintings is of the arrest of Eufinger's SS boss, Werner Heyde, from a newspaper photograph. Another one from the same series, Family at the Seaside, is a snapshot from his wife's photoalbum showing her father, Professor Eufinger horse-playing with his family, a banal photograph were it not for the fact that it was taken around the exact time professor Eufinger sent Richter's aunt to her death.

Finally, the largest photo painting that Gerhard Richter produced before turning to abstraction was Ema, Nude on a Staircase (#134 in his official catalogue raisoné). Ema was Gerhard Richter's wife, the name being short for "Marianne" – she shared a first name with Richter's aunt. Unusually for Gerhard Richter, this painting is dated very precisely to May 1966. Richter's first child was born on 30 December 1966, and Richter explained that this photograph was staged by him when he had found out that she was three months pregnant. In a New Yorker profile of writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who spent many weeks with Gerhard Richter during his research for the film but never revealed anything about the content of these conversations, Gerhard Richter revealed surprisingly that "Ema’s father had been her gynecologist, and that there were mysteries and rumors around the treatment that he provided her".

Donnersmarck read Richter the full screenplay when he was finished, so that Richter could see for himself how much was fiction and where facts from his life were used. But when the film was finished, and Donnersmarck offered to arrange a screening, Richter said he did not feel up to it and did not feel he had the strength to see the film. Donnersmarck stated he understood this reaction, as few people would want to relive some version of the most traumatic chapters of their life on screen. He said it would probably be hurtful if it was too close to the facts and perhaps even more hurtful if it was not close enough. "Maybe the film is for everybody except him".

However, Richter claimed that he told Donnersmarck clearly that he would not approve of a movie about himself (Gerhard Richter). Richter also suggested to Donnersmarck that the film's protagonist might have another profession, but Donnersmarck didn't respect his requests.

Reception

Audience reaction

Final Professional Audience Poll for all films in Official Competition at the 76th Venice Film Festival.

At its very first screening, in Competition at the 76th Venice International Film Festival, Never Look Away received a 13-minute standing ovation and came in first place. Never Look Away also won audience awards at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, Tournai Ramdam Festival, Aspen Film's Academy Screenings and the Leiden International Film Festival, mostly in competition with the same films it was up against in Venice.

Professional reaction

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes The Exorcist director William Friedkin stating: "One of the finest films I have ever seen is Never Look Away – a masterpiece." The Squid and the Whale producer and feminist critic site Cherrypicks founder Miranda Bailey in an interview with Mingle Media called Never Look Away "the best movie I've ever seen, in my entire life – ever – in my whole life."

Critical reaction

Never Look Away holds a 76% fresh rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the critics consensus stating: "Never Look Away fills its protracted running time with the absorbing story of an incredible life -- and its impact on the singular artist who lived it." Ann Hornaday writing in The Washington Post wrote: "The title of "Never Look Away" is deliciously ironic: This is one of the most mesmerizing, compulsively watchable films in theaters right now." Leonard Maltin who taught the film at his master class at USC Film School writes: "I urge you to see Never Look Away. It is a rich and rewarding experience, and the three hours fly by." In Commentary magazine, in an article called "The Greatness of Never Look Away – Triumphant", editor-in-chief John Podhoretz, compares Never Look Away favorably to David Lean's Doctor Zhivago and calls it "the rare movie you actually wish were longer because it is so involving, heart-wrenching, and beautiful.” The novelist Kyle Smith, critic-at-large for the National Review, writes in an article entitled "A New Cinematic Masterpiece": "The German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck already has one of the best films of the century to his credit: 2007’s The Lives of Others. His new one is, I think, even better. It may be the best German film I’ve ever seen. Never Look Awayis the title." He goes on to state: "It’s about the biggest themes (art, war, love, death), it’s emotionally overwhelming, its dialogue is lapidary, its musical score transporting. It’s one of the best films of the decade." Dissenting voices include humorist contrarian critic Armand White for the National Review and David Edelstein, writing for Vulture.com.

Box office

Never Look Away, currently at a North American box office of US$1,179,137 became only the 15th German-language feature film in to pass the million dollar box office mark.

See also

• List of submissions to the 91st Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of German submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

External links

• Never Look Away at IMDb