North Shore Movies review (print only):
A must-see for those who love the creative process
‘Gottfried Helnwein’ looks at an opera’s genesis
By Daniel M. Kimmel
Perhaps one of the toughest things to do is to capture the creative process on film. A movie showing a writer tapping away at a keyboard, or a musician putting down the notes he hears in his head, tells you nothing about what the artist is actually going through.
Perhaps the closest we’ve gotten is the 1956 documentary “The Mystery of Picasso” where the camera is placed on one side of a canvas and an unseen Picasso creates pictures on the other side. We watch as the pigments bleed through while the work is being formed, and try to anticipate what the artist will do next.
“Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child” is a similar attempt. The 2011 documentary, newly released to DVD, is about a different kind of art: the production of an opera. As with a dramatic film, a stage performance like an opera is a collaboration of many talents, which means there are going to be compromises, differences of opinion and, sometimes, an artistic vision that must fight through competing visions. That is what occurred here.
Helnwein is a renowned contemporary artist, born in Austria and now dividing his time between Ireland and the United States. In 2010 he was commissioned to serve as production designer for an original opera, “The Child Dreams,” for the 25th anniversary season of the Israeli Opera. It is based on a play of the same name by the famous Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin, who was inspired by the notorious “St. Louis” incident during which a ship filled with Jewish refugees was denied a safe port. Before his death in 1999, Levin approved it being turned into an opera.
Like Levin, Helnwein used images of endangered children as a challenge to viewers: Here is innocence betrayed and destroyed; how can we stand by and do nothing? Helnwein’s exhibition “Selektion,” originally created to commemorate Kristallnacht, was displayed in conjunction with the debut of the opera,
All of this would be of historic importance in terms of Israeli culture and the ability of Israel cultural institutions to attract world-famous artists. However, as the film makes clear, not everything went smoothly. A decision was made to use an adult performer for part of the character of the child, and Helnwein was concerned this miscasting would undercut the message of his art and Levin’s original play.
What’s interesting is that Helnwein
– in arguing with the director of the production over that and other decisions – believes he is fighting not only for his own ideas but also for Levin’s. The artist had not previously been familiar with the Israeli playwright’s work and was shocked to discover someone with whom he was totally in sync. To Helnwein, Levin had been writing about the very things he had been struggling with in his own art.
As we watch the process, we also catch extended glimpses of what would become an Israeli cultural landmark. It is eerie, surrealistic and unforgettable.
“Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child” is not for everyone. The “plot” of this documentary is the argument between the director and the artist/production designer, and their competing visions for the opera. If, however, you are fascinated with how art is made, this is a film you will want to put on your must-see list.
Movie Maven
“Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child” is available throughhttp://
Daniel M. Kimmel lectures widely on a variety of film-related topics and can be reached at danielmkimmel@gmail.com.
“Directed by Lisa Kirk Colburn, “Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child” follows Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein as he designs sets and costumes for an Israeli production of the opera “The Child Dreams”, composed by Gil Shohat. The opera is based on the play, “The Dreaming Child” by prolific Israeli dramatist Hanoch Levin.
Children, their innocence and the violence perpetrated on them by humanity, is the primary theme of Gottfried Helnwein’s (http://www.helnwein.com/) work. That theme is mirrored by Levin’s play. Helnwein was the obvious choice for the opera. Both the play, the opera, and Helnwein’s work are about the torture and death of children during the Holocaust, as well as their mistreatment throughout human history.
The film follows Helnwein as he works with opera director Omri Nitzan and the production staff in creating the opera’s look. We’re also introduced to Helnwein’s portrait work of children. More importantly we learn of Helnwein’s passion, and see that passion lived in the creation of “The Dreaming Child”.”
“… Susan Vogel’s Fold Crumple Crush: El Anatsui (2011) and Lisa Kirk Colburn’s Gottfried Heinwein & The Dreaming Children (2011) are similar looks at emerging artists whose works say something about people in distress and worse with Professor Anatsui’s works made of the simplest materials into murals that tend to speak of what happens to the things we throw out when we are done with them and it has its analog with people to often being treated as disposable. Heinwein’s work echoes the murder of children in the Nazi Holocaust in new paintings and images so stark, they become the basis for an opera on the subject in this also-interesting telling of his background, inspirations and origins.
Both men are likable and have a new way of seeing things, plus a heart and soul to their work that mire than justify this coverage. You might want to see these now before they become more popular, then you can compare where they start to where they are going. Both have extras with Anatsui offering “Eight Short Films” about his work (though they are more like video clips) and Heinwein adds Outtakes and an ArtGallery… ”
Gottfried Helnwein painting in his Los Angeles studio, in scene from “Dreaming Child.” Courtesy First Run Features
The collaboration of world-class painters and opera companies is an old story by now, but remains a fascinating object of study nonetheless. Chagall, Hockney, Dali, Cocteau, Picasso — the list of those who designed opera sets encompasses some of the greatest visual artists of the 20th century.
Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian painter known for his death- and destruction-haunted paintings of children, a direct outgrowth of his concern for the history of the Shoah, might seem an unlikely addition to that list. But his concerns matched those of Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin so perfectly that when the Israeli Opera decided to produce a new operatic version of his play “The Dreaming Child,” Helnwein was the obvious choice to design it.
Lisa Kirk Colburn, a documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles, managed to get permission to film the proceedings and the result, “Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child” opens on Nov. 23. It’s an often engaging but no less frequently frustrating film, perched on the edge of total access but not quite inside the inner sanctum of the artistic cathedral.
Helnwein is a tough cookie, the sort of man who, throughout his childhood, kept hammering away at his parents for answers to questions about the Holocaust, questions that a properly raised non-Jewish Austrian child wasn’t supposed to ask. As he says in the film, “Nobody would talk. Up until the 1970s it wasn’t taught in the schools.”
He searched relentlessly through books and magazines and saw things that disturbed him, “images that you cannot forget. … I didn’t know what to do with them. And I think that’s why I became a painter.”
The center of his artistic work is the place of the child, an innocent victim in a contemporary world of unspeakable cruelty. His images are stark, sometimes even gruesome, portraits of strangely luminous children floating in ominously dark, undefined space on his large canvasses.
Levin, who died in 1999 a few months before his 56th birthday, is one of Israeli theater’s most prolific, gifted and controversial playwrights. “The Dreaming Child” is one of his late works and a much acclaimed play, inspired by the doomed voyage of the St. Louis, a ship filled with Jewish refugees from the Nazis who were unable to find haven in North America and forced to return to Europe. With that as his starting point, Levin, himself a son of survivors from Poland, created a more abstract version of the story with universal implications. Eleven years after his death, composer Gil Shohat and his co-librettist and director Omri Nitzan created an operatic version that was remarkably faithful to the original text.
They knew only one visual artist would be right for their production. As Nitzan says in the film, “[Helnwein] is the twin brother of Hanoch Levin.”
Of course, dream projects have a way of turning into nightmares very quickly. Although “The Dreaming Child” never threatened to become a disaster and, in the final event, would actually prove a considerable success, the trail from concept to realization was a steep and difficult one. Colburn had a fair amount of access, and we get to see Helnwein fighting quietly but with gritted teeth to have the on-stage child played by a real child rather than a petite opera singer. It’s a battle that is central to his ideas and to the film, but one that is settled off-camera, in no small part by an edict from the Ministry of Labor barring the company from using a performer less than 14 years of age. There is a meeting of the creative minds that pointedly takes place behind closed doors, and it’s over. Helnwein offers his own rather jaundiced view of what happened (“the egos of people who wanted to be on stage … in the limelight”), but we never really can be sure.
We also see the painter and designer jousting with the lighting designer over what will prove to be Helnwein’s greatest coup de theater, a hypnotic final-act tableau of dozens of “dead children” suspended in black space. This time there can be little doubt that Helnwein’s judgment is correct; even on screen the effect is startling and eerily beautiful.
The problem with the film itself is that there aren’t enough of such moments, either the conflicts or the results. Too much screen time is spent with people sitting on-camera talking about what happened, too little is occupied by seeing it happen. To encompass the entire creative process, “Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child” ought to be at least an hour longer and the film crew should have had more direct access. That would have been a film worthy of its subjects. As it is, Colburn has given us a tantalizing forshpeis, an appetizer that tempts but doesn’t fill.
“Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child,” produced and directed by Lisa Kirk Colburn, opens Friday, Nov. 23 at the Quad Cinema (34 W. 13th St.). For information, call (212) 255-8800 or go to www.quadcinema.com.