The title of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away (2018) is an imperative: don’t look away from art, evil, joy or history. The film follows the life of Kurt Barnet (Tom Schilling) as he grows up in nazi Germany and Communist Dresden, engaging directly with the horrors of the era. Kurt’s aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), diagnosed as schizophrenic, is sterilised as part of the Nazi eugenics program overseen by Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a gynecological doctor and leading member of the SS medical corps. Dresden is firebombed and men die on the Russian Front. Many reluctant National Socialists fall foul of the piecemeal attempt at post-war denazification, while higher profile nazis go unpunished. This unflinching history is told alongside the history of German art and the aesthetic, as well as the ideological, changes wrought upon it by both regimes.
It is Elisabeth who urges Kurt to “never look away” because “everything that is true holds beauty in it”. This becomes the guiding mantra of Kurt’s life, framing his relationship to the world and to his art. Looking at art is, in the context of Nazi Germany and the later period of East German communism, a politically subversive act. It is also central to the structure of the film, shaping it into three fairly predictable acts. Aryan Romanticism and brutal state suppression are followed by strict Socialist Realism, and finally, when Kurt moves to the West and the Dusseldorf Art Academy, by bourgeois Modern Art. This movement is echoed in the artistic development of Kurt: his narrative functions as a lens through which we can contemplate epochal shifts in a larger story, The Story of Art. Never Look Away was inspired by the life of Gerhard Richter – and suggests a progression both in terms of artistic freedom and artistic taste. Taste is central to the film’s discussion of art: while repressive regimes judge an artwork as Good or Bad because of its political subtext, the film urges a qualitative metric – to consider Beauty or Skill. In a tour of ‘Degenerate Art’ in Dresden, the National Socialist guide stops in front of a Kandinsky painting and, pointing to the five-year-old Kurt, jokes “I think you could do this, too”. Using the well known joke – modern art as childlike scribble – in this context serves to align bad taste with bad politics, a brutish intellectual miscomprehension with an evil ideology. This didactic structure is repeated throughout the three acts of the film, each of which contains a representative speech on art – the venomous nazi tour guide, a Communist art professor who rails against the “Me, me, me” stance of bourgeois artists, and the modern art student who obsesses over the need for “something new – an idea”. On each occasion art introduces politics.
The film makes a strong case for the idea that a society can be judged by its relationship to art – that there is a strong correlation between artistic faculty and political morality. We have seen this before – in The Monuments Men (George Clooney, 2014) or Trumbo (Jay Roach, 2015) – mainstream cinema exploring the inherently political nature of artistic production and exhibition, as far as liberal discourse will allow. But Never Look Away also suggests a theory about how art should be made. Scenes set in the Dusseldorf art school focus on the relationship between Kurt and his lecturer Antonius van Verten (Oliver Masucci), and their traumatic experiences of nazism and a World War Two plane crash. For van Verten, art is about “what I have truly experienced in my life” – his agony in the wreckage of a burnt-out Luftwaffe plane. For him, artistic integrity is gained through personal hardship. This Romantic perspective of the suffering artist is set against the callous profiteering of the Abstract Expressionist art students who flog sexed-up, ironised work that is, they themselves admit, little more than ‘wallpaper’. Van Verten’s relating of art to suffering is, on a more fundamental level, also reflective of the logic and form of the film itself. An artistic Bildungsroman, Never Look Away’s very structure and focus support the theory that Van Verten proposes – art from experience. This is problematic when we consider the film and its relationship not just to art but to history. The Bildungsroman was notably an 18th-century form, and the film’s focus on Great Men is similarly dated. Women are everywhere subsumed into the story of the artist. Kurt’s wife Ellie is a fashion student but apart from the time she makes a suit for Kurt there is almost no on-screen development of her passion. In a film with a run-time of three hours and nine minutes there is little excuse for such omissions. Later, when she loses a pregnancy and thus her traditional reproductive role within a nuclear family, Ellie tells Kurt, “Your pictures have to be our children”.
Although Never Look Away explicitly criticises contemporary patriarchal attitudes these are addressed diegetically rather than formally. The message of the film is clear: men like Seeband must be condemned. But in a film about looking it is frustrating that we never see from the perspective of these women. While we do not always see through Kurt’s eyes, everything we see affects him, is linked by the structure of the film to him. When Elisabeth is interviewed by Professor Seeband before her sentencing she stares at a wall clock and a painting by the doctor’s daughter. Many years later Kurt stares at the same objects. This creates a sense of dark historical irony but it is also true that, structurally, Elisabeth’s scenes are a set-up for Kurt’s. When Elisabeth is violently removed by the medical authorities, the child Kurt holds up a hand, blocking the traumatic image. The camera blurs when Kurt squints, filtering the action. Through such a filter their history becomes his experience and eventually, his art.
In the final act Kurt paints a picture of himself and his aunt Elisabeth which wins him an exhibition. He calls it ‘Mother and Child’. The press ask, “Who is depicted there? You and your mother?” he replies “It’s just a snapshot”. Kurt creates his paintings from photographs, projecting the images onto canvas and painting in the lines, later smudging the photo-realistic painting with his brush, making his mark on what would otherwise be direct mimesis. The transposition liberates the image from the form of the snapshot, dulling the link to the historical figure of Elisabeth. She is universalised, repackaged for public consumption as an angelic model of reproductive traditionalism. The picture appears again, in different form – only this time it is seen as his work rather than her life. He asks us to look but to see only with his eyes. This is the problem with the demand to ‘never look away’. No one can see everywhere at once. What matters, and where the film fails, is in interrogating how to look. While the film introduces the idea of seeing politics through art, it ignores the political ramifications of its own artistic form, omitting to ask who has the opportunity to look? and who will be seen?. Elisabeth’s imperative is direct, but it is also vague, and much of its moral value is diluted as Kurt’s vision is clouded by his own subjectivity. The final frame of the film is Kurt’s face, joyous and close-up in shallow focus, a visual summation of the film’s real imperative, which is to never look away from Kurt. Like the childlike hand, held up to block an unwanted image, everything else blurs into the background.
