Charlotte:
Life or Theater?
by Richard
Dindo
Produced by Esther Hoffenberg
First Run / Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY,
1992
VHS, 62 mins., col.
Sales, $375; rental, $75
Distributors website: http://www.frif.com.
Reviewed by Artur Golczewski
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
artur.goczewski@uni.edu
By the careful selection and editing of
images and narration, this film commemorates
the life of Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943),
a Modern-era Jewish painter. It does this
in a manner that not only celebrates her
artwork, but, in the process, becomes
a work of art itself. Her own large innovation,
on which this film is closely based, was
an operetta called Life? or Theatre?:
A Play with Music. She made it
from a series of 769 of her gouache paintings,
arranged in deliberate clusters to form
"acts" and "scenes."
Salomons play-like "autobiography"
was multi-media. As recreated in this
film, it is a visual, literary and sometimes
musically augmented stream of consciousness
in which she recounts the developments
in her personal life, by a mixture of
real and imagined events. The two transcendent
aspects are a pattern of suicides among
her family members, and the brutal realities
of simply trying to survive as a Jewish
woman in Berlin in the late 1930s
(she was eventually captured by the Nazis
and murdered at the Auschwitz concentration
camp). These and other factors are the
existential background for the challenges
Salomon dealt with as she struggled to
maintain a life that, in spite of everything,
was somehow still worth living. As recounted
by this film, it was through her artwork
that she was able to maintain a Life?
Or a Theatre? in which her
daily life becomes a play of sorts,
through which she seeks peace of mind,
defines her self-identity, and deflects
the ever-present threats of Nazi Germany.
The concept of the art-making process
as a perpetually evolving act of designing
(or re-designing) ones existential
space in terms of an intricate balance
of esthetic and emotional sensibilities
is, of course, suggested by the title
of the film. But it is even more powerfully
realized in the play-like presentation
of her paintings, within which incidents
sometimes lack the conventional linear
ordering of time and space. Nor is their
meaning crystal clear. These aspects can
work to ones advantage in the sense that
they enable her to perceive situations
from surprisingly different perspectives
and to arrive at "distorted"
conclusions that may remind us of the
work of such Modernists as Cezanne, Matisse,
and Picasso.
This film supplies a narrative for events
in Salomons life and art without
at all distracting from their inherent
complexities. It is of particular value
that the film begins and ends with statements
by the artist, in which she herself describes
her artistic intentions then relates the
nature of her work to one of the plays
main characters, whose death and resurrection
(or self re-creation(s)) provide us with
vivid analogies for Salomons own
life and artistic process. By combining
dramatic close-ups with articulated journeys
through the often crowded scenery, the
filmmaker takes on the challenge of simulating
the artists meandering, uncertain
search: As a result, when the curtain
falls, most viewers are likely to leave
with a greatly enriched comprehension
of Salomons unceasing efforts to
shape, redefine and "stage"
her own self-identity.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 20 Number
3, Spring 2005.)