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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
Distributor’s 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."

Salomon’s 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 1930’s (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) one’s 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 Salomon’s 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 play’s main characters, whose death and resurrection (or self re-creation(s)) provide us with vivid analogies for Salomon’s 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 artist’s meandering, uncertain search: As a result, when the curtain falls, most viewers are likely to leave with a greatly enriched comprehension of Salomon’s unceasing efforts to shape, redefine and "stage" her own self-identity.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Volume 20 Number 3, Spring 2005.)

 

 




Updated 1st June 2005


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