A 3 Hour Movie in 4 Parts: or not watching The Academy Awards

Part I

Somewhere I can hear Jean Genet saying, "to create is always to speak about childhood. It's always nostalgic."

Part II

I thought everyone would be home last night watching The Academy Awards so I went to the theatre on Fillmore Street to see the new movie, "Never Look Away", the German biopic of the German artist Gerhard Richter. I like to see movies in the dark with as few people around me as possible, which is why I so often seek out unpopular movies, or popular movies at unpopular times, sometimes judging the movie by the number of people seeing it with me: the more people watching the movie with me the less likely it is to be a good movie; this kind of critical measure has held up pretty well through the years, at least in my mind.

Thus, there was the strong possibility that I'd admire "Never Look Away", admiring Gerhard Richter as I do and thinking there wouldn't be many people in the theatre, as most people I know who like movies were at home watching The Academy Awards, some of them even making bets on who or what would win which award.

I was wrong. The theatre was at least half-filled, full of people like me, I presumed, people who like to see movies in the dark with as few people around them as possible. Or people who no doubt knew of the art of Gerhard Richter, who might have read of Richter's dissatisfaction with the movie and become intrigued. Or people who were attracted to the length of the movie itself, over three hours, and wanted to be entertained on a cold February night for as long as possible.

Part III

About an hour and a half into "Never Look Away" I could see why Richter renounced the movie, after initially cooperating with the movie's writer/director, a German filmaker, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The movie's far too biopical for an artist like Richter, beginning as it does with Richter's youth in Nazi Germany and ending with the celebration of his first gallery show in Dusseldorf sometime in the mid-1960s.

Perhaps Richter had hoped the movie would be art, and when it became clear to him that the movie wasn't art he moved as far away from it as he could. Perhaps he felt betrayed at having given so much information to the filmaker and getting so little in return, in terms of interpretive creative compensation. Perhaps it was a public relations stunt, a maneuver to drum up business for the movie. Or perhaps Richter felt, as I felt watching the movie, that the movie followed too closely the narrative of his own art-making, right down to his first real art breakthrough, those photographs and found newspaper photo images he made his first original paintings from. 

The last hour and a half of the movie felt like a violation of some sort of privacy, or at least a sacrifice of the anonymity the artist craves. I kept staring at the screen however, becoming at least as aware of the people sitting around me as I was aware of the movie I was watching. I wondered what they were thinking of the movie. Were they liking it? Were they hoping it would soon end? Was there anyone I knew in the audience? And if there was would I, at the end of the movie, have to acknowledge them and then chat about the movie in the lobby?

I stayed in my seat for the credits. There was a note of appreciation from the filmaker to Gerhard Richter. Then I walked out into the night without seeing anyone I knew.

Part IV

When I got home I turned on the tv. The Academy Awards show was coming to a end. A movie named "The Green Book" won 'Best Picture.' I remembered seeing "The Green Book" in an uncrowded theatre and that it wasn't a movie I'd either remember or completely forget; "The Green Book" was somewhere in-between.

I turned off the tv. I picked up a book, a biography of a famous writer, and started reading. Movies are different from literature. No life can ever be as good as a movie but no movie can ever be as real as a life.

Janet Leigh, from the movie "Psycho", directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. Screenshot by author.