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Artists Abramović, Neshat on a boat trip on the Hudson River: Feminist creative processes
Photo: Filmwelt
A woman with messy hair dyed purple-blonde hops off a large stone onto the beach, in the background graffiti walls and Israeli national flags.
Two women in black walk along the banks of the Hudson River in conversation with the backdrop of Manhattan.
And in front of the gray sky over Berlin, a tall, bright red-haired woman with sunglasses climbs down the bank stairs to the Spree.
Director and writer Evelyn Schels doesn't need a minute to introduce the four protagonists of her film, the Israeli sculptor and video maker Sigalit Landau, the Iranian photo artist Shirin Neshat, the Serbian performer Marina Abramović and the German photographer Katharina Sieverding.
You can't hear the women speak yet, but the images create a desire to know more about these four.
Why are you in this movie?
And what do they have to do with each other?
"Body of Truth" is the name of the 90-minute documentary, which will open in cinemas nationwide this Thursday, with a six-month corona delay.
Body of Truth - the awe-inspiring title sums up what the artists have in common: the conviction that the body, unlike the spirit, is always truthful and is therefore particularly well suited as an artistic means of expression to say what needs to be said.
About politics.
About religion.
About violence and the abuse of power.
And about the position of women, which is still too often marked by oppression.
The Munich filmmaker has interwoven four feminist creative processes in such a way that, from different generations and cultures, they seem to be connected in a natural way.
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According to Schels, she wanted to create a dialogue "between the biographies of the artists, their works and contemporary history".
The different temperaments, life and suffering experiences shape the artistic forms of expression of women.
"I was a healing child," says Sigalit Landau, who was born in 1969 as the first of a family of Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem, to a house with relatives, some of whom could not bear to survive, and who killed themselves.
"I danced in the living room and filled in gaps."
War and death in the Middle East conflict have dominated everyday life for decades.
Marina Abramović, 73, learned from her parents, who fought against Hitler's Germany in Yugoslavia in World War II, that the meaning of life is to sacrifice yourself for a big idea.
"For them it was communism, for me it was art."
The mother beat the child bloody, "I didn't understand why".
The father threw the little daughter into the sea to teach her to swim, she thought he wanted to kill her.
"I realized that no matter what I did, I would always be alone."
The doctor's daughter Katharina Sieverding, who was born in Prague in 1943, was shaped by fear of death and the need to survive on the run after the Second World War.
When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by a police officer during a demonstration in 1967, she decided to use photography to resist any kind of oppression: "I was angry with everyone."
Shirin Neshat, 63, who emigrated to the United States to study before the Islamic seizure of power in Iran in 1979, feels like an exile to this day.
The daughter of liberal parents, who grew up under the Shah's regime, felt alienated from her culture and her country by the religious submission of women.
"When I look back," she says, "I see myself as a great example of a survivor."
Filmmaker Schels, known for haunting portraits of artists, including Georg Baselitz, Man Ray and Pola Kinski, refrains from commenting - as is usual in her films - and thus creates space for very personal testimonials from her protagonists.
Inexorably gently, it seems, the interviewer seduces her alpha animals into self-expression, tangible beings become visible behind the public figures, be they volcanic like Abramovic, controlled like Sieverding, bewitching like Neshat or openly vulnerable like Landau.
The merging of the four female art concepts that focus on the body or face shows how different an iconography of pain can look.
Abramović, who sometimes allows the audience to injure her body with objects (1974), sometimes even scratches her abdomen with a razor blade (2007);
Neshat's larger-than-life photographs of Muslim women, veiled in black, heavily armed, on whose skin the artist writes the experience of violence between birth and death in her native Farsi;
Sieverding, who captures in her photo series the misery of flight and displacement that she herself suffered and recognizes in the current fate of refugees;
Landau, whose narrow body floats in the Dead Sea in a huge spiral of watermelons that, partially cut open, circle around them like huge blood vessels (2016).
"Body of Truth" draws its tension from sometimes fast, sometimes resting sequences of cuts (Ulrike Tortora) and music (Christoph Rinnert) that pushes the film forward without stepping into the foreground.
The camera (Börres Weiffenbach) comes close to the artists, but it doesn't press them.
The director was allowed to choose iconographic images from the four works.
The life stories of the women and the historical recordings of the respective social conflicts combine to create a picture narration that shows how suffering, pain and the art of survival can merge into art.
"You are a warrior", says the graceful Shirin Neshat to Marina Abramović, who is a friend of her and who admires her willingness to repeatedly pose as a symbol of female self-wounding.
"But we're both very vulnerable," she adds and the outwardly robust performer is visibly touched.
To combine elemental force and vulnerability, women still have to apologize.
In this film they belong together.
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