max ernst

June 21 movie: Max Ernst. Skipping ahead a bit because I want to write about tonight's movie. It's a documentary about Max Ernst, which Georg thoughtfully rented before our trip, which will include the big Ernst retrospective at the Met.

So the movie was actually somewhat flawed as a biography. It tended to introduce characters and then drop them without explanation. People who seemed to me rather important, like Ernst's son and all his ex-wives. Also there was an unfortunate reliance on re-enactments. So much that the movie at times came off like one of those shows on Discovery about dogs saving lives or people having supernatural encounters. For instance a reading from Peggy Guggenheim's diary, about how when she first met Ernst he had hung his art from a tree to sell it, accompanies re-enacted footage of a mysterious hand lifting Ernst paintings into a tree. Dorothea Tannen's memoirs about living with Ernst in Arizona are read to endless footage of an antique car on Arizona roads, towing a trailer full of crated art. (At one point the car meets two men on horseback and you can faintly hear someone yell "Hi, Max!" Hilarious.)

On the other hand, the movie was chock full of images of Ernst's art. Which was why we watched it in the first place, so I can forgive the pseudo-documentary re-enactments. There were many pieces I'd never seen before, and also many that I'd only seen in black and white, in books. I'm already excited wondering how many of those pieces will be at the exhibit. According to the exhibit webpage they have Vox Angelica and The Robing of the Bride and the webpage also says they have copies of his 3 most important collage novels! Wowie wow wow. La femme 100 têtes, A little girl dreams of taking the veil and Une semaine de bonté. (Which I thought meant "A week of kindness," but in the movie they said it actually means "A week in which everything is cheaper." It must be slang, like "happy hour" in the US.) I can't wait to see them. I wonder if they removed and hung the pages so we can see the entire contents, or if the books are just in a case open to one page. I have a reproduction of one of the books (I think it's Une semaine de bonté) but it will be amazing to see an original printing.

The movie also had much interview footage of Ernst, both talking and working, which was interesting and made up for the interminable quotes from Tannen's rather pompous memoirs. ("The fact that we were both visionaries," she intoned, "was simply a marvelous coincidence to me.") There were even a couple of brief clips of that famous "Degenerate Art" show, including a photo of Hitler standing right next to an Ernst. That was creepy. Especially when they said that the painting in question was lost during the war.