The Day of the painter
35mm, 84 Min., Colour, Optical Sound.
1997.
Acting: Kirsten Dressler, Heide Jansen, Maria Masciulli, Judith Verberne.
Digital Image Processing: Jain Pictures.
Production Management: Ursula Richert.
Music: Anthony Moore.
Directing, Script, Camera, Editing and Production: Werner Nekes .
The painter gazes at his female model, or how voyeurism is transformed into culture. An erotic adventure film where the theme is the viewer himself.
"THE DAY OF THE PAINTER shows what " La Belle Noiseuse " does not want to show: the enclosed "Unknown Masterpiece". It is a walk through the picture world of the painter that directs the gaze to the unveiled female model.Associations with the picture world of Dürer, Marey, Matisse, Seurat, to the "Origin of the World" by Courbet, to " L' étant donnés" by Duchamp and to many other works of art can be called up and are actually intended. THE DAY OF THE PAINTER amalgamates the artistic expressive possibilities of painting, video and computer images as film .
Unusual ways of showing make the film an adventure film for the viewer I s gaze. The art of
painting melts into the film." Werner Nekes
"The artist, Dosso Dossi, once taught God, that Builder of baroque mechanisms, how to paint his purely technical creation - this meant, to really view it and thus to give this rigid clockwork cosmos a soul and to bring it to life.
Dossi's painting God reveals very clearly how enthusiastic he was about this work of animation. The bestowal of a new artistic form, the transformation of the world, makes it possible for him to see himself as a real creator, one who not only builds technically, but brings himself to life.
Today, Werner Nekes offers producers of works made with the technology of film the opportunity to view the output of their automatic picture machines through the eyes of the artist and thus to learn understanding. This is most intensively possible through a "looking-at", through a voyeuristic observation of the painters while they themselves look at, and are enthused by the world - that is, they bring themselves to life.
Modern artists have done this most often through the "painter and model" constellation. In this way they have deliberately made the viewer of their art into a voyeur i.e. into a person, who, through watching another, discovers and brings himself to life. The intensity of this life-giving can be increased by the observer insuring that he is visible to others.
Voyeuristic exhibition (or, more modernly expressed, the observation of an observer who purposefully exposes himself to the perception of a third), has become, above all, through public exhibitions of " painter - model " pictures, a basic means of self-discovery, in our western world, self-discovery through "looking-at" while being "looked-at. "
Nekes' film-light-painting activates the mere animated cartoons of the picture machines by giving them the viewing forms of the masters of modern painting. When he delivers Courbet's "Source of Life" up to voyeuristic reflection or presents animations of nudes, from Matisse's "Joy of Life" up to Duchamp, Schmidt-Rottluff and others as film paintings in a way where the viewer can himself look at his looking-at, then he has achieved an artistic, not a film -technological process of animation: it is not the pictures that move, but the imagination of the viewer; not the dead carrier of the images is awakened to life, but the picture that the viewer makes of himself in the eyes of others, when he, in the cinema or an exhibition, together with them observes the looking-at." Bazon Brock
The film was produced with the support of Kulturelle Filmförderung Hamburg and Filmbüro NW by Werner Nekes.
For public presentation... Film distribution...
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