The most inspiring and the most beautiful kind to talk about films are talking about its images. The origins of images, can be retraced to our ancestors the Cro-Magnon. This film is entirely recorded with a smartphone, the most recent among modern image-making devices. Interestingly, before Stefan Hayn decided to make a whole film with this smartphone, he used it at the beginning only for documenting the different development phases of his paintings he created in the last two years. Like the spoken, vocalized and written language, the images if painted, drawn or the modern reproduced and recorded images had always a range between scientific documentation, art and entertainment. The modern recording and image making devices are used for astronomy, medicine, biology as much as they are used for art or entertainment, industry, even military - and they have always influenced each other.
Stefan Hayns recent paintings seen in his films are made in his native city Rothenburg ob der Tauber and his adopted city Berlin. His motifs are the house of his mother, his daughters and the mother herself in Rothenburg and several buildings and streetscapes in Berlin. We see his recorded image motifs always confronted with the paintings, if finished or still in the making. The film has very few voice-over comments and some snippets of conversations between the people. One has to deal almost entirely with the images. The artistic image is visible side by side with the images recorded by the clinical precise image -making device. Both kind of images are very powerful in evoking something in us. The question is, what will be saved in my memory as art and what as document?
Stefan Hayns image motives are: in the more private ones: his daughters and his mother and the house in Rothenburg, in the public ones: streetscapes of buildings like the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (America Memorial library) , the Jewish Museum or the Holocaust Monument. To pick some moments from the rather private motifs in this film, I remember the mother and the daughters sitting on a table side by side. On the table there is a big vase with red flowers. As we see both, the image motif and the painted picture, the artistic and the documented image, I do not think so much about what is art and what is “just an image” but I see without knowing these people are in a familiar environment and very close to each other. Another moment is literally burnt in my memory. His mother is sitting on a porch built with almost glowing red tiles. How the tiles are reflecting the sunlight and left a strong visual impression on me. What will my brain save as art or as a documented image, I really do not know for sure. There is another small moment when one of the young women is dozing. These moments and the light (if recorded or painted) remind me in Renoir´s The River, especially the famous Siesta-scene. Scorsese insists that this film displays the strongest influence from Renoir´s father, the painter Aguste Renoir. But Renoir defines the documentary scenes, which he shot in India against the will of his producer and Rumer Godden (co-writer and the author of the novel the film is based on) as the poetic moments of his film.
The other, public image motifs are entirely streetscapes of Berlin. To these places I have a different access. They evoke in me vague memories on the famous establishing shots from Ozus films but more important, I am familiar with these places. The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek for example was always for me symbol for stored knowledge and cultural richness, open for all the people and for me always associated with the good aspects of our civilization. As a contrast, the Holocaust Monument is a reminder of our nation´s darkest chapter, the worst genocide in the history of mankind and secondly it is a gigantic sculptural pendant to a requiem.
Even though a building or a street ages different than a human being and can theoretically outlive several generations, the effect of an image taken out of time has a different impact than in the other more intimate and mortal image motifs and the paintings. The “Haus der deutschen Wirtschaft (House of the German Economy) had in 2022 a big rainbow banner. When Stefan Hayn painted it in 2023 with the lettering “Mit Vielfalt erfolgreich” (successful with diversity), the banner has already disappeared. The Axel Springer tower block had during the Pride-week in 2024 a Rainbow flag. When Stefan Hayn returned to this building just after the Pride week, the rainbow flag was exchanged with a national flag.Among a few comments from passersby we hear directly or quoted by Stefan Hayn, there is one obvious antisemitic tirade and probably the most hefty hint to our present with a raising tendency of antisemitism in our country. The spectator as the filmmaker are here exposed in a different kind to the world, the geography, the history and sometimes (during a rainfall) even to nature. There is a very remarkable moment when a painting is filmed on the stand. The frame of the painting is integrated in this other frame, the film´s aspect ratio. But beside beneath and above of the margins of the aspect ratio, the reality with its noise, its speed and its busyness surround the quiet paintings, a piece of frozen time and frozen movement. Here as well, the paintings are visible in different development phases.
One will have a different access to the paintings by Stefan Hayn when there is a change for an exposition to watch them isolated as works of art in their own right from how they appear in this film. 2024 (2023) is a film essay which thinks, inspires our thinking, in and about images. It is impressing to watch it on the big screen and it will have a long echo in my memory.
Rüdiger Tomczak
I would like to recommend here the interview with Christiane Büchner and Barbara Wurm on the Forum-webseite with the filmmaker (in English and German).
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