Charlotte

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Charlotte
Life or Theater?

Directed by Richard Dindo
Produced by Esther Hoffenberg

film still "My life began when my grandmother tried to take her life. When I found out that my mother had taken hers, just like her entire family.

When I found out that I was the only survivor and when deep within me I felt the same inclination, the same urge towards desperation and death.

And I found myself facing the question of whether to commit suicide or to undertake something wildly eccentric.

I saw all the beauty around me, saw the sea, felt the sun and knew: I had to disappear for a while from the surface of the earth and make every sacrifice in order to create my own world anew out of the depths.

And from that came: "life or theater ?"

- Charlotte Salomon

CHARLOTTE: LIFE OR THEATER? is based on the work of Charlotte Salomon who, as a young Jewish painter from Berlin, took refuge in Nice during World War II.

Life or Theater? - a series of 769 poignant, unforgettable paintings - is her moving and singular masterpiece. Unique in the history of art, it has been transposed into a film by careful editing to highlight its dramatic potential.

In these gouaches, she tells the story of her childhood, her love for a singing instructor, her dreams of painting, the advent of Nazism, and her exile in France.

"Recommended! A moving introduction to Charlotte Salomon’s unique creation, and to the terrible sad circumstances that engendered it." - Educational Media Reviews Online

"It is extraordinary how Dindo's camera swoops down on these gouache paintings, the edges of which are never seen as if they unfolded endlessly like huge comic strips. One feels as though one is swimming in reds, browns and greens and the characters that marked Charlotte's childhood and adolescence are shown in close-ups. Her father, her mother, her mother-in-law, her first lover...small silhouettes portrayed in a clumsy manner which sometimes conveys anger are surrounded by text that a woman's voice renders with hypnotic simplicity. One is carried away by this sad and stirring text. Charlotte is not a film on art, it is an autobiographical reconstruction through paintings, a sensitive and searing dream of memory. A wonderful film." - Le Monde

"Dindo has thrown himself headlong into an exploration of this startling work. He has re-framed and scanned over the scenes depicted, faithfully followed the sentences, word by word, that Charlotte wrote on her gouache paintings. He has filmed a magnificent poem, an epic song, that of the memory of the German Jews, of universal despair." - Liberation

62 minutes / color / 1992
Sale/video-dvd: $375
Rental/video: $75

Subject areas: Adolescence, Aging, Animated Films, Art, Biographies, Death and Dying, Family Relations, France, French Culture, French History, Germany, Health Issues, History (World), Holocaust, Human Rights, Jewish Studies, Psychology, Suicide, Theater, Western Europe, Women's Studies, World War II

Related Titles:

Art and Remembrance: The Legacy of Felix Nussbaum: The story of artist Felix Nussbaum, who created the major body of work about the Jews during the Holocaust.

The Two Lives of Eva: The complicated, traumatic story of a young woman, the filmmaker's mother, a well-off, Polish Lutheran before WWII, who afterwards married a Jewish Warsaw ghetto survivor.

Last updated 09/01/2006