Paul Klee, the wildly imaginative and influential artist of the 20th century, is presented in this rather somber and slow documentary, The Silence of the Angel (2005). Utilizing his diary entries above all else — of which thousands of pages are readily available to anyone who wants to read them — director Michael Gaumnitz delves into the mind of this inimitable creator.
While the film immediately thrusts viewers into the world of Klee — with limited biographical information presented — it will pique viewers’ curiosity into learning more about this truly original artist. Klee’s work captured the gamut of both emotion and form: happy and sad, optimistic and gloomy, satirical and serious; drawings, paintings, watercolors, sculptures, and more.
The film’s drawback, as might be guessed, is that it provides little introductory info, making it considerably more difficult to understand the life, and especially the art, of the Swiss-German artist. Those who are already quite versed in the context of his time and techniques, will get far more out of The Silence of the Angel than those who are new. (Usually not the case with most documentaries).
Nonetheless, this (somewhat difficult) film is worth your time. Unadorned with any kind of theatrical scenes, its straightforward narration interweaves with a voiceover of Klee’s journal entries. (On occasion, it also includes those of Felix Klee, his son.) It allows one to begin to understand the mind of this brilliant thinker.
Born into a musical family, Paul Klee (1879 – 1940) was pulled in various directions by the myriad forms of art calling his name: music, literature, writing, art. While he eventually dedicated himself to the latter, the influences of each of these interests can be seen in both his paintings and journal entries. Klee was a true dedicatee to the powers of creativity; nearly all disciplines informed his perspective, and one can see from this limited selection of his journal entries just how serious he was about understanding the nature and workings of art.
Yet he doesn’t seem to have been overly confident in his abilites, either as an artist or as a thinker (indeed he constantly had to think things through in meticulous fashion, trying to understand not just the processes and forces behind art, but of life also.)
His many advances into becoming an artist seems to have come full force during a trip to Tunisia, in 1914. It was a period of intellectual and artistic stimulation. In one diary entry during that period, he would assert in a journal entry that “I am a painter.” He was 35 at this time. The fact that he had immersed himself in art for years prior to that seems to show his utter seriousness (and humility) in approaching his life as a genuine artist.
After eventually establishing himself (and gaining recognition), he was invited to the Bauhaus school in Weimar. It was there, for much of the 1920s and early 30s, that he both taught and developed himself as an artist. He also continued a prior relationship with Kandinsky, who, likewise, taught at the “creative laboratory” of the avante-garde Bauhaus school.
But the year 1933 brought a host of troubles into the artist’s life — ones that would more or less remain with him until the end. Hitler’s rise to power created, ultimately, insurmountable difficulties (as it did for some so many other artists). Though he avoided some of the tumult during this time, it eventually became too much, and he moved to the country of his birth, Switzerland. (It’s not made clear, however, whether his wife, Lily, went with him).
His final years of life contain plenty of dark, dreary, almost defeated-looking pieces. Yet it was also a period of “super human reserves of strength”; his fertile imagination was not over.
It was in the year 1939, that he painted angels again and again, in a wide variety of expressions.
Spectatio 