The painter and graphic artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) is said to have had a lifelong fascination with North Africa. After his formative trip to Tunis in 1914, he returned to North Africa in 1928. Egypt impressed him with its light, its landscape and its epochal monuments. The influence of this trip was already evident in the 1929 oil painting Necropolis. Filmmaker and author Rüdiger Sünner uses his diary entries to follow the artist's footsteps through colorful bazaars, mysterious colonnades and up the Nile on ancient barges. Sünner intertwines Klee's paintings, sepia-toned photographs of the journey and the ancient mythological texts describing the odyssey of Osiris, who must endure numerous adventures in the underworld. "You have enough time to let the images intensely affect you; and so the parallels to the paintings Sünner has found seem quite unobtrusive and, precisely for that reason, so intense. Sünner has a good eye for detail: his images, shot with a handheld camera, seem casual and shadowy only at first glance." (taz)
Biography, Documentary
58min
16+
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This travel diary describes the journey of the painter Paul Klee in Egypt between 1928 and 1929 through his letters and his paintings.
The painter and graphic artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) is said to have had a lifelong fascination with North Africa. After his formative trip to Tunis in 1914, he returned to North Africa in 1928. Egypt impressed him with its light, its landscape and its epochal monuments. The influence of this trip was already evident in the 1929 oil painting Necropolis.
Filmmaker and author Rüdiger Sünner uses his diary entries to follow the artist's footsteps through colorful bazaars, mysterious colonnades and up the Nile on ancient barges. Sünner intertwines Klee's paintings, sepia-toned photographs of the journey and the ancient mythological texts describing the odyssey of Osiris, who must endure numerous adventures in the underworld.
"You have enough time to let the images intensely affect you; and so the parallels to the paintings Sünner has found seem quite unobtrusive and, precisely for that reason, so intense. Sünner has a good eye for detail: his images, shot with a handheld camera, seem casual and shadowy only at first glance." (taz)