CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH - GRENZEN DER ZEIT

FSK 6 | 84 minutes | Start: 05.01.2017 | BRD/DDR 1986

Award-winning feature and documentary collage about the legendary landscape painter.

The painter Caspar David Friedrich has died and is buried. His coffin is followed by, among others, the doctor and painter Carl Gustav Carus, who treated Friedrich in the last months of his life and had to put up with his misanthropy time and time again.
Flashbacks and flashforwards show how Friedrich's work was treated. During his lifetime, Friedrich was not recognized as a painter; his often gloomy pictures did not meet the taste of the time. Although Frederick's financial situation improved somewhat when Crown Prince Frederick William bought some of his paintings and the poet Vasily Zhukovsky also purchased several works for the Russian tsar's family, Frederick's character was not conducive to his success. He repeatedly turned down educational trips abroad, was unable and unwilling to be socially subordinate and preferred solitary days in Saxon Switzerland to the company of other people. He rarely went on hiking tours with Carl Gustav Carus, on which they both drew. Carus, in turn, inspired by Friedrich's paintings, traveled to the north of Germany, visiting Rügen and Greifswald, where Friedrich's birthplace was located. He patronizes the artist and tries to get him a position as a professor at the Dresden Academy of Art. The professors, however, scorned Friedrich's work, which lacked any joy and in which people are always seen turned away from the viewer in a uniform outline. After Friedrich's death, his household effects were auctioned off. The most valuable item is not his paintings, but an old model ship.
Pictures of the great fire in Munich's Glaspalast are shown, in which several of Friedrich's major works burned. To this day, only half of the painter's oeuvre has survived. Friedrich comments off-screen that people who transgress the boundaries of their time are not recognized by the world around them. He weaves himself into his cocoon and leaves it to time to decide what becomes of it: a maggot or a butterfly.