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Charlotte: Life or Theatre

by Richard Dindo
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, New York, 2004
Video, 62 minutes, col.
Rental: $75; Sale: $375
Distributor’s website: http://
www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

dahlberg@bakernet.com

Charlotte Salomon was a young Jewish painter in Berlin who fled to Nice during World War II. She painted the story of her life in a series of gouaches together with accompanying text. Richard Dindo has used 769 of these paintings to turn her paintings into a film. The soundtrack is provided by a reading of some of the texts accompanying the paintings. Dindo filmed the paintings in close-up, so each appears complete, as a world in itself. Charlotte's story is that of a young, well educated girl growing up in Berlin who was forced into exile by the rise of Nazism. Her autobiographical work can be seen as an attempt to find some meaning in the overwhelming and terrible events that threw her from the world in which she belonged into exile and, eventually, death. This is a film about memory, loss, and the search for meaning.

 

 

 




Updated 1st May 2005


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