Alain Fleischer, Jérôme de Missolz, Heinz Peter Schwerfel: Three Filmmakers Defend Cinema as Art

An article from art press 2 (2012) examines how three filmmakers—Alain Fleischer, Jérôme de Missolz, and Heinz Peter Schwerfel—approach the genre of the art film. Schwerfel, who has made films on Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Georg Baselitz, Rebecca Horn, and Bruce Nauman since the late 1980s, emphasizes dramatic staging over simple documentary. In "Les Vies possibles de Christian Boltanski" (2009), he uses blur-to-sharp focus and layered sound to capture Boltanski's elusiveness, and includes a mise en abyme by showing Fleischer's 1989 film on Boltanski within his own. Missolz, working in a "cinéma direct" tradition, films photographers Jan Saudek and Joel-Peter Witkin in their studios, placing the camera behind them to capture the moment of the photographic shot. His film "Sans titre" (2006) reconstructs Francesca Woodman's photographs with actress Florence Denou, blending documentary and fiction, and uses voice-over from Virginia Woolf's "The Waves." Fleischer, who began making art films in 1969 after meeting Boltanski, approaches each artist through elective affinity, as seen in his films on Jean-Luc Godard ("Morceaux de conversations," 2009) and Rodin ("Le Roi Rodin," 2002). He claims to "exhaust a subject through cinema," turning the medium into an instrument of knowledge. The article argues that art films are a distinct genre that can reveal the creative process and generate discourse, blurring the line between film on art and art film.