The New York Times International - 07.08.2019

2 | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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Works like Mr. Wagenbrett’s “Auf- bruch” are a reminder that what was largely perceived as a momentous, eu- phoric event in the West was, in East Germany, an era of great danger, anxiety and upheaval. The two young people in the earth are not experiencing a glori- ous rebirth; it is both perilous and painful. After 1989, many East German state enterprises were sold to Western com- panies and taken over (or closed down); many museums and arts institutions also got new leaders from the West. A simmering resentment at these perceived indignities persists among older East Germans — a sense that the people of a country that vanished from the map were sidelined in the process of German reunification. Paul Kaiser, one of the curators of “Point of No Return,” said that “30 years after the fall of the wall, the process of categorizing East German art within the Pan-German context is still conflict- ridden and incomplete.” The exhibition was “a further step in synthesizing the history of East German art into German art history,” he added, and in countering its “politicization and devaluation.” After 1989, the art of East Germany was often dismissed in the West as the product of a totalitarian regime under which artistic freedom was severely limited. In 1990, in a debate that became known as the “bilderstreit,” or “battle over pictures,” the painter Georg Ba- selitz said in a magazine interview that there were “no artists in the G.D.R.” Anyone who could paint had left, he said — as both he and Gerhard Richter, now the two top-selling German artists, had done before the Berlin Wall was erected. Mr. Kaiser prompted a rancorous re- vival of the debate in 2017, when he wrote a newspaper opinion piece ex-

pressing dismay that the main show- case of modern art in Dresden, a city in the former East Germany, had con- signed art produced under the dictator- ship to the depot. The museum’s director, Hilke Wagner, who refuted Mr. Kai- ser’s claim, was inundated with hate mail. The debate became a proxy battle- field for a host of festering East German grievances. The Dresden museum, the Albertinum, responded by staging a show of East German art in 2018, accom- panied by a program of talks and events aimed at bringing the public into the museum for open discussions. Other institutions in the former East Germany, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig and the Moritzburg Art Museum in Halle, have picked up the ba-

ton, unearthing stores of East German art from their depots and retooling their permanent displays to raise the profile of the works. But gaps in museum collections re- main — particularly in the case of artists who were either dissidents or working under the official radar. More than 70 percent of works on show in “Point of No Return” are loans, many from the artists themselves. That allows for plenty of discoveries. One room in the show is dominated by a series of melancholy large-format paint- ings called “Passages” by Doris Ziegler, a Leipzig artist whose work has rarely been exhibited. “In 1988, we all thought the G.D.R. would stay as it was till we die,” Ms. Ziegler said in a recent interview. “The

situation was ridiculous but also threat- ening. The climate was gray, it was mor- ibund. Best friends and colleagues had left, and I was constantly asking myself whether I should leave, too.” The “point of no return” referred to in the exhibition’s title is Nov. 9, 1989, the night when crowds of East Germans breached the Berlin Wall. The crowds streaming across the border are captured in a 1989 painting by Trak Wendisch as a river of light against a lu- gubrious violet and black cityscape. But the show also examines what Mr. Kaiser called “the cracks in the wall” that began developing in the 1980s. From the early 1980s, pockets of rela- tively free artistic expression began to develop in ramshackle apartment blocks in dilapidated districts of big East German cities. Many of the artworks of this era ad- dress a feeling of desperation to escape. A 1984 work by Stefan Plenkers, “Boat Cemetery,” depicts a beach strewn with fragments of boats and the heads of two people with their backs turned to the viewer, as though staring out to sea longingly, but stranded because the ves- sels are all broken. Yet freedom, when it came, was not unequivocally welcomed. Perhaps one of the most unnerving works in the show is by Willi Sitte, a committed socialist and the long-serving president of East Germany’s official artists’ association. For some, he was the epitome of a “state artist,” but in the 1960s, he fought for greater artistic independence and was put under surveillance by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. His 1990 work “Erdgeister” (“Earth Spirits”) shows the artist upside down, his head buried in the mud. All around him are East German workers in the same posi- tion. For Mr. Sitte, the world had been turned on its head.

“Aufbruch” (“Awakening”), a 1990 work by Norbert Wagenbrett, is a reminder that many viewed East Germany’s demise with anxiety. Right, “Der Agitator (Rufer)” by Hans Ticha.

ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/VG BILD-KUNST, BONN

East German art gets its due

G ERMANY, FROM PAGE 1

“Die reizende Mauer,” or “The Delightful Wall,” by Wasja Götze, was painted in 1988.

WASJA GÖTZE

In the opening sequence of the television series “Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid,” a hungover computer program- mer sets off to her dreaded office job, only to encounter a five-story-tall dragon waiting outside her door. Before Miss Kobayashi can figure out if she’s dream- ing, the dragon has transformed into a young woman in a maid’s costume. Fans of the anime director Yasuhiro Takemoto say the series was typical Takemoto: fantastical yet relatable; vis- ually beautiful and narratively strange. Last year a major anime website gave it awards for best TV comedy and best TV ending. News in February that the show would have a second season was widely celebrated. But before a release date emerged, Mr. Takemoto was killed, alongside more than 30 of his friends and colleagues, in one of the deadliest massa- cres in Japanese history. On July 18, an arsonist set fire to Kyoto Animation, the studio that helped turn Mr. Takemoto into a household name in the world of anime. After weeks of confusion about whether Mr. Takemoto was among the victims, the Kyoto police confirmed his death on Friday. Most of the fire victims have not been publicly identified. Of those who have, many had remarkable biographies. But few creators anywhere had been with the company, known affectionately as KyoAni, longer than Mr. Takemoto, said Christopher Macdonald, the chief exec- utive of the Anime News Network. Mr. Takemoto, 47, joined the studio in his 20s, holding every job in the book: junior animator, key animator, story- board artist, writer, assistant director, episode director, series director, trainer of young talent. In the credits of the studio’s most beloved TV shows and films, his name is usually there — whether up front or at the end with a “special thanks.” “It’s hard to imagine KyoAni without Takemoto and Takemoto without KyoAni,” Mr. Macdonald said. Cayla Coats, the editorial manager at Crunchyroll, an anime distributor and news site, said “Miss Kobayashi’s Drag- on Maid” encapsulated what was so special about Mr. Takemoto’s directorial style. “His sensitive and empathetic di- recting style managed to take a some- what absurd story about a live-in dragon maid and bring out the deeply human themes of adopted families and bridging emotional distances,” she said. Peter Tatara, the event director for Anime NYC, made a similar observa- tion. “It didn’t matter how outlandish” Mr. Takemoto’s stories were, he said.

“Whether they were about dragons or aliens, there was a certain humanity and intimacy that grounded them and made them very real.” Mr. Takemoto decided he wanted to study animation after watching the 1986 movie “Castle in the Sky,” according to a magazine interview cited by The Japan News. Directed by the famed filmmaker and animator Hayao Miyazaki, the movie centers on an orphan’s attempt to keep her magical amulet from space pirates with the help of a new friend. After studying anime in Osaka, Mr. Takemoto joined Kyoto Animation in 1996, according to The Hollywood Re- porter and The Japan News. Over the years, he steadily attracted fans, and many credited the 2007 television series “Lucky Star” with introducing him to a wider audience. Based on a manga comic strip by the same name, it focuses on the day-to-day lives of four high school girls. Though the characters are fictional, the town and a Shinto shrine that plays a crucial role were modeled after real lo- cations.

As the show grew in popularity, hun- dreds of thousands of fans from across Japan — and eventually beyond — made pilgrimages to the Washinomiya Shrine, about an hour from Tokyo. Because fans were respectful and lo- cals appreciated the visitors, it became a new model for anime tourism, according to Takayoshi Yamamura, a professor in the Center for Advanced Tourism Stud- ies at Hokkaido University, who wrote a paper on the topic. In 2010, Mr. Takemoto was a director of what The Hollywood Reporter called “one of the longest anime ever made.” Nearly three hours long, the movie, “The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzu- miya,” won best film at the Animation Kobe Awards and became one of Mr. Takemoto’s most commercially success- ful films, grossing $8 million in Japan, according to the Internet Movie Data- base. In the aftermath of the blaze at Kyoto Animation, there was a great deal of confusion about whether Takemoto had been in the office or traveling that day. Early reports suggested that he had died, only to be contradicted by widely shared tweets stating that he was fine. Finally, on Friday, the Kyoto police confirmed that he was among the dead.

Famed anime director

died in Japan arson attack

The Washinomiya Shrine, north of Tokyo, was featured in the 2007 TV series “Lucky Star,” with animation by Yasuhiro Takemoto. It is a pilgrimage site for his fans.

EUGENE HOSHIKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

BY HEATHER MURPHY

After weeks of confusion about whether Yasuhiro Takemoto was among the victims, the Kyoto police confirmed his death.

D.A. Pennebaker, the groundbreaking documentary filmmaker best known for capturing pivotal moments in the history of rock music and politics, including Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England and Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, died on Thursday at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y. He was 94. His death was confirmed by his son Frazer. Mr. Pennebaker was part of a close- knit group of pioneering filmmakers in the 1960s who helped bring cinéma vérité to the United States. Michael Moore, presenting Mr. Pennebaker with an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2012, said Mr. Pennebaker, along with Robert Drew, Albert Maysles and Rich- ard Leacock, had “invented nothing less than the modern documentary.” The key development in that inven- tion was the advent of synchronous- sound cameras, which allowed the filmmakers to move more freely with and among their subjects, and to do away with the postproduction voice-over model of narrative. “You wanted to drive the stories by what people said to each other,” Mr. Pen- nebaker once said, “not by what you thought up on a yellow pad.” In 1965, Mr. Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, approached Mr. Pennebaker about following Mr. Dylan on a British tour.

“I didn’t really know much about Dyl- an,” Mr. Pennebaker told The A.V. Club, a pop culture website, in a 2011 interview. “I had heard one of his songs on the radio.” “Dont Look Back,” the ensuing movie, is regularly cited as one of the best docu- mentaries ever made. Between brief performance clips, Mr. Pennebaker’s camera follows Mr. Dylan as he antago- nizes the press (“I don’t need Time magazine,” he tells a Time reporter), outruns mobs of fans and loudly types over the voice of Joan Baez while she gently sings in a hotel room. The movie, in black and white, begins with an oft-imitated scene in which Mr. Dylan flips through a series of card- board placards that display the lyrics of his song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” That opening was Mr. Dylan’s idea. The critic Pauline Kael pointed out in The New Yorker in 1968 that the entire movie was more complicated (and com- promised) than some viewers might ap- preciate. “Sequences that in a Hollywood movie would have been greeted with snick- ers — like Bob Dylan in the throes of composition — got by because of the rough look,” she wrote. “Audiences seemed to accept the new cinéma vérité convention that the camera was an in- truder in the idol’s life, though it must have been obvious that Dylan had ar- ranged to star in this film.” Mr. Pennebaker had absorbed these techniques in 1960 while working on the crew of “Primary,” directed by Mr. Drew, which followed Hubert H. Humphrey

and John F. Kennedy campaigning in Wisconsin for the Democratic presidential nomination. Decades later, while preparing to make “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Mr. Pennebaker found that politicians had become decidedly less accessible and more wary. “I could see right away that you could- n’t actually occupy space with a person who intended to become president in a very interesting way,” he told The A.V. Club. “They were constrained to act; as soon as the camera appeared, they had

to pretend to be something else.” Mr. Pennebaker focused instead on George Stephanopoulos, James Carville and other then-little-known (and less camera-shy) operatives. The result, Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, was “a revealing film and an in- valuable document.” His political films are now part of the canon, but the scenes from Mr. Pen- nebaker’s catalog that still circulate most widely are of pop culture figures in action: Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire in “Monterey Pop”; Elaine

Stritch in “Original Cast Album: Com- pany,” exhausted and straining to record “The Ladies Who Lunch” while Stephen Sondheim and others look on in despair; Mr. Dylan showing up the softer-edged singer Donovan in a hotel room crowded with their hangers-on in “Dont Look Back”; and the actor Rip Torn (who died last month) attacking Norman Mailer with a hammer at the end of “Maid- stone” (1970), one of three eccentric movies directed by Mr. Mailer for which Mr. Pennebaker served as a camera- man. Mr. Mailer’s films from that era are mostly notable as oddball vanity projects. The Times’s Vincent Canby called “Maidstone” “a very mixed bag” that “doesn’t make a great deal of sense”), but Mr. Pennebaker’s relation- ship with the author would pay divi- dends down the line. In 1971, he accepted Mr. Mailer’s suggestion that he film a panel discussion that Mr. Mailer was holding at The Town Hall in Manhattan. The topic was the state of feminism. Mr. Mailer was his pugnacious self as he battled with, among others, the author Germaine Greer and the journalist Jill Johnston before a raucous audience. At one point, two women from the audience took the stage and kissed and groped Ms. Johnston, an activist for les- bian rights, before all three tumbled to the floor. The footage of the night remained on a shelf for nearly a decade, but when it was released as “Town Bloody Hall” in 1979, it was called a remarkable time capsule of a colorful moment in New York’s intellectual and cultural history.

The filmmaker Chris Hegedus, Mr. Pen- nebaker’s third wife (they married in 1982) and creative partner, edited the footage, which she called “incredibly rough.” Donn Alan Pennebaker, known as Penny to friends and colleagues, was born on July 15, 1925, in Evanston, Ill., to John Paul Pennebaker, a commercial photographer, and Lucille (Levick) Pen- nebaker. He served in the Navy and studied en- gineering at the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology and Yale. After working as an engineer for about a year, he was shown “N.Y., N.Y.,” a short, impres- sionistic color film by his friend Francis Thompson chronicling “a day in New York,” as the subtitle says. “In about 15 minutes, I saw right away that filmmaking was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” Mr. Pen- nebaker said in a 2006 interview. His many other films include close-up looks at David Bowie (“Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” from 1973), John Lennon (“John Lennon & the Plas- tic Ono Band — Live in Toronto ’69”) and Jane Fonda (“Jane,” from 1962, when she was 25 and enduring a starring role in a flop on Broadway). In addition to his son Frazer (a producer of many Pennebaker docu- mentaries), Mr. Pennebaker is survived by his wife, Ms. Hegedus; seven other children, Stacy, Linley, Jojo, Chelsea, Zoe, Kit and Jane, all with the surname Pennebaker; 13 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Pioneer of cinéma vérité captured ’60s music and politics

D.A. PENNEBAKER 1925-

BY JOHN WILLIAMS

The filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker in 2016. One of his best-known projects, “Dont Look Back,” documented Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England.

CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

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The New York Times International - 07.08.2019

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East German art gets its due

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