I love the colours in Maria Lassnig’s pictures. They directly inspire me. The power that radiates from them. That’s how it starts. And then I love the idea of Lassnig going into her studio every day and facing the stream of consciousness of creativity. I like the story of her conquering the male art market in the end, simply as a female artist. This solitary fighter. I find it important to tell that story, to film it! I think about filmmaking while I make films. In this case: to lay bare the biopic, which can, of course, always only show a section of a life, which always remains an interpretation on the part of the biographer. My response to this: get radical. That usually helps anyway. Radical in approach and implementation. And see how a soft film ends up plopping out.
Across her life, Maria Lassnig used a combination of wit and skill to shape the art world to serve her purposes.
I like the idea of our souls always remaining the same and snaking their way through eras and events. Let’s say that’s how they are formed. They have things rub off on them, take things with them, grow. On the inside. The whole film and all the people in it act as if all that were completely normal. That’s how the humour contained in this idea can completely emerge, I think. Maria Lassnig was also full of humour. While carrying out my research, I was told in numerous interviews with those who accompanied Lassnig across her life how she used a combination of wit and skill to shape the art world so it would serve her purposes. But also by way of the silence that she also embraced. I’m thinking here of the sounds you then hear nonetheless. The words from her diary, the testimony of an inner search for the right art. For the film: what does that actually mean in teams of cinematic possibilities when the person being portrayed looks the same the entire time, regardless of where she happens to be in reality? Or, in the language of Lassnig herself: how does that feel? This film contains this unique cinematic language to say something about Maria Lassnig without saying it. And hopefully even about a general state that we are all familiar with. This film develops a life of its own, which emerges from the combination of this idea with all our strategies, the production design, the lighting, the editing and the sound design. Based on this radical person. I like how Maria Lassnig created hell on earth for herself and in it many gaudy pictures.
Anja Salomonowitz
Translation: James Lattimer
