User Reviews

Joseph Beuys is a fascinating and complex artist rapidly receding into the mist of obscurity. With it's soft coherence and lack of focus this documentary will sadly do little to help. Beuys is an artist revered by past generations of artists - he's given glowing mention in the recent autobiography of Marina Abramovic for instance. And, from the little that is shown of his work in this film like his powerful performance piece 'I Like America and America Likes Me', it is easy to see why. It's sad then that little of his art gets the same kind of treatment and that a seemingly endless passage is devoted to his political life, which we are invited to view as a failure despite because the party of which he was one of the co-founders did not ultimately select him to stand for election. How can this be viewed as a failure in a country which has probably the most powerful green lobby anywhere in the world? The way his war myth is treated is deeply unsatisfying and leaves so many questions. Ultimately I regret that the makers of this documentary missed the opportunity to focus on Beuys the artist the way so many contemporary documentaries (Burden, Gerhardt Richter Painting, Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry) are.

"Beuys" is a German, mostly German-language documentary movie from 2017, so this one is not really brand new anymore, but still relatively new. It runs for 105 minutes approximately and was written and directed by Andres (not Andreas) Veiel. He is a truly prolific documentary filmmaker, even if his most known career effort at this point is a full feature live action movie starring August Diehl, but this is not the time and place to talk about that one. Instead, let us take a look at Beuys now. It received some really decent awrads recognition, not only won Best Documentary at the German Film Awards, but also took home the editing prize, which is a respectable achievement and does not happen too often for a documentary. But yeah, the objective is really almost the only positive I can say. I was not too impressed by this documentary and I felt as interesting and certainly also polarizing as Beuys was, the documentary did not really capture this and depict it to the audience in a way where the film really has them at the edge of their seats. At least not me. Beuys is of course still a big name artist, even if he died a long time ago. He was also famous in America as we learn here, but here in Germany even more. He actually died about a year after I was born. But that's just a little random snippet of information and now you know how old I am. I mean this documentary was not a failure or anything, but the somewhat most interesting aspect was maybe Beuys' physical appearance. He always looked a bit worn-out, maybe with his chiseled face almost like a concentration camp survivor, but this is never really a subject in this film as it is a lot more about what he did and what he did not achieve and go for in his lifetime. Conflicts and arguments are a frequent subject here. Beuys was not really one who was very easy to get along with, surely a pugnacious character as we find out here, even if looks-wise I also would not have been too surprised if he had been more of an introverted and reclusive character. But he really isn't. We also find out partially about that when we see Andy Warhol near the end for a brief moment as he is in the same location as Beuys, but the two could not be any more different because Warhol is what I just described in the previous sentence. Both do have that slightly tortured artist thingey going for them though. Anyway, I personall felt that this documentary was maybe slightly too long for my liking. It does not happen too long that German documentary run clearly for over 90 minutes and for this one here, it was maybe not the wisest choice. What was mostg interesting was probably all the old recordings when we see Beuys in person, even if the new scenes like interviews were not on failure territory either. Nothing about this film is a failure I'd say, but something is missing for me, maybe something that adds a special note to this film and makes a difference compared to the gigantic amount of other documentaries (on artists) out there. Perhaps it really would have been a better choice for Veiel to turn this into a full feature movie and have an actor play Beuys. So i would not say it is really worth watching. Like what stays a bit in the mind is his political involvement, but it is not really worth sitting through everything else because of that. If you know like pretty much everybody else that Beuys was working with felt and fat/lipids (not sure which is the right word), that is enough basic knowledge and you can skip this documentary I'd say. I give it a thumbs-down because regardless of how good it may be technically, it is not enough if it comes short in terms of script and general execution.