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KLIMT & SCHIELE - EROS AND PSYCHE

By Michele MALLY

NEXO DIGITAL S.R.L. - as SALES All rights, World

Documentary - Completed 2018

Scandals, dreams, obsessions in Vienna’s golden age. The documentary recounts this extraordinary season: a magical moment for art, literature, and music, in which new ideas are circulated, Freud discovers the drives of the psyche, and women begin to claim their independence.

- Year of production
- 2018
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- ITALY
- Languages
- ENGLISH, GERMAN
- Duration
- 95 mn
- Director(s)
- Michele MALLY
- Cast
- Lorenzo RICHELMY
- Synopsis
- 1918. As the roar of the First World War cannons was dying out, at the heart of Central Europe, in Vienna, a golden age was coming to an end. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was beginning to disintegrate. On the night of October 31st, Egon Schiele died, at home in his own bed, becoming one of the 20 million deaths caused by Spanish flu. He died looking the invisible disease in the face, the only way he could: by painting it. He was 28 years old. Only a few months earlier, the main hall of the Secession building had welcomed his works: 19 oil paintings and 29 drawings. This was his first successful exhibition, a celebration of a new painting idea that portrayed human anxieties and desires.
  
  A few months earlier, his teacher and friend Gustav Klimt had died. Since the turn of the century, he had fundamentally changed the way people felt about art and founded a new group: The Secession. Today Klimt masterpieces attract visitors from all over the world to Vienna or the New Gallery in New York, or they become stars in films like Woman in Gold. But they are also pop icons that accompany our everyday lives on posters, cards, and calendars.
  Now, 100 years later, works of art by these visionaries – between Art Nouveau and Expressionism –once again take centre stage in the Austrian capital, along with those of designer and painter Koloman Moser and architect Otto Wagner, who both died in Vienna in the same year, 1918.
  Taking as a starting point some of the many planned jubilee exhibitions, the film event will recount this extraordinary period: a magical moment for art, literature, and music, during which new ideas circulated, Freud discovered the drives of the psyche, and women began to claim their independence. Written by Arianna Marelli and directed by Michele Mally, Klimt & Schiele. Eros and Psyche is produced by 3D Produzioni and Nexo Digital, with the support of Intesa Sanpaolo, featuring special guest Lorenzo Richelmy.
  “Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit”. This is the motto that stands out in golden letters on the entrance to the Secession building and celebrates the start of a new era: “To every age its art. To every art its freedom”.
  These are the years the documentary will bring back to life: actor Lorenzo Richelmy will tell us about when you could meet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or future directors Fritz Lang and Erich von Stroheim on the street or in the cafés, while Arthur Schnitzler’ dramas were being staged in theatres and The Merry Widow, or Richard Strauss’ Salome, were being premiered at the opera house.
  
  So, the documentary will be enriched with images of extraordinary visual power: going from the enchanting seductive decorations of Klimt’s works, (like the famous The Kiss, The Bride, or Death and Life exhibited at the Leopold Museum), to the anguished linework of Egon Schiele. In his magnetic nudes and contorted figures there is an explosion of invincible yet painful eroticism.