Sigmar Polke: Films

The richness and variety of Sigmar Polke's film work is overwhelming: extensive exposure to it makes one dizzy—with astonishment and anticipation. It is a treasure trove and a major discovery, but it certainly will take more than this short essay to begin to make sense of it and to value it accordingly.

Faced with Polke's extensive film output, in addition to his stupendous work as a painter and graphic artist, one's initial impulse is to try and classify the unclassifiable, taking up the challenge in the full knowledge that this is an impossible task and may even be counter to the spirit of Polke's mercurial personality, his indifference to media specificity, and his active attempt to "flatten" and deconstruct aesthetic hierarchies. Nonetheless, we must start somewhere. A first attempt is to contextualize the films biographically and then to situate them historically. But situate them in which history? Is it that of post-Conceptual, post-Minimal, post-Pop contemporary art (Polke, another of Marcel Duchamp's and Salvador Dali's disloyal disciples, and the German contemporary of Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol)? Or does his film work belong to the history of the German film avant-garde, with affinities to the abstract Gebrauchsfilme (utility films) of the 1920s (e.g., the advertising films of Walter Ruttmann), or Hans Richter's Dada films (Vormittagsspuk/Ghosts Before Breakfast [1928] especially comes to mind), the American avant-garde (Maya Deren's 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, Jonas Mekas's 1976 diary film Lost Lost Lost, or Jack Smith's 1963 Flaming Creatures), the expanded film group in Vienna (especially Valie Export and Peter Weibel's street films), the structuralist-materialist filmmakers of the London Film-Makers' Co-op (Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice), or the homegrown avant-garde in Cologne and Düsseldorf (Lutz Mommartz, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein)? Polke's films have demonstrable links to all of them, but the biographically most obvious connections are, evidently, with the Rhineland avant-garde around XSCREEN.

My task is more to look at Polke's films from the perspective of a film historian and film theorist, partly with an eye to Polke's contemporaries among the filmmakers of the New German Cinema of the 1970s and 80s (the films of Kluge, Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, Syberberg).

While little has been written about Sigmar Polke's films, some very important pioneering work has already been done, notably by Barbara Engelbach in the Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 catalogue and a long review by the noted New York film critic Jim Hoberman in Artforum. Hoberman—extensively quoting from Engelbach—is quite informed about placing in a historical context the few Polke films that have previously been publicly screened, such as Der ganze Körper fühlt sich leicht und möchte fliegen …/The Whole Body Feels Light and Wants to Fly … (1969), How Long We Are Hesst/Looser (ca. 1973–76), Quetta's blauer dunstiger Himmel/Afghanistan-Pakistan/Quetta's Hazy Blue Sky/Afghanistan-Pakistan (ca. 1974–76), Auf der Suche nach Bohr-mann Brasilien und seine Folgen/Brasilien Sao Paulo/In Search of Bohr-mann Brazil and Its Consequences/Sao Paulo (ca. 1975–76), and HFBK II/Hamburg Lerchenfeld (ca. 1975–89/2009).¹ Yet, artistically, he does not rate these works very highly within the above-mentioned avant-garde traditions. Instead, he much prefers Polke's uncut material and singles out one film in particular—Farbe/Color (ca. 1986–92)—as a masterpiece, writing:

Although the mode is impressionistic rather than structural, Color is a work of great purity. The outside world is referenced only when Polke cuts from a pile of green pigment to a shot of pine trees and then to a close-up of lichen in the rain. What is the nature of paint? Or the power of creation? Every canvas comes to seem a landscape, dotted with tiny stones and pools of water. Here Polke's sole desire is to see what certain things look like on film. Self-contained and truly indifferent, this non-product film piece is successful as installation and as motion picture...