This portrait of Ella Bergmann-Michel, enriched with photographs, film clips, drawings and collages, links her artistic work to the use of cinema as an instrument of social reform, talks about her grotesque collages, strongly influenced by science and technology, her pacifist aspirations, the photographic experiments then used by the artist as preparatory studies for her short films, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Film, and the film society she ran. The documentary opens in a desolate Schmelzmühle, the mill that had been home to the ‘local modern art museum’ and a meeting place for artists and art lovers, and where Ella Bergmann-Michel and her family went ‘underwater’ during Nazism. There are the voices of people close to the artist, such as the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters as well as her son Hans Michel, and obviously her own voice: “Our life is abstract, while painting is tangible once again. Yet, who knows, if the world becomes tangible again, we’ll have to paint abstract once more”.

Madeleine Bernstorff