AustLit

'Unlike the many films about the lives of artists, operas in which visual artists feature are few, though two of the most popular in the repertoire, Puccini’s Tosca and La Bohème, both have painters as central characters. The lives of artists are often messy affairs and resist convenient shaping into narrative arcs, with the actual creative process difficult to dramatise effectively. The new film Never Look Away, by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, controversially, though loosely based on the life of German artist Gerhard Richter, achieves a remarkable degree of success in showing the development of a creative artist, often actually at work on a series of paintings, while a panoramic sequence of events play out in the background. It is one of the few films that offer a plausible insight into the creative process.' (Introduction)