Bauhaus
That cold opening! Only slightly hagiographic history of the OG Bauhaus movement, brought to life in Weimar republic.
The opening sets the right tone for the rest of this competent period drama. It’s a telefilm, but with BBC-like quality.
This follows one of the woman who studied there, including the contrast between the philosophical ideals of art for all, and the toning down of woman involvement. How creating and maintaining a project with opposite ideas to the prevailing regime is nearly impossible. How even betrayal can heal.
To my surprise, the Bauhaus movement started way before the post-WW2 I was familiar with. That’s the second wave of disciples of the real deal.
Turns out the Nazis didn’t really close down the Dassau school. There was some backroom deal, but the conditions were unacceptable, the Bauhaus leaders close themselves down.
They even re-reopened the school in Berlin for a little while, before dissolving themselves and spreading the ideas all over the world, from Calcutta, Shanghai, Chicago.
The best product out of the school was actually minimalism and the now-mainstream idea of bringing good design to the masses, a sort of proto- IKEA.
The Weimar Republic is beginning to be an obsession. This is even set in Weimar, the city. Like all Weimar-Fiction, it always ends with a SA brownshirt shooing everyone off.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.