The Sleeping Girl



Düsseldorf, beginning of the seventies. Hans, a young, introverted
student of Beuys, meets Ruth, a young homeless woman living
in a park. Fascinated by her, he takes Ruth in and makes her
the subject of his video work. Ruth quickly settles into the artist
scene around Hans, she gets a job as a drawing model at the academy.
But Hans is skeptical about her new life, he suspects that
Ruth, in her transformation to ‘glamour girl,’ is only trying to get
away from herself. For him, she remains the baffling homeless girl
that he had secretly fallen in love with, a subject that he doesn’t
want to share with anyone. Jealous of his best friend Philipp, he
locks Ruth up in his studio so he can – so he thinks – look into
her secrets in the test tube of art. Art and life become inextricably
intertwined.



In front of the backdrop of the skeptical post ’68 years, "The Sleeping Girl" presents a portrait of two dissimilar loners who are apparently
trying to use each other to get a grip on their damaged
lives. Made in the style of a self-reflexive video experiment, but
with the dramatic means of narrative cinema, the film brings alive
a time in which the first portable video systems were becoming
popular among artists and in which a significant period in performance
art was shaping up parallel to the rising video culture.



"The Sleeping Girl" is a fictional artist film. Its documentary style
grounds the psychological movement of history, it is the organic
component of narration. We experience the events through
Hans’s gaze, every image is marked by his artistic vision – it is
Hans’s film that we see. the dramatic action takes place at the
point of friction between Hans’s intentions and the unpredicted,
which enters in without – and often contrary to – his cooperation.
So the film has Hans depicting his own loss of control, we
participate in a battle over the grandeur of the image, a battle
with the reality of the event, the central form of which is Ruth.



But Hans’s artistic program has nothing to do with protocol: he
is an active artist, himself the protagonist of his own images. He
examines the elementary peculiarities of the medium–film character
in space, relation of the visual space to real space–and his
own relation as well. Like the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, who died
very young and is my historical model, Hans creates himself as
a melancholy-ironic, Buster-Keaton-type art figure, who encounters
the adversities of reality with stoic patience, consequently
becoming the pawn of the game. Hans’s film is therefore always
also a project of self-examination, in which the difference between
artistic figure and the real Hans creates the spark for the
dramatic action.


Rainer Kirberg

Source: 61. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)