An imaginative blending of live action docu-drama with hand-crafted cut-out animation, German writer-director Katrin Rothe’s Johnny & Me looks back on the life and work of John Heartfield, aka Helmut Herzfeld, the revolutionary socialist and Dadaist visual artist best known for his strikingly surreal anti-Nazi photomontages. Building on the methods she used in her debut feature 1917 – The Real Revolution (2017), Rothe takes viewers on a zig-zagging animated journey through the major ruptures of 20th century Europe, from the Great War to the Cold War and beyond, with a colourful background cast that includes Bertolt Brecht, Martha Gelhorn, George Grosz, Tristan Tzara, Rosa Luxemburg and other notables.
Despite a few weak points, notably clunky dialogue and a disjointed narrative, Johnny & Me is rich in real-life background drama and superbly rendered visual sequences. It screens in competition at DOK Leipzig this week, the perfect festival platform with its rare joint focus on documentary, animation and politically engaged film-making. High production values and Heartfield’s globally feted reputation as an groundbreaking anti-fascist agitprop artist should ensure more festival bookings and niche audience interest.
Johnny & Me is loosely structured as an extended dialogue between Stefanie (Stephanie Stremler), a graphic designer living in contemporary Germany, and an animated cut-out version of Heartfield (voiced by Manuel Harder) that she creates in her studio, which subsequently takes on a life of its own. Stefanie is suffering a minor career crisis, distressed that her artistic endeavours serve no deeper social purpose than bland commercial propaganda. “There’s no point to my work any more,” she complains to her Heartfield puppet. “Your work made a difference.”
Of course, Stefanie’s first world problems do not really add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But they are merely here as a flimsy dramatic hook on which to hang the film’s main scrambled, time-jumping plotline: an animated bio-pic of Heartfield told in a visual style that mirrors his photomontage technique but with added stop-motion movement, multi-media texture, vintage still photos and live action elements. Rothe half-jokingly calls her style “2.5D animation”, but the meticulous level of DIY craftsmanship here is highly impressive. Full of witty and imaginative touches too: red wool used to depict blood, scrunched-up newsprint as scenery, minor characters depicted as flat cardboard silhouettes, entire cityscapes rendered in abstract but recognisable detail.
Johnny & Me is too vague on biographical detail and political context. For example, Heartfield and his siblings were abandoned by their parents in a woodland cottage in 1899, apparently a result of their father Franz running away from blasphemy charges, a life-changing episode that the film breezes through with zero explanation. In his later years, the artist remained strangely loyal to Stalin, even after his murderous reign of terror had been widely condemned on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and to East Germany’s repressive Communist regime, which treated him with deep suspicion for years due to his his decade of exile in London, even though he was there as a dissident artist whose name ranked highly on Hitler’s most wanted list.
Rothe could have worked harder to unravel some of these mysteries and contradictions in Johnny & Me, but she mostly uses her fantasy time-jumping dialogue sequences between Stefanie and Heartfield for simplistic, on-the-nose exposition. An ever-present score dominated by twinkly lounge-jazz piano also feels incongruously whimsical for such dense, serious material. That said, Rothe’s use of surveillance quotes from Heartfield’s East German secret police files is an inspired recurring motif, with two puppet government agents serving as tragicomic chorus figures, like clownish Communist Party cousins of Waldorf and Statler from The Muppets.
Director, screenwriter: Katrin Rothe
Cast: Stephanie Stremler, Manuel Harder, Dorothee Carls, Michael Hatzius
Cinematography: Thomas Eirich-Schneider, Richard Marx, Manon Pichón
Editing: Hannes Starz
Animation: Lydia Günther, Caroline Hamann, Tonina Matamalas, Anne-Sophie Raemy, Benjamin Swiczinsky
Producer: Gunter Hanfgarn, Andrea Ufer, Ralph Wieser, Sereina Gabathuler, Werner Schweizer
Sound: Stephanie Stremler, Manuel Harder, Michael Hatzius, Dorothee Carls
Music: Micha Kaplan, Thomas Mävers
Production company: Hangfarn & Ufer (Germany), Mischief Films (Austria), Dschoint Ventschr (Switzerland)
World sales: Newdocs, Germany
Venue: DOK Leipzig film festival (International Competition Animated Film)
In German
104 minutes
