Educational Media Reviews Online

After watching Charlotte: Life or Theater?, you'll maybe want to borrow, in order to describe the film, the terrifying opening sentence of The Good Soldier, "This is the saddest story I know." This because, though tragedy is endless, the imagination seizes up when irony, grim irony, is added to the mix. That irony played never more grimly than in the case of Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943). A young German Jewish woman seeking shelter in France at the outset of World War II, she found herself able at last to stave off the strong suicidal impulse that had claimed numerous family members – her mother, her aunt, and, most recently, in their French refugee home, her grandmother who, having failed at hanging herself, jumped out the window. Watching the ebb and flow of the Mediterranean, Charlotte chose instead to affirm life by opting, in her words, to do something “crazy” – only to be carted off two years later, pregnant, along with her husband, to Auschwitz to be murdered upon arrival….

Charlotte’s story might never have emerged from the anonymous million others of the Holocaust had it not been for the “crazy” thing she committed herself to. She set herself to compose a kind of “opera” – pictures, words, music – telling the story of her life. Painted images comprise the primary element of the work – some 800 gouaches done seemingly spontaneously in a variety of styles. We see probably less than half of them in the film, interspersed with photographs of the some of the places and players in the story, together with a voiceover narration of Charlotte’s text. Pictures and text relate more or less the story of her brief life, the centerpiece of which is a passing love affair with her professional singer stepmother’s singing teacher, himself madly in love with her stepmother. (A charismatic, enduring figure in Charlotte’s life, the man tells her at one point, “Life doesn’t have to love you for you to love life.”) Art critics reviewing a museum exhibition of the gouaches comment that, in style and execution, they evoke, among others, Chagall, Modigliani, George Grosz, even Ludwig Bemelmens. They are original in their narrative technique and even suggest cinematic storyboards in their alternation of long shots and close-ups on behalf of the unfolding narrative. Charlotte drew the text sometimes directly onto the gouaches, sometimes on transparency overlays. Music, she said, came into her head as she painted – thus the category opera. Without the grand scale, there is still something Proustian in the conception, in that her memory is so clearly sensually inspired.

The English voiceover, however, is sometimes strangely emotionless, and you may get the feeling you’re listening to an opera “sung” in translation, as opera never should be. (The credits at the end of the film list the respective narrators of the French and German versions of the film but not the present English narrator – she gets a few things wrong, such as pronouncing Eurydice, Ura-dice.) Then again, it may be that the gouaches must be seen assembled all together in a museum setting for their full power to be experienced. Still, the film serves as a moving introduction to Charlotte Salomon’s unique creation, and to the terrible sad circumstances that engendered it.