When Moore returns to the United States, she offers to try and take Charlotte and Alexander with her, but they stay in France – Charlotte because of her sense of duty to her grandparents. In a scene from the film, Charlotte stares into the water, thinking about her aunt, who had drowned. Her grandmother is a troubled woman and her grandfather is, in a word, an asshole, but Charlotte finds beauty in her friendship with a wealthy American, Ottilie Moore, who owns a villa in Villefranche, and in her relationship with fellow refugee Alexander Nagler, whom she marries eventually. What is certain is that, after Kristallnacht, the violence against Jews in Berlin has become unavoidable and Charlotte’s parents send her to the south of France to take refuge, and care for her maternal grandparents. While she gains entrance to Berlin’s art academy, despite being Jewish – it is 1933 and the Nazis are now in power – she is expelled pretty soon thereafter, though whether that’s because of her nonconformity to the artistic norms taught at the school, her Jewishness or both, is not clear. Wolfsohn has a lot of personal issues, to say the least, and he ultimately betrays Charlotte, but he is also strongly supportive of her being an artist. He is also a veteran of the First World War.
Jumping ahead, still in Berlin, Charlotte’s father, Albert, has married Paula Lindberg, an opera singer, through whom, incidentally, a teenage Charlotte meets her first love, Alfred Wolfsohn, who is a singing teacher. The woman turns out to be Charlotte’s mother, who dies, the young girl is told, of influenza. The narrative then jumps to Berlin, to a young Charlotte trying to comfort a woman who is ill and sad. She asks him to guard the paintings for her, as they are her life, almost literally, given their content. The film begins near the end of Salomon’s life, as she is handing over her paintings to a man, who we find out later is a local doctor and friend, in what we later find out is the south of France. These parts of the film are sumptuous and give the most sense of Salomon as a person and artist. Led by Oscar nominee Keira Knightley as the voice of Charlotte, the actors do a formidable job with dialogue that is, at times, stilted and animation that is pretty basic, with the exception of the scenes and transitional pieces that depict Salomon’s artwork. And, on these points, the film scores high. 6, 9:15 p.m., at Vancouver Playhouse.īased on the story and the cast, the Jewish Independent chose to be a media sponsor of the local screenings. Featured at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, Charlotte has two screenings at the Vancouver International Film Festival: Oct. Somehow, despite the artist having inspired a live action film, a documentary feature, an opera, a novel, a ballet and several plays, I’d never heard of her, or of her masterpiece, Life? Or Theatre? That is, until I watched the animated feature film Charlotte, a Canada-France-Belgium collaboration that was just released. In about a year-and-a-half, as the Holocaust closed in on her – and her family’s history of depression became known to her – Charlotte Salomon painted hundreds of works, telling her life story in images and words, in what is considered by many, apparently, as the first graphic novel. The creative drive that some people have astounds me.
A graphic novel co-created by artist Miriam Libicki and Holocaust survivor David Schaffer for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust & Human Rights Education project.