In her painting he’s beautiful, like Swan Song and Chloe & Emma, but he hasn’t been made beautiful rather the artist has simply looked and found what was already there. We see waves of emotion run through him like an electric current: surprise, shock, wonder, gratitude, amazement. The key moment of Ree’s film comes when Nordland first sees Kysilkova’s first painting of him. It’s about what happens when we see people as people, when we listen to them with intent and empathy, when we take what they have shared with us and incorporate it into our own personal world. The Painter and the Thief is not about the awful things that can befall us when we open ourselves to others, but the wonderful things. However, the twist is that there is no twist. There’s a tension in play – perhaps native to our ingrained cultural perception of criminals and crime, perhaps not – that at some point the other shoe will drop, that she’ll be robbed, or he will be abandoned, or some kind of revelation, some twist in the tail, will lead us to some harrowing final act climax. We follow Kysilkova as she makes tentative contact with Nordland and starts to enter his world and we fear for her – this man is a criminal and she could be in danger.Īs the film progresses, we come to know the troubled but gifted Nordland, a generous, funny guy wrestling with his own worst impulses, and we fear for him: what is he to Kysilkova? Is he a subject to be captured and then discarded? Our sympathies tick-tock from one to the other. Ree was fortunate enough to be able to film the pair over the course of three years, and the access he was granted lends the film an incredible, and occasionally, uncomfortable, level of intimacy. To try and pin it down is a Sisyphean task but boiled down to the basics Ree’s film is about empathy – radical empathy. It’s about crime and punishment, specifically the Norwegian model. Yes, it’s about the relationship between artist and muse, and about the potential for exploitative behaviour in either direction. Yes, it is a true crime story about a victim confronting a transgressor. It is vast, yet intimate to mangle a paraphrase, it contains multitudes. Hearing this, Kysilkova did the unthinkable: she asked Nordland to pose for her.ĭirected by Benjamin Ree ( Magnus), The Painter and the Thief is a genuinely sublime work of documentary filmmaking, and one that defies easy categorisation. While the crime was impulsive, he had looked through the gallery window at the paintings countless times. He did, however, admit that he thought they were beautiful. Swan Song, a picture of two swans, and Chloe & Emma, one of two girls, could be anywhere. In the dock, the heavily tattooed, feral-looking Nordland admitted that he had little memory of stealing her works from Oslo’s Galley Nobel, and had no idea where they were now – he was that high. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't a very good one.Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova first met Norwegian drug addict and petty criminal Karl-Bertil Nordland in 2015 when he was on trial for stealing two of her paintings. He left school at age 16 in 1905, intending to become a painter. Adolf was close to his mother, who was highly indulgent of him, and he was deeply affected when she died in 1907. Alois died in 1903 but left money to take care of the family. A moody child, he grew hostile towards his father, especially once the latter had retired and the family had moved to the outskirts of Linz. Notable Quote: "In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters but victory."Īdolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on Apto Alois Hitler (who, as an illegitimate child, had previously used his mother’s name of Schickelgruber) and Klara Poelzl.Known For: Leading the German Nazi party and instigating World War II.
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