Klimt

Klimt is a 2006 Austrian art-house biographical film about the life of the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918). It was written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, with an English screenplay adaptation by Gilbert Adair. The director of photography was Ricardo Aronovich, and the music was composed by Jorge Arriagada. The title role is played by John Malkovich and the cast includes Stephen Dillane. Both a 130-minute-long director's cut and a shortened producer's cut of 96 minutes were shown at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival. A few months later the film was shown at the 28th Moscow International Film Festival where it was nominated for two awards, winning the Russian Film Clubs Federation Award. Plot This art house film is presented in the format of a sequence of nearly two dozen often disassociated vignettes taken from the life of Gustav Klimt and visualized by him in his recollection. All of this occurs while he is being treated late in life in hospital using mercury treatments for advanced syphilis which he had contracted earlier in his life. In his advanced age, Klimt has become a leading artist in Vienna and his work is celebrated at all levels of society in Austria. Throughout his life, Klimt has had a special interest in the depiction of the beauty he associates with the female form and his studio is constantly occupied by nude models posing for his drawings and oil paintings. Klimt is open minded as to the expression of his own sexuality and casually forms relationships of an intimate nature with many of his models. A number of his models bear his children, and Klimt's visualized recollections of his younger years showing him as being aware of having fathered many children, some of whose identities he knows and some of which are nearly anonymous to him. In one visit to a local brothel with a male acquaintance, an older Klimt is introduced to one of the prostitutes as actually being his daughter, fathered during his visits to the brothel as a younger man. When his acquaintance asks him if this is true, Klimt casually says he does not know and the two men continue their evening of indulgence. A recurrent figure in the visualized vignettes which Klimt experiences while receiving mercury treatment in hospital, is an unnamed government official who seems to obtain commissions from the Ministry of Culture for Klimt.