The biographical feature film about William Turner is shown in the "Film & Art" series by Cinema Quadrat and Kunsthalle Mannheim

MR. TURNER - MASTER OF LIGHT

GBR 2014. D: Mike Leigh. D: Timothy Spall, Paul Jesson, Dorothy Atkinson. 150 min. DF. FSK: 6

Very calmly, almost as if in slow motion, director Mike Leigh unfolds the camera images for the viewer in his feature film portrait of an artist, thus providing an appropriate introduction to the atmospherically dense paintings and watercolors of the English painter William Turner (1775 - 1851). The film begins with a landscape in the warm light of an afternoon. Two women stroll leisurely along the riverbank, revealing the massive figure of the artist, who perceives and sketches his surroundings - clouds, water, fields - with the utmost concentration. We experience his still fascinating play of colors on canvas and paper, which can be read as landscapes in light and mist, in fog and darkness, but at the same time they can be understood as sensual statements about the disembodied light that is translated into the materiality of colors in painting. Turner's artistic radicalism was partly celebrated by his contemporaries, partly rejected as a lack of craftsmanship; today his work is regarded as a milestone on the path to 20th century abstraction.

Introduction: Dr. Dorothee Höfert, art historian