GEWESEN SEIN WIRD

The gaze becomes space. The film’s subtitle is frankly explanatory, “The Apartment of Heinz Frank,” which alone would be more than sufficient as we are going to scan a bizarre early 20th-century studio flat inch by inch, but instead there is so much more, i.e., art and design objects, reflections on the art and life of the character who lived there, recollections that become universal. The tiny Viennese apartment (30 square metres) was recently under the limelight as the shelter of Heinz Frank for literally all his life – he painstakingly shaped and perfected it with amazingly original solutions in his own image (like “a third skin,” in the words of his daughter who is our guide) and is still filled with artworks – but now that he is dead is in danger of being sold, thus losing a rare contemporary gesamtkunstwerk forever. Departing from the small flat, that shows the influence of modernist architecture (Adolf Loos, Josef Frank), and from the amusing stories told by the painter/designer’s daughter, Pirker’s film puts together a portrait of an artist who is never to be seen.