This film written and directed by Corinna Betz tells the story of Gerhard Richter and observes his creative and sometimes agonizing process of painting. Born in 1932 in Dresden, he grew up under the Third Reich and came of age in communist East Germany. He moved to West Germany in 1961. The film shows his many styles of painting and photography with scenes of him talking about the people in the hundreds of early photos piled around him. These pictures of his parents and family at a young age are particularly poignant because after he "defected" to the West, he never saw his friends and family in the East again.
The most interested part for me was watching him paint large canvases with bright primary colors of paint with wide brushes, like painting a house. He applied the paint intuitively without a plan and then he studied the painting and made additions and changes. Most dramatically was his use of a large scraper to scrape off some of the paint to reveal the colors below in interesting patterns.
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