WARUM LACHT HERR W.?
Jana Papenbroock | Germany 2016 | 76 Min. | OmeU
WHY IS MR W. LAUGHING? is a portrait of three members of an atelier community of artists with different disabilities. Questioning the usual asymmetry of inclusion (meaning that often there is just a monologue about and not a dialogue with the persons concerned), the film is a cinematic experiment that politicizes boundary-practices in its form and content: Rather
than making a film about inclusion, the film itself was produced inclusively. In an open collaborative journey through the pictorial worlds of the three artists, a focus was set on their aesthetic obsessions and perspectives through their own videography. Their spontaneous and sometimes gratuitous imagery isn’t organized by a boosted ego at its center but displays subjectivity as social experience in space. As a result of the collaborative approach, the film is an eclecticmix of materials and techniques, interview situations interwovenwith observational episodes, auto-fiction and performance,home videos of the protagonists and their own musicalcompositions. The juxtaposition of life and art doesn’t apply for the three whoare artists in order to participate in communities. Art for them is not a breakaway dream from normality, but the quintessence of bourgeois work that enables them a status as citizens. This is one of the many realizations that occurred during the work on this film, -that most ideas about disability and art brut are romanticizing and excluding misconceptions.
