Hilma Fascinates in a Disjointed Telling

 

 

 

 

 

 

2019 Guggenheim Museum

Hilma (2023)

Directed by Lasse Hallström

Juno Films, 120 minutes, Not rated, In English

★★★

 

When was the above painted? Sometime in the 1960s? Who’s the artist? Perhaps a pop art painter like Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusma, or Peter Max? Answer: Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), two decades before anyone heard of pop art. She also did abstract nonrepresentational art well before Mondrian or Kandinsky took it up. Hilma was a non-conventional woman, but she wasn’t a hippie; she was a follower of Theosophy obsessed with spirits and all that went with them: Ouija boards, seances, meditation, communing with nature…. To further complicate matters, she was probably a lesbian at a time in which such an identity was shocking. The movie Hilma is a disjointed biographical picture from Lasse Hallström, the director of fare such as My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules, and ABBA videos. 

 

 

Hilma af Klint was very bright, though her parents seldom quite knew what to do with her. The death of younger sister Hermina exacerbated Hilma’s deep plunge into Theosophy and the search for the “High Masters,” once-human spiritually enlightened guides to the occult. She graduated with honors from Sweden’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts­, but because she was unorthodox and a woman, she struggled to find acceptance in the art world. Hilma gathered likeminded women around her in hope of setting up an atelier whose art would make others appreciate female painters and understand Theosophy.

 

Hilma was something of a Hallström home movie; his daughter Tora played young Hilma, and his wife (Lena Olin) took on the role of aging Hilma. Young Hilda was magnetic and headstrong. Her inner circle included Anna Cassel (Catharine Chalk), Mathilda, (Lily Cole), Cornelia (Rebecca Calder), and Sigrid (Maeve Dermody). The center of this part of the film is the relationship between Hilma and Anna, which Hallström presents as lesbian. (The historical record is suggestive, but not definitive.) Hilma depends upon Anna, who has money to burn and helps get various projects out of Hilma’s head and onto canvases–big ones. Hilma, though, is also fickle. Based on her youthful (mis)understanding, Hilma is convinced that Rudolph Steiner (Tom Wlaschiha) is her soulmate. Although a mystic, Steiner–an architect of Waldorf education­–thought Theosophy was bunk; his was a belief in anthroposophy, an objective explanation of the spiritual world. His dismissive remarks about Hilma’s art led her to quit painting for four years and ruined her relationship with Anna. Hallström suggests Hilma became interested in another woman, though that’s speculative. When Hilma picks up the brush again, she is again rebuffed by Steiner, and shifts her attention to building a “temple” that she and her associates create. She insisted all 196 cavasses be kept together and in an exact order.

 

Finding money for the temple is the obsessive quest of older Anna, whose own brother wants nothing to do with such a flight of fantasy. Only her nephew is kind to her, but he’s not wealthy. Thus, Hilma packed up her art and stipulated that it should not be displayed until 20 years after her death. In 2019, Hilma’s artwork finally got its day: a massive show at the Guggenheim. That was followed by a posthumous Stockholm temple.  

 

Hilma af Klint is hardly the first artist to die unrecognized but achieve renown in the future. Herein lies a problem with the film. It is as if Hallström could not make up his mind what the center of the tale should be. We know early on that Hilma was obsessive, as she throws herself in watching human dissections, studies botany, and announces her intention to make a map of “everything.” Is the film about obsession? Is it lesbianism? (Or, less charitably, the male gaze?) Is it an exploration of spiritualism and the thin walls between the objective and the realm of spirits? Hilma as an early inventor of modernism and nonrepresentational art? Hilma as stubborn to a fault?

 

All of these, of course, can be dimensions of a person’s personality, but the movie has no discernible takeaway message. Instead we get the equivalent of a stack of Polaroids, each image fascinating, but a life abstracted. The film is worth watching– Tora Hallström is both spunky and spiky and Catherine Chalk has commanding presence–but keep a roll of tape handy to fix the pieces in place.

 

Rob Weir