Among a new generation of German filmmakers, Hamburg’s Helena Wittmann is uniquely elemental, even primal, in her concerns. For over a decade, the 39-year-old artist has been exploring the outer reaches of cinematic storytelling through the medium’s singular ability to transform not only space and time, but also the spectator’s relationship with their surroundings. Human Flowers of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to her mesmerizing feature debut Drift (2017), pushes her formal and thematic predilections towards a vanishing point where narrative dovetails with pure aesthetic elegance. A standout in this summer’s Locarno competition, it marks a major step up for Wittmann in terms of profile and visibility, and carries with it a certain seriousness of intent that harkens back to art cinema’s heyday of the ’60s and ’70s, when ambition and ambiguity…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 92- Fall 2022