It was not easy to stamp this project out of the ground, says Edgar Reitz about “Leibniz chronicle of a missing picture“. Basically, you already wanted to put it, the 92-year-old filmmaker recalls. After all, his heart project over the universal scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with whom the “home” director dealt over ten years, quickly ran out to an estimated budget of 25 million euros. This sum is simply impossible for a project in the German -speaking area – especially if we do not move in the explicit entertainment sector.
But after the script had already gone through several revisions, each with the aim of steering the scope of the initially lifting script in a financially stampable way – finally, one idea of how Leibnitz could still be approached. Wouldn't it be a shame about this planned opening scene, in which Leibniz is commissioned by Queen Charlotte von Prussia? And couldn't be constructed for this one scene an entire film that explores the limits and overlap between art and science?
Again and again the camera Edgar Selge comes very close as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
So simple this starting situation comes, it takes away as promising. Arranged as a chamber game, we see the Leibniz played by Edgar Selge, who already had most of his life in 1704. His great spirit is largely recognized, his contributions to the development of different fields of activity such as law, mathematics or moral philosophy. However, the fact that Leibniz, who has long been a member of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris, has not been appointed to higher tasks and ultimately spent existence in Hanover in Hanover, certain scars seems to be certain scars in it To have left-scars that Reitz and co-director Anatol Schuster gradually approach. However, this psychological research is not at the center.
Knowing that the life of Leibniz, which is unprecedented on all common standards, cannot be told in a quick run with all its ingenious inventions and theoretical developments, without getting over to mere illustration, Reitz focuses on the essential question of whether – and if so, how, how – can be expressed a life through a picture. “Do we want to think a bit together?” It says in one place. A question that could quickly sound silly, but which expresses a sincere knowledge of knowledge from the mouth of Leibniz.
A painting as a mirror of the soul?
On such a court painter Delalandre, the court painter Delalandre embodied by Lars Eidinger, he travels with a number of already prefabricated canvases, the only empty space of which represents the face to be inserted. Leibniz 'Personal is rejecting, but at least benefits from the last template that although she does not show Leibniz, it is reasonable. Here Reitz roams an issue early on, which he continues as soon as Eidinger's court painter takes off after continuing differences with Leibniz (“he can't be a painter”). Only when the fictional Dutch painter Aaltje van de Meer (played by Aenne Schwarz) affects the scenery, the tableau opens up and thus also the center of history, in which we see how positions for painting are exchanged, compensated for, covered and further spun .
Coming largely without music and interior, the minimalism pursued by the director's duo and cobbler at no time is degraded to sterility. In exquisite, the focus is clearly on the faces, the expressed thoughts and the light that falls on it. For Leibniz, who, as a pioneer of the Enlightenment (or, as it is said in other languages, is far more poetic: the epoch of enlightenment), a very coherent decision. Nothing appears to be left to chance in this formal strict, although formal outbursts indicate here and there (in a setting, for example, we suddenly take Leibniz's perspective, which goes so far that the camera, as one of the French directing Terrible Gaspar Noé (“irreversible”) knows, begins to blink).
Art as an image or as an interpretation?
In one of the most impressive scenes, we also see how a narrow light falls through the darkened studio and Leibniz and van de Meer literally become the projection surface of one of the garden, the grasses of which are shadowed on their bodies. A camera obscura is that, Leibniz knows how to classify the moment immediately. It is not particularly surprising that Reitz on the edge of the world premiere of the film at the Berlinale in 2025 is to note that this is also a film about filmmaking. However, the cliché inherent in this comment refers to the basic problem of Reitz's approach to Leibniz.
Because although the film is open to his heart, the dialogue, he does not manage to transport this openness. The saying of the painter van de Meer “What I don't know, I can paint” from Reitz to the central line of the film actually indicates an undeveloped thinking room. Ultimately, however, he gives Leibniz more to think than us. This may be due to the fact that Reitz is not located to go where he locates his fictional painter: in a cinematic space that is so tacted and concluded that the dialogues present themselves less than the moment than the script.
The philosophy of the picture
At no time, this will be more obvious than if Leibniz and Van de Meer find themselves in a discussion about how exactly the creation of a painting is in space and time. The Leibniz thesis that the present is literally frozen by the portrait, the painter counters with the fact that the picture is rather the gathered past manifest itself with all its material conditions. This exchange is certainly meant nicely, and also presents Leibniz as a feminist, who not only recognizes the artist's explanations as equivalent, but also shows himself to be open to learning from her. However, the thinking process that we get started in Leibniz does not want to transfer itself to the audience. Probably also because Reitz ultimately does not succeed in integrating the one in the exchange.
Conclusion: Despite (or maybe because of a formal strict, the heart project of “Heimat” director Edgar Reitz about the universal scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz does not ultimately want to work entirely. The openness that the filmmaker and co-director Anatol Schuster apparently strives with “Leibniz-Chronicle of a missing picture” ultimately triggers fewer thinking processes among the audience than the protagonist and unfortunately mostly remain in the illustration.
We have “Leibniz chronicle of a missing picture“Seen at the Berlinale in 2025, where he celebrated his world premiere as a“ Berlinale Special ”.