GEYSIR AND GOLIATH

Karl Geiser (1898-1957): Swiss sculptor, drawer and photographer. Torn between a great love for life and profound self-doubts he died a solitary wolf. A portrait about a forgotten artist with a vulcanic temperament who was called «the geyser» by his friends.
«Geysir and Goliath» tries to evoke the life and work of the sculptor Karl Geiser (1898 – 1957) through fragments of his plastic, graphic and photographic work taken from letters and diaries: Geiser par lui-même. The film refrains from interviewing those few still existing talking heads. It also abstains from psychological and art-historical interpretations and comments. Next to Geiser himself - in written and oral bequeathed statements - other people, who were close to him, will have a say. I see my own comments, as in the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon documentaries, as a narration: as an informative and matter-of-fact report.
The documentary will not focus on his work but on his life achievement, in the double meaning of this word. Or to put it in another way: on his huge work in progress, to what Geiser's life and work has been inextricably intertwined. Just as in the tradition of the romanticism and the 19th century he lived for his work - and, quasi as the exhausted Goliath, let his life for «David». He never «resided»: the studio was never just a place of work, but domicile - the place, centre of his life. As a photographer he documented extensively: the works not made for a museum but understood in their becoming, between models and collaborators, between bottles of Chianti and leftovers. The studio was also his space of love: with those few, but the more important women of his life, with the boys and younglings,
Whose beauty, he was attracted to from early on. He died in the studio - exhausted, lonely and unnoticed for weeks.

This film is included on the DVD edition Alexander J. Seiler.
The DVD box can be ordered via office@dvfilm.ch.

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