As artists grow old and fragile, they face the prospect of no longer being able to perform the gestures of creation. The first shot of BILDWERDEN frames the Austrian artist Isolde Maria Joham, now 90, off-center, her hands shaking. Christiana Perschon (SHE IS THE OTHER GAZE) allows her a new gesture: to climb a stair frame and pose, smiling in front of her large canvases. Isolde trembles a little, but so does the bird we see alighting on a branch, as do the stairs themselves; nothing in this world is fixed rigid. As the filmmaker says to Isolde, happily: “Now you’ve outgrown the frame”.
