IMAGO Meret Oppenheim

For many younger women artists Meret Oppenheim is a rôle-model, because of the way she lived her life and realized her creative freedom. She won early fame in the thirties with her Fur-lined Teacup, but then experienced a long creative crisis. In the middle of the 1950s she regained her self-confidence and quietly began a new phase of productivity. At the end of the sixties her work was rediscovered, and she gained new recognition. Meret Oppenheim considered herself a seismograph of the spiritual landscape - one who, being rooted in the past and future, kept the passage to the unconscious open. She had a deep trust in the unconscious and throughout her life she recorded her dreams, which she used as a source of guidance and self-knowledge. She also strongly believed that art has no gender, and strove to balance and unite the opposite sides of her psyche, the spiritual-female and spiritual-male, an effort that was reflected in her appearance and in the dreams of her last years. She felt that, ever since the establishment of patriarchy, the female principle had been devalued and projected on to women. Because of this disturbed balance, she felt that a new direction in the evolution of mankind is needed, where the female principle is not devalued and humanity arrives at wholeness. The makers of this film were friends of Meret Oppenheim and had planned to make the film with her. After her death in 1985 they went ahead on their own, basifg the narration, spoken by Glenda Jackson, on the artist's own words, taken from her letters, writings and poems, and on conversations with her family and friends. It tells the story of her life, but it is also a supremely poetic presentation of the themes that dominated her art.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.