IN WIRKLICHKEIT IST ALLES GANZ ANDERS

The onset of the film, In Wirklichkeit ist alles ganz anders, must have begun with questions such as the following: How do you portray someone who, for more than forty years, has put his artistic effort into making portraits of artists? How do you portray someone who has persistently aimed at getting closer to those portrayed rather than their art? And, finally: how do you make a portait of someone who, for decades, not only hid these portraits from the public, but also in his films made himself vanish as much as possible as well as in public discussion of the same? This film has found an astonishingly simple solution for these questions: in order to make a portrait of someone who makes portraits, it is sufficient to apply to the portraitist the methods developed in these portraits. But the film avoids the danger of this type of reproduction by allowing a portrait of Wilhelm Gaube to arise from the traces of his presence in the portraits. (Vrääth Öhner)