All of us, at some point or another, have a teacher who makes a difference. Maybe it’s just that we cross paths at the right moment, or maybe it’s just that he or she is that damn good at what they do, but the right teacher at the right time can change a person’s path in a way that not even the world’s best parent might. For me, that teacher was a man named Deane G. Keller. A drawing professor where I studied art, Deane was a bit of an anachronism — in a time when traditional art techniques were widely dismissed, he held fast to the old ways, enthralling us for hours with his grasp of the human form using little more than a sheaf of paper and a thin stick of charcoal.
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned where Deane had picked up a lot of his love for the classics. It turned out that his father — also named Deane Keller, and also an art professor — was one of the “monuments men” of the U.S. Army, responsible for saving and preserving European art treasures from the Nazi pillaging of World War II. You may remember a recent George Clooney film about the art-loving Army crew; more on that in a moment. This week, a pair of films comes to Amherst Cinema to tackle the history of art theft during the war years.
Helen Mirren stars in Woman in Gold, director Simon Curtis’ (My Week with Marilyn) take on the true-life story of Holocaust survivor Maria Altmann. Forced to flee Vienna during the war, she eventually settled in the U.S. Sixty years later — after discovering a revealing letter that had belonged to her late sister — Altmann filed a suit demanding the return of her family’s prized possessions, among them a famous Gustav Klimt portrait that happened to be of Altmann’s aunt Adele.
Enlisting the help of young lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), Altmann finds that the Austrians are none too eager to give up what has become a national treasure. But when Schoenberg uncovers evidence that points to a more widespread cover-up, the unlikely pair find their case gaining ground. A bittersweet story of justice delayed, it does remind us that there is no deadline to righting a wrong.
And screening at Amherst on Tuesday at 7 p.m. is Five Days, Five Nights, a 1960 film about plundered art, set in Dresden immediately following the war. With the city devastated, over 2,000 paintings — works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and more — go missing from the Old Masters Gallery. For a week, the city’s residents join forces with the Red Army to track down the missing masterpieces. (This first East German/Soviet film co-production features music by Shostakovich.) Part of the cinema’s Art Theft Film Series, it is presented in collaboration with the DEFA Film Library of UMass Amherst. The film will be introduced by Laetitia La Follette of the UMass Department of History of Art and Architecture, while DEFA’s Hiltrud Schulz will be on hand to lead a post-screening Q&A about the film and the questions it raises.
But to circle back to that George Clooney picture — the press notes for Five Days, Five Nights mention it as a favorable companion to Robert M. Edsel’s book The Monuments Men, on which the Clooney film was based. But while Clooney’s take was generally dismissed as something of a snooze, there was another version of the history that still makes for compelling viewing.
That film is a 2006 documentary called The Rape of Europa. Currently available to stream for free via online hub Hulu, it highlights the invaluable work of my old professor’s dad, particularly his heroic efforts to save the frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa (so valued was his work that his ashes are interred there today). And one of the very first paintings it talks about? Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
