Gerhard Richter - Painting (2011)

The filmmaker has been granted access to the "inner circle" (for no apparent reason), and Richer, his coworkers, employees, his wife etc talk to her quite casually, almost as a friend. But she does not take full advantage of this opportunity. There are no intelligent conversations, only friendly conversations. That is not enough.

It is okay that Richter does not want to talk too much about personal matters, and does not really open his bag of tricks as a painter (in front of a running camera). Being filmed at work prevents creative powers being set free, many artists say (e.g. I remember Horst Janssen saying this to a film-team). Sometimes Richter seems to expect more of the conversation but quickly realizes that no-one around him has anything valuable to say about his art. Seems to happen all the time, so he does not care. He is not a diva, but quite down to earth.

It is honorable that the writer/director does not want to lecture the user, this also means almost nothing gets treated with sufficient depth.

I suspect the writer does not know enough about art (despite a lot of research and effort that she undoubtedly put into this documentary), and so has no intelligent questions to ask when it matters. Even when the conversation does not revolve around art, but instead abound family (for instance) the dialog is a but more fluent, but still, it stays quite boring.

Sometimes the filmmaker throws in some snippets from vintage documentaries from the 60s which are a bit more inquisitive, but they seem misplaced and thus are not really helpful either.

There are only subtitles shown very briefly. The music is minimalist modern classical (piano solo, or strings).

If you praised Richters greatness as a painter to someone who does not know anything about him, and you showed her this movie before you showed her any paintings of his, she'd never believe that this is one of the greatest painters of our time.