Johnny & Me

Director: Katrin Rothe (Austria, Switzerland, Germany). Year of Release: 2023

An old style typewriter. Someone is pressing the keys, each of which narrowly avoids a cloth puppet. If you know such things (and if you do, you really need to get out more), you’ll recognise that the puppet has the face of John Heartfield, né Helmut Hertzfeld, Dada artist, Communist, and pioneer of photomontage. Heartfield was born in 1891, and, after experiencing two World Wars and Fascism, he died in 1968 in East Berlin having made his peace with the DDR régime.

A voiceover tells us some of Heartfield’s history. The son of socialists, he was appalled by the xenophobia which was fomented during the First World War. As a response to the popular slogan: “Gott strafe England!” (God punish England), he and his friend George Grosz anglicized their names. As Hitler rose to power, his work became very explicitly political, producing iconic posters which emphasized the support Hitler got from big business, many of which are reproduced here.

Heartfield is presented to us though the eyes of Stefanie, a graphic designer in the present day who is having a crisis in confidence in her artistic ability. Stefanie is re-inspired when she visits an exhibition of Heartfield’s work (because graphic design is like photomontage, right?) Later in the film, Stefanie asks her puppet what Heartfield would be doing if he were alive and active today. Would be be an influencer? This is a device which is much too laboured to work for me.

The fictional Stefanie takes out some scissors and cloth to create the Heartfield puppet, then tells his story through a series of 3-d cartoons. This is visually astounding, and uses cinema in a way which It has rarely been used before. But as a political – or even an artistic – statement, the film is remarkably incoherent. It leaves little impression of what made Heartfield such a great artist, nor of how his political commitment manifested itself.

Above all, the experience both of revolution and of resistance to Hitler is never presented as being a collective act. Heartfield remains in his garret, or flees to a different garret in a different part of the world, while events act upon him. Later on, his conflict with the DDR is more about how this affects him as an individual than as something happening in society. We are told that Heartfield is a Communist, but never why, nor of any collective strength he might gain from Party membership.

It’s difficult to know which criteria you should use to judge Johnny & Me. We can sit back and marvel at the artistry. At the same time, the fact that it has chosen such a committed figure as Heartfield means that it surely wants to do more than just draw pretty pictures. Johnny & Me is much better at looking pretty than it is at being profound. Added to this, much of the film is based on legal documents, which feels counter-intuitive for a film about an artist.

At a Q&A afterwards, director Katrin Rothe said that the 1950s Heartfield was what was most interesting to her. This means that we rush through the 1920s and 1930s. The German Revolution, in which Heartfield took an active role, is almost entirely absent. Hitler’s rise is shown through a few of Heartfield’s posters, him working for the exile opposition in Prague, and pictures of bombs raining down on London, where he lived in exile. This all feels very perfunctory,

After the war is over, the film slows down, and you could certainly make a case that his negotiations with the East German Communist Party is of interest to a certain sort of person (most obviously someone who grew up in the DDR), But this comes at the expense of much serious analysis of him as an artist. We see Heartfield bargaining with DDR bureaucrats about rejoining the Party, but not why it was so important that someone of his artistic stature return to the fold.

In the Q&A afterwards, an expert explained that there was a difference between the “Stalinistic” DDR, and the (implicitly more liberal) DDR that followed. He also explained that there is new research placing Heartfield, Brecht, and others as “anti-Stalinist Stalinists”, which I presume means that although they accepted the DDR as the least worse option, they kept a critical distance. While this is mildly interesting, I don’t think that this is the key part of Heartfield’s life.

Rothe based some of the plot on her experience in the DDR in the 1980s, when the state had lost its credibility and the population just laughed at it. This results in a strangely unhistorical analysis. If you see the old Soviet system as a figure of fun, rather than something to be either worshipped, demonised, or a bit of both, you don’t end up having much useful to say about it. I found myself wondering: “what exactly is the point of this film?”

At one point, the Heartfield puppet sees a (presumably AfD) demonstration marching past Stefanie’s studio, and gets agitated, screaming: “Do you really know what Fascism means. It’s back again”. This is certainly a heartfelt message for a modern audience, but it appears with so little context in a film which is clearly for a very specific audience that I’m not sure that it really works as interventionist art. I mean, this is hardly a film that will be watched by many AfD fans.

I really wanted to like Johnny & Me much more than I actually did. I like John Heartfield very much, but on the one level, there was little new here, and on the other, what we did see seemed to trivialise his importance as an artist. And while the graphics are impressive, they seemed to be continually in conflict with the story that they were attempting to tell. I can’t articulate it much more clearly except to say that for all the good intentions, it didn’t work for me.

This may well be one of those “it’s not you, it’s me” films, and even that I may enjoy it, it I see it in a different mood, or if I go with different expectations that I had this evening. Well, maybe, but not necessarily. I’m not sure that the film contains enough information about Heartfield to win him for a wider audience, nor that the dilemmas it raises are of great interest to most people. But I guess the world will be a drabber place without films like this, so let’s welcome its existence anyway.