Vera Klement: Blunt Edge
dir. Wonjung Bae
Columbia College Chicago, USA
Synopsis:
Vera Klement: Blunt Edge is a biographical documentary of Vera Klement, an oil painter in Chicago. As her 80th birthday approaches, Vera conceives an idea for the new painting, develops, contemplates, and finally completes the painting. At her birthday party, the completed painting is hung on the wall, revealing its majestical narrative in full scale.
Deeply influenced by abstract expressionism and avant-garde music, Vera Klement’s painterly impasto canvas depicts isolated and alienated objects like a vessel, a ship’s prow, or a bell, in a white, solid void. This time, it is a portrait of an artist under oppression, an homage to Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovitch. In the portrait, the figure holds onto itself, bursting out from a red bed of blood. The black door at the right side of the painting haunts the artist, reminding Vera of her childhood flight from Nazi-occupied Germany.
Her signature white space functions as breathing room figuratively and literally, balancing out the thickness of the layered mass of her painting. The documentary mimics and repeats the look of her art works in its intricate shallow-depth composition, emphasizing the texture of her painting in upcloses.
Interweaving the artist’s process of art making with her 80th birthday party, this short documentary celebrates an artist’s life and her unyielding attempt to create her art.
Director:
Wonjung Bae is a filmmaker interested in the issues of identity, modernity, and art. Born in Busan, South Korea, Bae made her first documentary, Grand, Father and Me, at age sixteen and came to believe in the power of visual storytelling.
Bae won numerous awards including the 16th Annual Directors Guild of America Student Film Winner of Women Category Award, the Kodak Cinematographers Scholarship 2010 Bronze Award, Viva Doc International Student Documentary Competition Best of Category Award for Arts and Humanities, the Chris Award from 58th Columbus International Film & Video Festival, Ohio, the Best of Fest Award from DOCUTAH International Documentary Film Festival, Utah, the Korean Broadcast Institute Student Film & Video Competition Best Documentary Award, and the YMCA Cultural Ministry Awards for Student Filmmakers, Korea, among others.
As the cinematographer for most of her films, Bae shoots on both digital and film. Bae benefits from her background in 35mm still photography and dark room training for 5 years in apprenticeship under a respected Korean documentary photographer, Youngsu Kim. Bae seeks to capture the pertinent formal and aesthetic properties of the medium that are indispensable to realize each story. The result of her cinematic endeavors is the deliberate, raw human stories she shares with her audience. Bae majored in political science for her bachelor’s degree in Korea University, Seoul, and is a MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago Film & Video department, Chicago.