A candid look behind the scenes of the contemporary art world in a film by the GDR’s leading director. Screening as part of the Still Life. Portrait. Landscape. Genre Beside Itself programme.
Registration opens three weeks before the screening
The Naked Man on the Sports Field
- Date:
- 27 Jan 2027,
19:30–21:25
Registration opens three weeks before the screening
- Age restrictions
- 18+
Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz
1974, Konrad Wolf
German Democratic Republic
97 minutes, German with Russian subtitles
Starring: Kurt Böwe, Ursula Karusseit, Andreas Schmid, Reimar J. Baur
T
A legendary goalkeeper of a provincial football club dies in an accident. The team’s management is preoccupied with how to honour his memory. Sculptor Herbert Kemmel proposes erecting a monument in the stadium, depicting not the deceased but an abstract figure—after all, the ministry is highly likely to allocate funds for it.
Still from The Naked Man on the Sports Field, 1974
We deliberately wanted to destroy this attitude towards art, which always remains shrouded in a great fog of the intangible, not out of political conviction, but simply because it is a stupid lie.
— Konrad Wolf in an interview for Filmpodium (Zürich, 1974)
In the middle film of his trilogy on art, director Konrad Wolf takes the everyday life of an ‘ordinary’ person as his starting point. Adopting an exclusively documentary style, he creates an important anthropological record, capturing not only the life of an artist in a socialist society, but also the artistic milieu of the GDR.
