Ken August Meyer explores his connection to Swiss-German artist Paul Klee in Angel Applicant

ANGEL APPLICANT (Ken August Meyer, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
angel-applicant.com

During the pandemic, I watched a Zoom play called UnRavelled about Canadian scientist Anne Adams, who, in 1994, at the age of fifty-three, became obsessed with Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” and made a remarkable painting based on the musical work, which Ravel composed for dancer Ida Rubenstein in 1928, when he was fifty-three. As it turns out, both Adams and Ravel had the same serious brain disease, one that affects memory while lighting a creative fuse.

I was thinking about that play while watching Ken August Meyer’s Angel Applicant, in which Meyer becomes obsessed with Swiss-German painter Paul Klee, who suffered from systemic scleroderma, a diseases that attacks connective tissue and for which there is still no cure. Meyer was diagnosed with the same life-threatening disease, which ultimately spurred him to make this film, although he had little previous cinematic experience. Meyer is particularly taken by Klee’s later period, when the scleroderma affected Klee’s work significantly. Meyer believes that he can understand what Klee is saying in these canvases and how it relates to their shared, rare autoimmune disease.

In the film, Meyer, who wrote, directed, and edited it and produced it with director of photography Jason Roark, explains, “It’s really an odd sort of comfort for me. It’s not particularly cheerful, nor is it as colorfully inventive as his earlier work, but I’m obsessed with it. It really speaks to me like a strange language of cryptic codes and symbols that I can’t help but interpret for myself. And I know this is gonna sound completely crazy and pretty pretentious, but some of these paintings feel like they’re messages sent in a bottle just for me.”

Meyer, a former drugstore stock boy, Zamboni driver, graphic designer, and advertising art director, reviews his old family photos and home videos and intercuts them with images of Klee’s drawings and paintings, including Portrait White-Brown Mask, Atrophy, Insula Dulcamara, As Time Passes By, and High Spirits. He examines several of them in depth, decoding their meaning from a health standpoint while visually comparing them to shots of him undergoing testing and getting results in which the colors, shapes, and lines evoke elements of Klee’s work. “They are testaments that destruction can feed creation and make something so ugly so beautiful,” says Meyer, who studied art and design at the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University.

The film also features several reenactments of key moments from Meyer’s life. One takes place in a store where two women thought that Meyer, his body stiff from the disease, was actually a mannequin. “Did he also feel like a stiff, broken doll?” he asks, wondering whether Klee, known as the Bauhaus Buddha, had felt similarly. In addition, he flies to Bern to meet with one of Klee’s grandchildren, Alexander Klee, who cofounded the Zentrum Paul Klee and passed away in 2021 at the age of eighty.

Even as his condition worsens, Meyer refuses to give in, documenting his life as he gets married and has a child, who he wants to see grow up. He continues to get bad news about his health, but he keeps the camera going and doesn’t lose his sense of humor. “Fear was becoming the new order [in the world]. And somehow, it even found my home address,” he says, zooming in on a “Consider Cremation!” mailing he received.

Meyer named the film after a ghostly 1939 painting by Klee as well as his newfound belief that maybe angels do exist. When he asks, “How long do I have? And what comes after that?,” we fully believe that he’s not done yet. It’s also a question that we all ask ourselves, whether we’re ill or not.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]