GOYA OR THE HARD WAY TO KNOWLEDGE (1971) is yet another rarity in Wolf's oeuvre: a historical epic, set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Plans for making it date back to the 1960s, but the production was delayed for a number of reasons, among them the inability to find the Western stars originally envisioned for an international coproduction. Instead of Western stars, Donatas Banionis (best known today for his role in Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris) was cast as Goya, and Olivera Katarina (who had made her name in Aleksandar Petrović's I Even Met Happy Gypsies, 1967) as Alba. For a director usually associated with DEFA's brand of understated neorealism, the kind of swashbuckling grandeur typical of the historical epic (or biopic) must have been an uncomfortable fit, and this oddity is palpable in aspects of the film (such as the slightly implausible love affair with the Duchess of Alba, or Goya's weird, almost horror-movie fits of laughter near the end of the film, presumably meant to show his Falstaff-like vitality and earthiness; the melodramatic depictions of his fears of madness are also far from Wolf's normal palette). The film narrates Goya's transformation from a successful bourgeois portrait painter of the Spanish aristocracy to an engaged, sympathetic observer of political life, of Spain's war against Napoleon. It is thus a variant on the “conversion narrative” so often used by Wolf in other films (Die Genesung, Lissy, Sterne, Professor Mamlock, Der geteilte Himmel). Goya has a love affair with the Duchess of Alba, sees the persecution of the singer Maria Rosario by the Inquisition, and rides through the countryside in a Quixote-like journey, discovering the life of the people and discoursing on art with his friend Esteve. At the end, he flees over the border to France, escaping from the Inquisitor, and we are treated to an audiovisual montage of Goya’s works, combined with gunfire, calls for revolution, and flamenco.

Breaking the Frame of Painting

It is a tautology to note that films about painting tend to be themselves painterly—thus iconodule or iconophile—pointing beyond the medium of film to that of the canvas.