Out of place, out of time, Emily Louisa Millan Eide’s The Renaissance Prince (2024) is so today
P. Stuart Robinson (b. 1958), is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Tromsø. He writes academically about the politics of film, and has published in such scholarly journals as Alphaville, Apparatus and Nordlit.
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Occasionally we encounter someone so strange, they seem to come from far away indeed, another planet maybe, or at least another time. Such is the subject of Emily Louisa Millan Eide’s intriguing documentary, the precocious young artist William Heimdal. He’s no time-traveller, not in the usual sense anyway. It’s just that, as he puts it himself, he was ‘born 2000 years too late.’ And yet, in a way, he’s the most modern human being you could ever wish to meet. He doesn’t fit, doesn’t belong; there’s nothing more modern than that.
He belongs – or believes he belongs – in the time of the Renaissance, the Baroque period perhaps, given the more than passing resemblance of his extraordinary artwork to that of a certain Caravaggio. He is the quintessential child prodigy, an accomplished technician in oils, still in his teens. He even looks, as the movie title suggests, like a displaced noble from times gone by, transported by some cosmic short-circuit to modern Norway. The cinematic incarnation of The Renaissance Prince («Renessanseprinsen») premiered internationally a couple of weeks ago at the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival, in Malmö. NRK earlier featured a shorter, made-for-TV version.
We meet the artist in all his intensity, first, hard at work with another canvas, then stating his iconoclastic goal for the camera: To combine the best of Rembrandt, Munch and, not least (apparently) his mentor, Odd Nedrum. Cut to the full, glaring spotlight of child-prodigy celebrity: In the gallery his paintings are selling like hotcakes; on national TV he’s making a splash.
The ones we know best from those distant days are the painters – Michaelangelo, Da Vinci – and young Heimdal is by all means a painter – and not just any old painter, though he does, in some ways, seem old beyond his years. He lives to paint, but more than that. He lives to be the best, not just today, but anytime, anywhere. Since childhood he has toiled and dreamed of being the greatest of all time (GOAT) for classical painting, which, in his worldview amounts to the GOAT for painting in any shape or form. This is his calling, his hyperfocus.
Eide constructs a compelling narrative, gleaned, I’m guessing, from a large reservoir of hard-earned footage, having followed Heimdal for years, from adolescence to maturity. Meanwhile, her subject, at least as single-minded as the filmmaker herself, has scarcely wavered in his calling, his all-encompassing obsession. His loving mother completes a triptych of faithful concentration, looking on with a mixture of patient concern and bewildered amusement. This is fly-on-the-wall filmmaking at its best. The subjects, especially the artist and his mother, are as unselfconscious as they are intrinsically fascinating. William – the prince himself – is larger than life, a strange admixture of arrogance and nagging self-doubt, of maturity beyond his years and an almost childish naivety.
Such an assessment overlooks the most striking thing about the film’s protagonist, his beauty. He is a handsome young man of course, clad invariably in the flouncy flowing garments more proper to another time, but it’s so much more than that! There is a strange purity and fragile glow to this unique human being. He shines ruefully from our screen, as radiant as any Caravaggio masterpiece and captured exquisitely in Eide’s footage. An instinctive awareness of his own contradictions lends him many a note of bittersweet humour. ‘I detest painting!’ he confesses to a fellow artist.
Which begs the question ‘Why? Why paint then!’ This is the insistent yet insoluble conundrum lurking in the background of this film, the elephant in the room. It is not only the puzzle of William Heimdal, but of art itself. It reminds me of the skull routinely half-hidden in the compositions of late-renaissance painting, which I believe represents the discrete double edge of the genre, defining the accepted convention and limit of artist’s revenge: I will illustrate the lush, tactile, literal richness of your life, dear patron, but note nonetheless that you are as human as the rest of us, every bit as fragile and mortal.
The most striking example is the anamorphic skull, inserted like a veiled curse into Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors, from 1533. In short, there is often more to art than meets the eye, and there is more going on here and now in ‘little Norway’ than Heimdal entirely realises or Eide, as a good filmmaker, is likely to say.
It is tempting to presume that Heimdal, for all the vigour of his youth and talent, is stuck in a time-warp and an artistic dead end. If art is the essence of self-expression, how can it devolve into a contest for supremacy in the court of public opinion? As the artist himself states so artlessly, ‘Eyes are on me, and I want to impress.’ There is no hint of a yearning to say something through his work, to give expression to something ineffable, something sublime, only that it might reach some kind of objective pinnacle of technical and hence also aesthetic excellence. And yet…
Towards the end of the film, Heimdal reveals considerable growth, and a new level of understanding. He comprehends, for example, that being the GOAT is a more formidable task than he had realised. In his youthful naivety he believed he was almost there. Now he knows better. He remains unbowed, nonetheless, committed as ever to his goal. One possibility continues to elude him, at least for now: that any ranking of art or artists is in any case meaningless. This brings us to the subtle paradox of Heimdal, one that is much more interesting, though it parallels, that of his forebear, the very personification of classicism, Odd Nedrum.
Where to begin? The paradoxes are many. Heimdal recoils from all things modern and idealises the Renaissance as though it had been as unspoiled as the Garden of Eden itself. Yet the Renaissance, with its newfound principles of geometry and its novel quest for material, physical realism, is the very seedbed, even the quintessence of modernism. Would it really have been a ‘paradise’ for someone like him, as he puts it. I suspect not! He would have been the servant of aristocrats not, as he might suppose, their peer.
What can lead us, not only to admire beautiful things, but to become fascinated to the point of obsession and thus invested in a particular aesthetic as the be all and end all? The acclaimed pinnacle of beauty, lent further grandeur and pathos by the passage of time, may be so seductive as to stimulate a kind of blind love (or at least blinkered) and an unwavering devotion to match. The best of Renaissance artwork has that kind of power. This is its enormous potential, but what makes some especially susceptible, to stand out like an alcoholic among social drinkers or a stalker among otherwise harmless fans? The answer eludes me regarding Nedrum but what seems clear enough is that he works, like his young protégé, as if under a spell.
What is striking about the former – and elder – is how he negotiates his obsession and the body of work it has driven him to create. A sort of knowing nod, even to the point of self-deprecation, shapes the constitution and self-curation of his paintings. This is expressed in its irony, the acclamation and celebration of the self-consciously retro, the facetiously, almost apologetically kitsch. Heimdal is another story. The beauty of Eide’s film is the lightness of touch in the telling. The subtle ambiguities and unresolved quandaries of the narrative are given room to breathe, the product of judicious, measured and always unobtrusive observation.
As the story unfolds, we learn that there is more to the young artist’s drive than a love of art. In his infancy he longed to make the best Donald Duck ever, not to reinvent the figure, but to take the formula somehow to its natural conclusion, its perfect, almost slavish iteration. I’m enough of a Marxist to believe that we’re all profoundly alienated and that Heimdal just feels it more than most. As Bono might put it, ‘he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for,’ because what he’s looking for is ‘escape’ and there is none. There can be no escape from the relentless wheel of history. That unquenchable longing is what he really, albeit unconsciously, expresses in his art, not least that easily overlooked aspect of his oeuvre, the performance of himself, the artist, long-haired, expressive, inappropriately dressed. Bravo!
Beneath the puzzle of Heimdal is a deeper one of the human condition. As children, play and the free play of imagination rule the schoolyard. Modern values, education (what happens when break is over) and indoctrination have hamstrung them all by the time adulthood hits like the proverbial bucket of cold water. As songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman put it nicely, ‘Flesh and bone, he’s just bursting towards tomorrow.’ What happened to that child?
I hope ‘the chattering classes’ will not dismiss William Heimdal as simply immature, or his work as something as ‘out of place’ as the artist himself. He is neither infantile nor creatively barren or even misdirected. On the contrary! Take a look at his paintings! If I have a critical note for the filmmaker, it’s that she might have dared to linger over these a little longer. Still pictures are in any case an underrated anchor for the ones that move, but these intrinsically deserve our attention.
There is a tragic beauty here, which expresses the artist’s story: His loneliness, his sense of loss. These works of burning necessity should not be belittled as mere retrograde vanities. They are as authentic and modern as, well, anything. They express his loss, a loss we all share.