Michele Mally, “Taboo – Egon Schiele” (2026)
In this lively documentary on the life of early 20th-century Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918), Italian director Michele Mally offers a psychoanalytic essay of what motivated the artist to produce such frank and controversial works that were often deemed pornographic by critics – and often the authorities in the places where Schiele lived and worked – of his time. Much attention is spent examining Schiele’s relationships with his mother and two sisters Gerti and Melanie, his lover Walli Neuzil and his wife Edith and her sister Adele. Schiele also spent much of his short life in his hometown of Ceský Krumlov in southern Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic, in Schiele’s time it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) and the film explores his physical and emotional connections to the town as it changed from a sleepy rural settlement to an industrial urban city in the late 19th / early 20th century. Mally sees parallels and draws connections between Schiele’s relationships with the women in his life and his longing for Ceský Krumlov, and the art he produced and the concerns that it expressed. Issues of longing and connection, of life, creation and death, expressed in portraits and self-portraits, and in drawings and paintings of raw sexuality, may well have their origins in Schiele’s upbringing and complicated relations with his parents and sisters, and in the social and cultural environment of Bohemia and Vienna with its class divisions, social and economic inequalities, and the latent nationalism among the Slav peoples who were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian rulers.
For all its contentious premise regarding Schiele’s personal life and how it influenced his art, the film adopts a rather conventional format of telling the artist’s story, based mainly around interviews with art historians and critics specialising in his work and the work of artistic and creative contemporaries such as Gustav Klimt (who mentored Schiele) and Franz Kafka. This means following a more or less strict chronological order starting with Schiele’s early life, exploring his near-incestuous relationship with his younger sister Gerti, and segueing into his relationships with lover and muse Walli and later wife Edith. The film calls attention to parallels between Schiele’s life and Kafka’s life, though without much success: either Mally has not delved deeply enough into the parallels between Schiele and Kafka’s lives or there really wasn’t much the two had in common besides living in Bohemia at the same time.
Where the documentary excels is in grounding Schiele’s life in the changing society of his time: the film provides snapshots of significant events occurring in particular years such as 1914 and 1918. Both Schiele and Edith were caught up in the events of World War I – the newly-wed couple had to live in Prague where Schiele was billeted with his unit – and both eventually died within days of each other in late 1918 when the Spanish influenza epidemic reached Vienna where they were living. Mally glosses over the contradictions between Schiele’s harsh judgement of his mother, who was apparently inattentive to his needs as a child, and Schiele’s own treatment of his Walli and Edith, expecting Walli to accept Edith as the wife and to agree to continue being his mistress. For the record, Walli left Schiele, never to see him again, became a nurse with the Red Cross during WWI, and died of scarlet fever in 1917. Schiele may have been frank, uncompromising and radical in his art, but he turned out to be a creature of 19th-century Austro-Hungarian culture with its social hypocrisies and treatment of women as second-class individuals after all.
The film works mainly as an introduction to Schiele’s life and art, with much attention to significant works he produced, and until another documentary is done that deals with all of his art – he also painted landscapes, a fact all but ignored in the film – plus the legacy he left to future generations of artists, Mally’s visual essay is the best we have on Schiele’s life. That is not saying a great deal at all, unfortunately.