Sleeping With a Tiger

Under the direction of Anja Salomonowitz, a filmmaker renowned for her strong stances, Sleeping with a Tiger skillfully blends documentary, fiction, and artistic manifesto to trace the life of Maria Lassnig. Portrayed by Birgit Minichmayr, the Austrian artist is presented through each key milestone of her journey, from her prodigious childhood to her recognition as an acclaimed painter.
The film delves into her struggles, particularly her fight against societal conventions and her relentless effort to assert her artistic vision in a male-dominated world. Through meticulous staging and precise artistic direction, it reveals that when she finally gains recognition as an artist, her success is the result of an uncompromising, authentic approach that defined her career from the very beginning.

Director’s Statement:
Sleeping with a Tiger also tells the story of the awakening of a woman born in Carinthia, southern Austria, in 1919. She grew up with her grandmother and later with her mother, who taught her that a woman can only exist alongside a man. Arnulf Rainer, 10 years her junior, became her partner, and even the avant-garde cultivated male dominance in society and art. As a result, the young artist had to endure numerous humiliations as Rainer’s epigone, ​“which of course really affected my heart,” she says.

Anja Salomonowitz has created a film that is far from the typical biopic narrative of the self-discovery of an artist but is instead a radically feminist work. Lassnig’s oeuvre stands above all for the introspective exploration of her own state of mind and the artistic expression of physical sensations. Anja Salomonowitz not only makes this visionary approach to art visible in Sleeping with a Tiger, but also makes the concept of body awareness, which is essential to Lassnig’s work, tangible with every grimace, every contortion, or every shrug of the shoulders of the main actress Birgit Minichmayr.

Birgit Minichmayr IS Maria Lassnig. She is the child who snuggles up to her father, she is the young, still shy, undiscovered artist, she is the self-confident but constantly vulnerable woman. She is the headstrong woman who does not serve the male-dominated art market for the sake of money, but demands equal pay. She is the older painter who sees her paintings as her children, children who must not be sent to the orphanage. Minichmayr embodies Lassnig at all stages of her life — ageless, timeless, fascinating like her art.

In her directorial concept and screenplay, Anja Salomonowitz sets herself the challenging task of portraying 80 years of a woman’s life, without any masks. Minichmayr’s ingenious performance, her physical expression, her voice, allow us to easily follow all the leaps through time the film takes. Like a conductor, Anja Salomonowitz orchestrates the actress’s timbre through the decades. The script (screenplay : Anja Salomonowitz, dramaturgy: Roland Zag) is densely interwoven and takes us through Maria Lassnig’s life and the history of art in the last century.

Colors and motifs from Maria Lassnig’s artistic world are also repeatedly reflected in Anja Salomonowitz’s film images. Sleeping with a Tiger locates the biographical within the works of art themselves and creates unobtrusive, yet haunting visual quotations. The red motorcycle tells the story of an absent father, the cream-white telephone in the Parisian studio announces the imminent death of a mother. Formative moments are told through moving images and then find their counterparts in Lassnig’s colorful imagery. ​“Am I afraid to use the color brown because of my past?” she asks herself, after we see the powerful image of the swastika-flag-draped Academy of Arts in Vienna, where she completed her studies during these dark times.

Carried by spherical sounds (sound design by Veronika Hlawatsch, music by Bernhard Fleischmann), Lassnig’s world of color, images, and emotions opens up scene by scene on the cinema screen.
- Anja Salomonowitz