Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting Review

Edgar Reitz and Anatol Schuster’s Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting is a thought-provoking yet playful examination of the emotional power of art.

Leibniz, a new movie from the German director Edgar Reitz, who turned 92 last November, was co-directed by Anatol Schuster. It is the work of a season director, but not a creaking, rusty one. Leibniz is a modestly mounted movie, but it shines with imagination, humor and engrossing ideas. 

Leibniz tells its story through a mixture of fiction and reality, using historical figures placed in imaginary situations. The subject of the movie is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th century philosopher, mathematician and inventor who was an advisor and librarian for the Royal House of Hanover – Hanover being an Electorate of the Holy Roman Empire located in Germany. Among his many credentials, Leibniz devised the modern binary system, and developed calculus concurrently with Sir Isaac Newton. In sum, he was a genius, his ideas ranging through the fields of logic, analytics, psychology, theology, topology, geometry, computer science, and metaphysics. 

While bearing his name, Leibniz is not a biopic of Gottfried Leibniz, nor is it a Wikipedia Page-style summary of his life and achievements. Rather, it uses the man as a voice for its meditations on various philosophical approaches to art. The movie begins in the Winter of 1705 when Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia (Antonia Bill), a pupil of Leibniz (Elgar Selge) in her childhood, commissions a painting to be done of the man that she so greatly admires.

The movie begins strikingly with Bill reciting the letter asking for Leibniz’s portrait, standing in front of a void-like black wall, her face so wracked with despair she seems in physical pain. Perhaps the painting, and its reminder of a loved one, will ease her unhappiness. The supercilious court painter Delalandre (Lars Eidinger, of The Light) arrives with a pre-done painting, only needing to plug the polymath’s face onto the canvas. Leibniz does not approve of such a crass, arrogant approach to art and, in a very amusing scene, annoys the painter to such a shrill frustration that Delalandre storms out of the studio. 

The second painter to arrive is much more of a success. Let the philosophical debates begin. Played with an ingratiating wit and boyish energy by Aane Schwarz, Aaltje van der Meer is a young woman masquerading as a man in order to find work as a painter, and eager to make her way in the world. Painting is not simply a vocation for van der Meer, but a calling, a way for her to process life and humanity. “What I don’t know, I can paint.”

Her creative and emotionally open approach to art earns the approval of Leibniz, and, in turn, she quickly grows to admire Leibniz, drawn in by his sly sense of humor and astounded by the breadth of his inventions. As Leibniz sits for the painting, the two bandy back and forth on the philosophy of art; the ways in which art and science intersect, and whether art should function as a replication of reality or an interpretation. Leibniz is built around the heady, but engaging conversations between the aging philosopher and the young artist. 

Only incidentally moving outside Leibniz’s court study, Leibniz is a chamber piece. It would make an excellent play – that is, if the visuals were not important, and if the story was not about the very way in which we look at art. Despite its subject matter, Leibniz does not have the sterile feeling of walking through a museum. The direction from Reitz and Schuster is playful and vibrant, treating the characters as three dimensional beings and not just mouthpieces for the movie’s philosophical queries. Leibniz and Van der Meer are more than the ideas they espouse. The amiability of the characters and the mentor-mentee relationship that develops between the two provides the movie with a warmth. Leibniz connects the head and the heart.  

We watch movies for many different reasons. Those looking for an easy to watch piece of pure entertainment after an exhausting day at work will no doubt be disappointed by Leibniz, which  asks the viewer to exercise a different muscle. Those who approach the movie with patience and a ready mind will find something extremely worthwhile. Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting is a movie that makes you think about the very act of movie-watching; the ways in which art can attach itself to memories of loved ones and can both preserve and distort those memories. 

Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 19-22, 2025. Read our Berlin Film Festival reviews!