Michael Appelt
The Good Years

The Good Years follows Michael Appelt at his most exposed. To care for his ageing mother, the photographer moves back into the house where he grew up. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that he has himself spent long stretches in psychiatric care — and that the bond between mother and son is both tender and wrenching. What could have remained a bleak portrait of depression, decline and bodily fragility is, in Reiner Riedler’s hands, transfigured by a remarkably controlled cinema. Every shot feels precisely composed, yet never cold: the frames are suffused with quiet poetry, a softness that makes the darkness bearable. For Appelt, the personal is not a subject alongside the work — it is the work. Where other photographers turn the world into a mirror, he turns the camera on himself and those closest to him, as if the only way to reach something universal is to begin at the most intimate point. He belongs to those “splendid losers” Allen Ginsberg wrote about, whose off-kilter lives become the raw material of creation. In that sense, Appelt joins a lineage of luminous outsiders who have ventured into the shadowed core of their own existence — Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Antoine d’Agata, Dirk Braeckman, Anders Petersen, Nobuyoshi Araki.