Leave Her to Heaven

On Saturday, 3 August 2024, at 12:30, we will show a video by Klaus vom Bruch after the weekly market.

A woman sits alone on an armchair with her elbows resting on the armrests. In her hands she holds a book that covers her face. The cover reads: ‘Time without end’. She could be sitting in the suite of an elegant hotel if it weren’t for the American landscape passing monotonously behind her in the window. The woman is sitting in a forward travelling ‘Santa Fe Super Chief’, the luxury train of the rich and beautiful of the 1940s. She slowly lowers her arms and with them the book. We can make out her face. Her eyelids close. The book rests on her knees. She sleepily pushes it away – it falls to the floor.

The actual story is only slowly revealed in Klaus vom Bruch’s video: the film sequence from the Technicolor film noir ‘Leave Her to Heaven’ (1945) by John M. Stahl has been manipulated by the artist so that the image sequence and its soundtrack are shifted frame by frame in an endless loop on the continuously advancing time axis, so that the flow of movement gives way to a staccato.

The woman on the train is the actress Gene Tierney. She was considered one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses during the 1940s and early 1950s. For her role as a femme fatale in ‘Leave Her to Heaven’, she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role at the 1946 Academy Awards. ‘Deadly Sin’, the German title of the psychological thriller, became one of the biggest box office successes for 20th Century Fox and further enhanced Gene Tierney’s status as a Hollywood star.