NZIFF Review: Leibniz - Chronicle of a Lost Painting

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Written by Trevor Pronoso |  Letterboxd: @CleverGurl | Instagram: @trev.pro | Contributing Writer

Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting (2026)

dir. Edgar Reitz, Anatol Schuster

Germany, 104 mins

With the motion picture camera came the promise of ambient facticity no longer as something to be struggled for but as an automatic by-product of the medium itself. It appeared as though stories could be immediately embedded in the reality in which they took place. There were then entirely new possibilities for integrating elements so that action and environment, character and setting, could fold into one another, mutually support one another, in the homogeneous time of the moving image: manifestation, over and above expression. The management of this task—this historical destiny, as it seemed to the French criticism of the 1950s—is one way to define the mysterious cinephilia watchword ‘mise-en-scène’. For the critics who erected a halo above the term, mise-en-scène essentially meant the technics, beyond any particular technique, of narrative realism.

It is no coincidence that the heyday of those filmmakers regarded as the maestros of mise-en-scène—Ophüls, Lang, Ford, Preminger—is coterminous with the glory years of the American classical cinema, which come to an end not only as the studio system developed in the teens and twenties collapses, but at the same time as cinema itself becomes more self-conscious about its means and begins to explore them on the surface of the work, as techniques for the construction of meaning rather than as the invisible and seamless processes for meaning’s communication. From the 1960s on, mise-en-scène is not an enigma to be named but a name itself, even a rhetoric of itself.

Sam Warren Miell, The Sleep of Realism Produces Monsters: On Some Endings at Film Fest Gent 2023, 24 January 2025.

I'm starting to notice that the films I particularly like and enjoy at this year's NZIFF are from filmmakers who treat mise-en-scène as a challenge in and of itself, problematising the established monogamy between 'narrative' and 'realism'. It's a combative attitude that finds its consonances in histories predating cinema, an attitude Leibniz petulantly challenges the commissioned artist painting his portrait—Delalandre—who works within the realm of 'realism' in depicting his aristocratic/royal subjects. The self-enclosed totality of the imagistic diegesis becomes not only an artistic challenge but also a philosophical one: the universe is perfect because God is perfect. And because He is perfect, we currently live in the best of all possible worlds where all things have a reason for their existence and are predicated on the goodness and graciousness of God. Leibniz's theodicy aside, it is from this esprit that writer-director Edgar Reitz and co-director Anatol Schuster playfully externalise and contradict within the old basement-cum-atelier of Sophia of Hannover's palatial residence.

Leibniz is a man who refuses to sit still; if ever a new philosophical or poetic thought occurs in his head, he immediately calls upon his assistant/scribe to quickly write it down before it disappears, constantly pacing up and down to the frustration of the artist wishing to paint from an accurate still reference of his face. The basement studio becomes an open forum for ideas to flourish and dissipate to the whims of its characters. Wherever Leibniz goes, the camera follows. Reitz ardently tracks the volley of ideas springing back and forth between him and his interlocutors as the camera snakes around the décor that populate the mise-en-scène with precision and fluidity.

The camera is almost self-consciously rational and functional. When a person speaks, the camera both sees and hears them. A character's presence is given their due dignity to materially coexist with the mise-en-scène (realism), yet offer their refutations and contradictions of the mise-en-scène to align with their preference (narrative). Whenever a character speaks off-screen, it becomes almost accusatory, their words critiquing the image, the mise-en-scène presented to us by the camera frame, as if what we are looking at is incomplete, as necessitating either full corporeal adherence to the physical space (Leibniz refusing to sit still) or active adjustment and transformation of the décor to prove a character's rhetorical point.

But either scenarios function consistently to Leibniz's Deus nihil sine ratione facit—"because God does nothing without reason"—in the sense that it falls short into accounting for the a third option: if the characters and their thoughts never leave the space, are self-contained within the camera frame, are a subset of the mise-en-scène—and thus originate from God—what happens when a foreign presence enters the space, interjects itself into the camera frame, suddenly cuts away to a place outside of the basement studio? What if the mise-en-scène is imperfect, incomplete, and does not fully stem from God? What happens when evil contaminates the mise-en-scène?

It's a question the film decidedly leaves its audience in its final scene and refuses to resolve. From what we know of Leibniz from the beginning, he would simply continue with the straightforward logic that such an alien presence is another manifestation of God, intervening to preserve reality's perfection, that it was meant to be. A doubter, like myself admittedly, can't equate true, unwarranted suffering, tragedy and death (natural evil) as the will of God than I do the will of the devil. Reitz's offers little solace for my existentialist leanings, who reconfigures Leibniz's logic back to the logic of cinema: is what you see really what you get, or is there something more beyond the perfect frame that remains ineffable, not necessarily benevolent or transcendent, but something akin to reality's jouissance that repeatedly transgresses its own limits beyond human comprehension; not singularity through God, but the multiplicity of infinity—"the One is not," as Alain Badiou would say. If cinema is perfect (like God), can you see everything in cinema?

Mise-en-scène as rhetoric implies gaps in its utterances, commas and full stops that can't be filled by words, by décor, by key lights. When the camera stops rolling, when the shot has run its course, what stops people from saying that narrativity, reality, and narrative realism have also ceased? Mise-en-scène is also a matter of moving on from mise-en-scène.