Editors Note: This review is part of a series of reviews from the Hot Docs Festival that took place from April 27th to May 7th 2023 in Toronto, Canada.
In Angel Applicant, Ken August Meyer chronicles his life with systemic scleroderma, an autoimmune disease he shares with Swiss expressionist painter Paul Klee.
Angel Applicant
Ken August Meyer (director, writer, editor, cinematographer), Jason Roark (cinematographer)
Ken August Meyer, Dottie Soracco, Zetta Burton, Joshua Spencer (cast)
April 30, 2023 (Hot Docs)
My first in-person viewing at Hot Docs 2023 was Angel Applicant. Having been sent a few screeners to review, watching this film in a hall was a very different experience. I’ve never attended Hot Docs before so I was surprised to learn feature films are preceded by a short film. This meant I got to watch The Blake, a heartrending film by Courtney Sposato about the love of space she shared with her brother, who died tragically young.
The Blake was a precursor for the harrowing experience that Angel Applicant turned out to be. Director, writer, editor and cinematographer Ken August Meyer holds nothing back when filming his journey with systemic scleroderma, an incurable, life-threatening autoimmune disease which causes the skin to harden and tighten, sometimes affecting internal organs like the heart and lungs. Through re-enactments and the clever use of a mannequin (or Man-A-Ken, as it was called in the press materials), Meyer depicts his experience becoming more restricted in his own body, and the frustrating reactions from other people. I found this section particularly resonant, having spent much of my life being stared at and made to feel uncomfortable.
Meyer uses a variety of visuals and tools to take viewers through his first inklings of the disease—how his hands felt like frozen popsicles, then burnt hot dogs, and then hard crab claws. There’s a scene where he attacks a pinata shaped like his lungs—depicting how his own body is fighting him. There are re-enactments from his past of pivotal moments with his disease.
But to document his frequent visits to numerous doctors, Meyer keeps things raw and vulnerable—a camera, the doctor, him and his wife. The viewer experiences the terrifying moments when he receives bad news about his ever-decreasing lung function. He also captures moments from his surgeries and post-surgical care. Some of the medical scenes were quite graphic and I admit, I looked away.
But Angel Applicant isn’t just about Meyer’s diagnosis; it’s also about the unusual “therapist” he’s found on his journey—the artist Paul Klee. Though Klee never received an official diagnosis in his lifetime, following his death in 1940, it was determined that he suffered from systemic scleroderma. As Meyer mentioned in the post-screening panel discussion, he was aware of Klee’s illness from art school, but it was only when Meyer was given a handful of years to live that he started turning to Klee for support.
In Klee’s art, Meyer found messages from the past that seemed to be drawn and written for his eyes only. Born in Bern, Switzerland, Klee earned global renown while at Bauhaus, Germany, which was subsequently shut down when Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power. Klee and his pianist wife, Lily, fled to Switzerland and it was a few years later that Klee encountered his first symptoms of scleroderma. He became more prolific in his final years and Meyer highlights the powerful changes Klee made to his art style—incorporating hard, dark lines and more colour. Throughout Angel Applicant, Meyer talks about the various Klee pieces that have a direct correlation to his disease, where he could see connections because he was experiencing the same symptoms Klee was.
During the panel discussion, one of the audience members asked Meyer whether his analysis of Klee’s work is unique to his perspective or if there is already a fair amount of research into the disease’s impact on Klee’s art. Meyer shared that a lot of his understanding of Klee’s art is his own, though he has done plenty of research. I found this insight fascinating because without Meyer’s explanations, I wouldn’t be able to decipher Klee’s work. His artistic style, much like his contemporary Kandinsky’s, and Mondrian’s, is intriguing to look at but not easy to understand, at least not for me. That Meyer was able to decipher them at all makes me think Klee had a very specific story he wanted to tell through his art. While Klee’s art can be appreciated by many, it perhaps can be understood only by the people going through his particular experience. But then again, art is subjective, and someone else might have a completely different take on Klee’s art that is more resonant of their own experiences through life.
The sections about Klee’s art were engrossing—I may not understand art very well but I do love a good explanation. However, for the most part, Angel Applicant left me feeling distressed—it is a difficult experience to go through on the big screen but I feel that is the point. How many people know about scleroderma? I’d only heard of it, but I now have a much deeper understanding of the disease. Meyer and his cinematographer/friend Jason Roark spent ten years capturing Meyer’s life with the disease, often when Meyer was receiving the worst news of his life. The intimate moments in the doctor’s offices and hospitals are designed to make the viewer feel like they’re in the room.
But I don’t think that’s exactly what I had signed up for. Reading the blurb for Angel Applicant on the Hot Docs site makes the film sound more uplifting and hopeful than it was. Instead, the film documents a series of doctor’s visits where Meyer is given crushing news—his health and lifestyle degenerating sometimes quite rapidly. Had Meyer not been introduced to the audience before the film began, I would have thought we were watching his work posthumously. Meyer is doing better now, and the ordeal to get to this point is also documented in Angel Applicant. There is also a note about medical advancements at the end of the film, though systemic scleroderma is a terminal illness. The film does focus on the hope that Meyer’s wife and daughter give him, but it’s drowned out by the weight of uncertainty in Meyer’s future.
I do wish we’d got to hear from Meyer’s wife in Angel Applicant—she’s seen often, by his side, or playing with their daughter but she never addresses the camera.
I’m always up for learning new things and I do love art history. I am glad I watched Angel Applicant and relieved to see Meyer is still fighting on. The film is going to bring so much awareness to the disease, which afflicts millions of people. But it is a hard watch, it’s so raw, which is what the film aims to achieve, but the hope the blurb promised never really materialized, and I wish I had been prepared for that.
