Article about The Art of the Real in The L Magazine

… An intensely personal and associative visual poem, this movie looks at time and our relationship to it, achieving an often ineffable effect. Director Hartmann takes as his jumping off point his own middle-age status and the chronophobia it inspires to try and process both tangentially and finitely his past and the experiences that shaped his understanding of it. For each year of his life Hartmann presents a corresponding analog: memory (his own or someone else’s); an existential theorem; and fascinating and revelatory historical contexts of people dealing with the strain of mortality. The free-form approach culminates in a resoundingly coherent closing sequence in which Hartmann, riding a mountainside chairlift, films his undulating shadow as it zooms in and out against nature below. Viewers ruminate on all that Hartmann has presented and focus, for a time, on their own mortality. …

(John Oursler in The L Magazine)

see whole article: http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/the-art-of-the-real/Content?oid=2349278