Bastian Clevé

Biography

Bastian Clevé was born in Munich on January 1, 1950, the son of Dora and Otto Clevé. His father worked as a painter and editor for the Weltbild magazine. In 1959, the family moved to Hamburg, where Clevé attended high school until 1969. In the same year, his father died, and Bastian Clevé returned to Munich, where he found work as a sound assistant at the Unterföhring television studio.

In 1971, he began studying visual communication with a focus on film at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg (University of Fine Arts Hamburg). In the same year, he married the painter and art therapist Marlies Giersiepen, who designed numerous title graphics for his films. During his studies, Clevé made several short experimental films. After graduating with the film "Lichtblick" (1976), he received a DAAD scholarship for film and attended the San Francisco Art Institute in 1976/77. In 1978 he received a one-year grant from the Canada Arts Council.

Beginning in 1976, Clevé employed various stylistic elements in his films, such as single-frame editing, multiple exposures, color changes, and time distortions, to create his own contemplative and sometimes hallucinatory visual world. He often used footage from his travels as source material for his films. In "San Francisco Zephyr" (1978), for example, he incorporated footage of a train ride from San Francisco to New York. His combination of travelogue and documentary, presented in an experimental visual language often combined with rock music, made his work more accessible than the "seriousness" of other experimental filmmakers, but also classified him as an outsider within the scene. Film critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt wrote in 1978: "Clevé conspicuously lacks rigor and the seriousness that goes with it. What stands out is fun, lightness, fresh impulses at first glance, and at second glance a consistent and carefully calculated technique." For his experimental short film "Lichtblick", Clevé was awarded the Federal Film Award (today: German Film Award) in 1976; in 1978 for "Empor" and 1979 for "Wegerand", he was awarded the German Film Award in silver.

In 1979, Clevé moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a writer, director, production manager and producer. He made his feature film debut with "Exit Sunset Boulevard" (1980), which combined narrative elements with technically distorted filmmaking and starred Rüdiger Kuhlbrodt, Elke Sommer played herself. In 1981, he founded Eagle Rock Film & TV Productions, which also worked on other film and television productions, including educational videos for the Berlitz School. Between 1982 and 1985, he produced an eight-part series of musical portraits of metropolises such as Buenos Aires, Caracas and Vancouver for the German public broadcaster ZDF. He also directed television films based on authentic cases, such as "Der Sheriff aus Altona" (1983), which dealt with the ruthless and often illegal treatment of foreign seamen by German shipping companies, and "Das blinde Glück" (1986), based on the case of a 50-year-old blind man who regains his sight after an operation. In Percy Adlon's cult film "Out of Rosenheim" (1987), shot in the USA, Clevé served as production manager/pre-production. In 1991, Clevé returned to Germany and established the production program at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, which he directed until September 2017. He has also published numerous books on film production.

Clevé was also involved as co-writer, co-producer and executive producer in Hardy Martin's feature film "So weit die Füße tragen" ("As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me", 2001). In 2004/05 he directed, produced and wrote his own film "Klang der Ewigkeit": a compilation of 27 short films inspired by the 27-part musical structure of Johann Sebastian Bach's H-Moll Mass BWV 232.