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Tin Tin and Me (and some of my friends, and some of my French friends, and some of my english Friends, and Hergé and...)

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I went with the ole´ NSOP team and saw the film Tintin and Me by Danish director Anders Østergaard.

Quite a nice film, but like many other films about art it focuses on the personality of the artist and doesn't spend much time talking about the art. After seeing this film you know a lot about Hergé (Georges Remi, 1907-1983) who created Tin Tin, and of course the point of the film is that Tin Tin and the other characters in the books are projections of the personality of Hergé. You hear about his Right wing Catholic background, his blacklisting after WW II (because the Germans had taken control of the paper publishing Tin Tin) his divorce from his Catholic wife, his devotion to work and duty (which his publishers exploited to the fullest) etc, etc.

I think the best part was a short film clip of Hergé meeting Andy Warhol ("Uhm, er, uhm Yeah...er...") his realisation that his attempts at creating abstract art were futile and an awful TV show from the seventies celebrating the long awaited meeting between Herge and his "lost" Chinese friend Tchang-Tchung Sun whom he hadn’t seen for forty-five years. Tchang had met Herge in Brussels in their youth but returned to China in the turbulent 1930's. Reportedly Tchang changed Herge's petty racist views of the Chinese - typical of the time - and this led to the creation of the masterpiece The Blue Lotus where Tchang also drew the signs and posters in the backgrounds in authentic Chinese. Apparently the "reunion" of the two friends was turned into a marketing scoop for Hergés publishing house and in the TV studio both Hergé and Tchang - who had been flown in directly from Communist China - look somewhat embarrassed by the whole thing.



After seeing what made up Herge's life you fully understand why he spend most of his time crouching over his drawing board telling the tale of a young man who always stood up for good, rarely lost his temper, travelled the world- and the universe - and didn’t have a girlfriend or a job!



His great work of Art.

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