Max Woertendyke’s documentary-short Woman in the Sky is a retrospective exploration of the past grounded in the present; a navigation of passion within the responsibility of someone else’s life’s work.
Writer and teacher Magda Salvesen, 26, met renowned painter Jon Schueler, 54, when she was working at the Scottish Arts Council, and a whirlwind romance followed, but not without its pauses. Within months of knowing one another, Jon wrote a will leaving Magda everything in his collection. Although deeply in love, their relationship was fraught with an age difference that inevitably left Magda still unsure of who she was and what she wanted.
Magda reflects briefly on her engagement, her aversion to wearing a ring or taking Jon’s last name. She reflects on her year apart from Jon when he decided he was going to split his time between Scotland and New York. Recognizing that if she were to accompany him, her life would have to be halted in order for him to live his. With this understanding, Magda began as most young people do, in search of her own destiny.
With time, through teaching and writing, Magda found her way back to Jon. The two lived the rest of their years together in grateful understanding. Magda was a person first and a muse second, with Jon painting 64 paintings “for Magda.”
In the wake of Jon’s passing and the fulfillment of his final wishes, Magda became the executor of his estate. To this day, she is the only person to have seen all his pieces, and in the years since his passing, Magda has spent more time with Jon’s work than he had in his entire lifetime. Through knowing them so well she is able to visualize and remember Jon, his memories seeming to have become her own, his brushstrokes, the stool he stood on that squeaked, and the chair he sat in to stare at his work at the day’s end.
Magda does not just mourn Jon, but uses her sorrow as inspiration to continue spreading his art as her own; she finds herself in the unrelenting march through time. One doesn’t have to try hard to see themselves in Magda, someone searching for identity in a world that often seems so concrete. But Magda’s story is also one to hold as a reminder that personal passion, while important, is not the only passion; passion like love can be shared. Jon’s passion is Magda’s passion and vice versa. Magda is a beaming reminder that passion stems beyond the individual, it can span beyond decades, catalogues, and even death.
I sat down with Woertendyke to build upon my synopsis. Woertendyke first met Magda when he began working for the Schueler estate in his undergraduate years at Juilliard. He was struck by her character: “I’d never met a person who was so committed to someone else’s creative output while also, very simultaneously, being her own person. She is not a stand-in for John. She is Magda… She’s so much herself and yet so much of her life is committed to the preservation of this work and someone else’s memory.” Woertendyke reflects.
Woertendyke gathered a team of people who “also found Magda charming and fascinating,” which included Julia Best Warner as co-producer, the world’s newest Superman, David Corenswet, as cinematographer and co-producer, and Jennifer Dean as editor. Woertendyke reflects on the project as the place where “vision and resources overlap.” Woman in the Sky is strong in its vision, with a 16-minute run time offering only the most direct story possible. “Magda is a very quick thinker. She’s a quick talker. She’s also been doing this for a long time, so she has certain turns of phrases that she uses all the time. Like we all do. She’s talking about the paintings and she talks about them this way, or she talks about an experience, and talks about it this way. And all of that’s great. But I didn’t want to just make a promotional video for the foundation. Although I hope the film benefits the foundation and I hope it benefits Magda. I want to be part of that legacy with them. But the point wasn’t to make marketing material for them. It was to tell a story about this person, about this woman. And so I looked for the parts in a funny way where I felt we got a glimpse of something that felt very real.”
Woertendyke hopes that people are keen to the message of the film: “They should walk away thinking Magda is remarkable… I just think she’s remarkable, and I want people to walk away with that understanding on a slightly more practical level. I would like to see Magda enter the public discourse of abstract expressionism in the ’50s even though that time is, of course, a very male-dominated time in the art world. I think there’s a lot of often invisible work that the people who actually preserve these things do. Abstractly, I want people to walk away thinking about something regarding time. It moves our lives, from birth to death. Every single one of us. And it’s always moving in that direction, relentlessly… And so I think it behooves us, while we’re here, to find a way to live… that allows us to find some grace in that relentlessness. And I think that has to do with living in the right space between history and our future. We can pull memories forward and we can take our hopes and fantasies and bring them into the present… I would like people to take away something about the idea of, ‘what is worth remembering? Why? How can I carry the memories that are important to me forward? And how can I create memories with individuals that somehow extend beyond ourselves?’”
Woman in the Sky urges you to continue walking forward through time no matter how unrelenting the winds may be, with the hope that one day, as it settles, you will find yourself at equilibrium with the past and present, one great love richer and with a life fully lived.