Scoundrels (1982)

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Daniel Schmid - Le chat qui pense

As far as I am concerned, Swiss auteur/opera director Daniel Schmid (Violanta, Hécate) is one of the most underrated European filmmakers of the post-WWII era and his first three features—Tonight or Never (1972) aka Heute nacht oder nie, La Paloma (1974), and Shadow of Angels (1976) aka Schatten der Engel—are nothing short of strikingly singular high-camp masterpieces that should be made compulsory viewing for any serious cinephile. A friend and collaborator of both Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter, Schmid spent his formative years in West Germany, but would ultimately return to his homeland and become arguably the most world renowned Swiss filmmaker of all time, even among the Japanese (who he would pay tribute to with his documentary The Written Face (1995) aka Das geschriebene Gesicht), yet virtually none of his cinematic works have ever been made available in North America and thus virtually his entire oeuvre, especially his early works, are in serious danger of being disposed of in the virtual celluloid ash heap of film history. Luckily, Swiss documentary filmmakers Pascal Hofmann and Benny Jaberg, who previously co-directed the documentary Wintersong: A Film About Dakota Suite (2006) about English singer/songwriter Chris Hooson, have attempted to immortalize Daniel Schmid with their surprisingly lyrical love letter dedicated to the life and films of the filmmaker, Daniel Schmid - Le chat quie pense (2010). Featuring excerpts from Schmid’s films and archived footage from the sets, as well as new interviews with the filmmaker, auteur Werner Schroeter, actress/diva Ingrid Caven, cinematographer Renato Berta (who shot most of Schmid's films), and various others, Daniel Schmid - Le chat quie pense is an important documentary in that, aside from featuring rare film scenes and interviews that can be found nowhere else, the documentary also happens to be the only resource available to English-speaking viewers (although in various languages, the dvd released by T&C Film features English subtitles) on Schmid, as not a single English-language book has been written on the late great auteur. The perfect companion piece to the documentary Mondo Lux: The Visual Universe of Werner Schroeter (2011) aka Mondo Lux - Die Bilderwelten des Werner Schroeter directed by Elfi Mikesch—a work chronicling the life and work of Schmid’s one-time lover/assistant director and friend Werner Schroeter (whose work Der Bomberpilot (1970) Schmid acted as assistant director of)—Daniel Schmid - Le chat quie pense is not only a documentary about a criminally underrated filmmaker who the modern world does not deserve, but a cultural history of German-speaking Europe during the post-WWII years, which the filmmaker once stated of, “I live in a decadent era. That is my private belief. I believe that I live in a late chapter of Western history. I have no conception of how things might continue,” in front of a bunch of unhappy leftists while giving a press conference for his first feature Tonight or Never.

 Born on 26 December 1941 to a family of hoteliers in the Grison Alps in Switzerland, Daniel Schmid had a somewhat unconventional childhood that revolved around fantasy and matriarchy as his father passed away when he was just a wee lad, but while living in a luxury hotel in a resort spot, he managed to meet many famous people as a child, including Danish-German filmmaker Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind, All That Heaven Knows), who would later become his hero and who he would have the opportunity to make the last filmic portrait of with his documentary Imitation of Life (1983) aka Mirage de la vie. While still a young man in his 20s during the 1960s, Schmid relocated to West Berlin to a politically and socially revolutionary atmosphere that was quite in contrast to his quiet upbringing in the Swiss Alps. Although Schmid appreciated the fact he could be openly gay in counter-culture krautland and even befriended members of the Red Army Faction, he got fed up with the phony socio-political bullshit of the far-left and decided to focus solely on filmmaking, with the medium-length work Thut alles im Finstern, eurem Herrn das Licht zu ersparen (1970) aka Do Everything in the Dark in Order to Save Your Lord the Light, but it was not until he collaborating with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who he actually met in 1966 and was briefly lovers with, and his wife Ingrid Caven that he became really serious about filmmaking and began to get noticed around the European arthouse scene. Convinced by Fassbinder to quit film school after being called a “spoilt Swiss Boy,” Schmid decided to make his first film Tonight or Never (1972) aka Heute nacht oder nie—a high-camp satire of the far-left student movement—with next to nil money after being encouraged by Ingrid Caven, who starred in the film. From there, Schmid directed two more dark melodramatic masterpieces starring his new muse Caven, La Paloma (1974), and Shadow of Angels (1976) aka Schatten der Engel, with the former film being described as follows by his friend Werner Schroeter: “”La Paloma, my happiness that remained.” The alpine world…It could have gone so wrong…Completely wrong, yet it didn’t. It’s such pure kitsch, and then there’s the grandiose singing of Lotte Lehman and Richard Tauber from the ‘20s. It’s the victory of what Susan Sontag calls camp. These elements become something new that not only has ironic remove, but manages to spring over that, too, so as to find new, expressive force.” 

 For Shadow of Angels, Schmid adapted a controversial play that the filmmaker described as an “evil fairy tale” and Frankfurt Jews protested against for being ostensibly ‘anti-Semitic’ (one of the lead characters is named simply ‘the Rich Jew’), with Schroeter remarking regarding the work: “Fassbinder was very taken by the approach to his play “Garbage, the City and Death”, that Daniel filmed as “Shadow of Angels”. The film is pure Daniel but also pure Fassbinder.” Indeed, Shadow of Angels is undoubtedly one of the most brazenly dark, misanthropic, and simple yet esoteric films of German New Cinema as a work about a melancholy prostitute whose ex-nazi father (portrayed by Austrian actor Adrian Hoven, who was originally famous for starring in sentimental Heimat films) used to gas Jews during the good old days and now makes a living as a nocturnal third rate drag queen.  Due to his keenness for kitsch and high-camp aesthetics, Schmid was attacked as a supposed fascist by leftist filmgoers and critics alike, with Schmid remarking regarding his intent with his first feature at a press conference: “I did have political intentions in making the film. It may sound strange but…the backdrop of political interpretation in front of which I localize the film is, in the best case, only present so as to disconcert the viewer. I live in a decadent era. That is my private belief. I believe that I live in a late chapter of Western history. I have no conception of how things might continue.” If anything is apparent while watching his German era films, it is that he was infatuated with divas and you know you have a problem when a queen like Schroeter states of you, “Daniel saw a diva in everyone. He even tried to sell his aunt as an odd diva. Daniel was a diva addict. They were hidden everywhere, and you only had to bring this out in order to draw forth this artificiality and create a diva’s pseudo immortality.” After completing his Swiss-French work Hécate (1982)—a film set in a French Arab colony during the end of colonialism based on a novel by French fascist novelist/diplomat Paul Morand—Schmid permanently relocated back to Switzerland where he made more conventional and less campy works like Jenatsch (1987), Hors saison (1992) aka Off Season, and Beresina, or the Last Days of Switzerland (1999). Although Schmid would live until 2006, he would never complete another film after Beresina.  Ironically, like his friend Werner Schroeter, Schmid died of a form of cancer that obstructed his ability to speak and unfortunately he was unable to realize his final film Portovero, which he had already began shooting. 

 While I typically find reviewing documentaries, especially those about filmmakers, to be rather redundant, Daniel Schmid - Le chat quie pense is undoubtedly an imperative work for anyone with an interest in European arthouse cinema of the late-1960s to early 1980s. Admittedly, I have always been disappointed in Schmid’s post-Fassbinder era films (though I still have yet to track down Violanta (1978), which, as pointed out in the doc, was made during the filmmaker’s happiest point in life), yet the Swiss auteur filmmaker’s first three features alone are more important than most of his contemporaries’ entire oeuvres, but he seemed to realize that himself when he stated in an interview regarding Tonight or Never, “The film was severely attacked by the prevailing left “Zeitgeist”. It’s very strange. I recently talked to an American critic who’s now 25. For him the sixties have only survived as a theatrical act – and that’s exactly how the comedian in the movie is treated.” Indeed, Schmid was an artist who understood that the only real art is highly personalized as demonstrated by his rather revealing remark, “In describing someone else, you are in fact describing yourself … rather than this stranger, because it is your projection; in actual fact, this says more about you than about this other person, who has long departed (…),” so it should be no surprise that he also stated of the filmmakers of his generation, “At the time many of my colleagues – writers, filmmakers – were identifying themselves with a working-class environment they’d never lived or functioned in.” Indeed, while one would expect it to be common that there is nothing more pathetic than an idealistic bourgeois boob who has never worked an single day in their entire life pretending to sympathize with the working-class, it seems that Schmid came from an exceedingly ethno-masochistic generation of decadent degenerates who worshipped ugliness and weakness. Of course, Schmid was an authentic fellow who had no problem admitting he was an unrepentant diva and high-camp addict with a sentimental fondest for opera and old hotels and every one of his films, from Tonight or Never to Beresina, demonstrates this. A surprisingly worthwhile work for Schmid novices and fanatics alike, Daniel Schmid - Le chat quie pense is as loving a tribute to Schmid as Schmid’s own documentary Tosca’s Kiss (1984) was to the elderly retired opera singers of Casa Verdi that is so candidly portrayed. Despite his affinity for kitsch and camp, Schmid, like the subjects of Tosca’s Kiss, also had an affinity for classical European kultur which made him stick out among his contemporaries, hence why his works have aged as gracefully as the finest of wines and silent films. Indeed, in that sense, Schmid is worthy of being named in the same sentence with the likes of his heroes F.W. Murnau and Josef von Sternberg.

-Ty E

The Last Revenge

Naturally wanting to distance themselves from the legacy of the Third Reich, some young filmmakers of German New Cinema looked towards the grandfather generation for a ‘legitimate’ German film heritage, with Bavarian wild man auteur Werner Herzog (Stroszek, Woyzeck) being one of the most vocal proponents of this notion as a man who was mentored by German Jewish film critic/historian Lotte Eisner (author of the imperative Teutonic film history works Murnau, Fritz Lang, and The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt) and would later play the ultimate celluloid tribute to his ancestors by remaking German expressionist master auteur F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) as Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). Indeed, even the ‘heart’ of German New Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, looked to his grandfather generation as a man who used German Jewish novelist Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) as a template for many of his films, including his cinematically monolithic 14-part magnum opus Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). Additionally, Fassbinder also produced and starred in Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973) aka The Tenderness of Wolves directed by Ulli Lommel, which is a sort of quasi-remake/tribute to Fritz Lang’s expressionist masterwork M (1931) starring Peter Lorre. Undoubtedly, out of all the films of the German New Cinema era, the kraut classic Die letzte Rache (1982) aka The Last Revenge directed by Rainer Kirberg (Grottenolm, The Sleeping Girl) has to be the most literal take on Teutonic expressionism. An exceedingly eccentric and eerie yet darkly humorous work that seems like a celluloid crossbreed between Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and Metropolis (1927), and Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone (1982), The Last Revenge certainly feels like the marvelously misbegotten celluloid creation of a raving mad movie scientist with an acute aversion to anything post-expressionist. Made in collaboration with the Neue Deutsche Welle group Der Plan, whose third album “Die letzte Rache” was the soundtrack for the film and whose member Moritz Reichlt was partly responsible for the surrealist set design (not to mention member Frank Fenstermacher has a small role in the film), The Last Revenge was produced by the West German TV channel ZDF as part of their ‘Das Kleine Fernsehspiel’ series—a program responsible for producing important works by Fassbinder, Rosa von Praunheim, Edgar Reitz, and virtually any other important German filmmakers of the 1970s/1980s—and would develop a virtual instant cult following in Germany when it was first released and rightly so as a rare work that manages to pay apt tribute to the Fatherland’s expressionist legacy yet also manages to add to the aesthetic style that auteur filmmakers like Murnau, Lang, and Wiene pioneered. Starring the criminally underrated German actor Erwin Leder—a man who valiantly portrayed the schizophrenic serial killer in Austrian auteur Gerald Kargl’s criminally underrated masterpiece Angst (1983) and would go on to play eclectic roles in everything from portraying a Waffen SS officer in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) to playing a memorable role in the grotesque Hungarian arthouse flick Taxidermia (2006)—in the lead role, The Last Revenge is like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for those that cannot stomach silent film scores. 

 The Worldly (Erwin Leder) is a gaunt dandy-like dude who lives in a Teutonic desert where trios of singing fish heads pop out of the ground that somewhat resemble the sandworm from Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988) and deliver prophetic songs of truth and tragedy with a sort of sadistically sardonic flare. After traveling for some time on foot, Worldly reaches Water Hill, the home of the great Ruler (Gerhard Kittler, who died shortly after shooting the film), who invites the seemingly half-deranged dandy into his semi-aquatic home. The Ruler has just learned that his fiercely flamboyant Morrissey-esque son (Paul Adler) and quasi-dyke daughter (Anke Gieseke) are carrying on an incestuous affair, so he asks the Worldly—a man that catches the dictator’s attention by stating, “You interest me and I will interest you”—to do as follows: “I’ve lost my son. You’re the Worldly. Go out into this world and look for the man who will be my heir instead of my son.” To hide his undying shame, the Ruler decides to build a monument to cover up his perverse progeny’s decidedly degenerate legacy, stating, “I will put up a monument for you. Yes, the failure that you were in flesh and blood shall be clad in iron and stone.” Of course, the Worldly agrees to do the Ruler’s bidding and declares, “You shan’t be disappointed” to the somewhat melancholy monarch. Of course, as prophesied by a crooning trio of grotesque fish regarding the Worldly’s upcoming urban expedition, “ill fortune would strike, what terrible plight. Bad luck! Bad luck! He overrated his far-sight!” and indeed things do not go exactly as planned in eccentric expressionistic krautland. Of course, the Worldly finds his task to be rather dubious, but nonetheless finds three potential successors to the throne. The first is an obscenely narcissistic pansy fellow named ‘the Beautiful’ (Armin Sorg) who is, at the very least, ambiguously gay. The second potential heir is a swarthy philistine muscleman narcissist named ‘the Strong’ (Georg Ensermann) and the third is a neurotic and pedantic egghead named ‘the Wise’ (Richard Pleuger) who proudly proclaims, “Knowledge is my greatest virtue. Knowledge – always seeking for the truth. Reason asks the question “why?”, while the rest of the world goes by,” while ignoring the fact that his life is going down the drain as he spends all his time reading books. Of course, as can be expected from three exceedingly self-centered and power-hungry gentlemen, the contenders for the throne end up spending more time plotting each other’s demise than proving to be fit for rule, so the Worldly ultimately comes to the conclusion that he and only he can be the new ruler, declaring to himself, “I’m wandering this world, offering his inheritance: Fortune, wealth, and power. But what must I find: Nothing but stupidity, debility, and arrogance. He has no heir. No one is worthy. Nobody! Really nobody!,” as a true opportunistic man with a Svengali-like plan. 

 Unbeknownst to the Worldly, a dubious Inspector (Josef Ostendorf) and his Assistant (played by Der Plan member Frank Fenstermacher) hired by the Ruler have been following him on his search and figures out his conspiratorial plan to take the throne. After giving a truly Goebbels-esque speech to the citizens of the post-industrial metropolis regarding his quest to find a new successor to the throne, the Worldly is given quite the shock when the Ruler takes the stage and gives a hysterical Hitler-esque speech denouncing him. Of course, the Worldly is imprisoned due to his treacherous plan and decides to seek revenge against the Ruler while getting all moody broody in his jail cell, declaring to himself, “The hour of retribution is near. Everything is a question of time.” And, indeed, the Worldly gets his revenge when a sinister and equally insane Rotwang-esque Scientist (Volker Niederfahrenhorst), who works for a huge industrial conglomerate called ‘Krebs’ (undoubtedly a reference to 400-year-old German dynasty Krupps that Visconti ‘damned’ in his 1969 masterpiece The Damned), breaks him out of prison and helps him seek his revenge against the Ruler. Rather unfortunately, in killing the Ruler, the Worldly and the Scientist unwittingly make him immortal, which was the Monarch's plan all along. In the end, the Worldly—a man who once proudly professed, “I am the dark unknown…the person nobody’s heard”—must come to the realization that he is nothing more than a pawn after the Ruler says to him, “Your friend achieved something great. I will pardon your rashness which, due to my maneuvering, has borne fruit. Let me assure you, you’ve achieved your goal: You’ve killed me! But I had anticipated your imprudence. Just as you disposed of those that may have hindered me, you have now eliminated the last obstacle in my way. You’ve created what you wished to destroy! You thought this would be the end, instead it is the beginning. Death has become life, time has become eternity. When death hath overcome them all, as they rot and stink repulsively, t’is I who’ll stand forever tall, never to perish, divinity! Farewell my friend. You have served your purpose. You have played your role! I shall now leave you to your fate.” Naturally, in the end, The Last Revenge manages to get weirder and weirder and more ludicrously labyrinthine, with the Ruler’s incestuous adult children torturing their father in his immortality, said Ruler’s children dying a tragic yet romantic death, and the Worldly taking on a deranged messianic-like mentality. 

 As for as I am concerned, no other post-WWII film that I have seen has managed to better capture the aesthetic essence of works from the German expressionist than The Last Revenge. On top of that, there is no other film of its era that manages to be so detached from the prevailing aesthetic(s) of German New Cinema, as if auteur Rainer Kirberg had been given a time machine from the evil alien from the once-lost German science fiction Algol: Tragedy of Power (1920) directed by Hans Werckmeister in the hopes of destroying the Teutonic New Wave. While I am typically skeptical of films that attempt to mimic old films from the past and see it nothing more than a needlessly novel gimmick (with the obscenely overrated Academy Award-winning French flick The Artist (2011) being a great example of this), The Last Revenge manages to transcend mere postmodern dilettantism as a work that even manages to transcend Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926) aka Secrets of a Soul directed by G.W. Pabst in terms of it wonderfully wayward celluloid idiosyncrasy. In terms of its featuring of Triumph of the Will-esque speeches from antihero the Worldly and his nemesis the Ruler, The Last Revenge also seems to mock, if not unintentionally so, the thesis put forward in kosher commie film critic Siegfried Kracauer’s reductionist-ridden Teutophobic polemic From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947). In fact, one of the things that makes The Last Revenge such a refreshing work, aside from its obvious audacious aesthetics and absurdist blend of storytelling, is its general lack of far-left political posturing and soulless social realism, as a work that would have certainly irked Kracauer, who vehemently bemoaned the so-called ‘escapist’ and aesthetic-driven essence of German expressionism. Indeed, avant-garde in a fashion on the polar opposite side of the spectrum to the aesthetically sterile works of a neo-bolshevik filmmaker like Jean-Marie Straub, The Last Revenge easily achieves what Canadian auteur Guy Maddin has merely attempted to during his entire filmmaker career as an innately provocative and strangely humorous neo-expressionist work that does not seem like it was directed by some autistic fanboy cinephile who has seen one-too-many Fritz Lang flicks. 

-Ty E

Ludwig's Cook

After discovering the high-camp films of kraut dandy Werner Schroeter (Der Bomberpilot, Deux) and facing scorn from West German film critics due to his criticism of the far-left counter-culture movement with his second feature San Domingo (1970), Prussian auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (Scarabea: How Much Land Does a Man Need?, Parsifal) totally reinvented his aesthetic with his third narrative feature Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972) aka Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König, which was the filmmaker’s first film in his masterful ‘Germany Trilogy’ (preceding Karl Mary (1974) and Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977)) and his first attempt at creating a celluloid neo-Wagnerite ‘Gesamtkunstwerk.’ In between Ludwig and Karl Mary, Syberberg decided to temporarily go back to his minimalist documentarian roots and directed a strange little film entitled Theodor Hierneis oder Wie man ehem. Hofkoch wird (1973) aka Theodor Hierneis or How to become a former royal chef aka Le cuisinier de Ludwig aka Ludwig’s Cook. A sort of companion piece to Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King that Susan “The white race is the cancer of human history” Sontag once described as, “an austere Brechtian melodrama of ninety minutes with Ludwig’s cook as its one character—it anticipates the valet’s narrative in Hitler, a Film from Germany—and was inspired by Brecht’s unfinished novel on the life of Julius Caesar narrated by his slave,” Ludwig’s Cook is a quirky one-man show starring and co-written by stereotypically Bavarian actor Walter Sedlmayr (Volker Schlöndorff’s Baal, Welt am Draht aka World on a Wire) following the marginal historical figure Theodor Hierneis, royal chef at the court of Ludwig II of Bavaria, as he fondly reminisces about his past life appeasing the rather idiosyncratic appetite of the mad ‘Fairy Tale King’ as he walks around rural Bavaria, as well as the mysterious monarch’s castles, Linderhof and Neuschwanstein, and royal cabin, Schachen. Essentially one long monologue taken largely directly from Hierneis’ memoir, Ludwig’s Cook attempts to fill in some blanks left by Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King by painting a truly ‘picturesque’ (indeed, one cannot deny that rural Bavaria and Ludwig’s lavish homes are most aesthetically pleasing in a fairy tale sort of way) portrait of the ‘perfect Wagnerite’ from the perspective of a lowly servant who tends to the needs of a decidedly decadent king who rotted out all his teeth by eating too many sweets and who forced his servants to wander the countryside during the overnight and early A.M. hours. While undoubtedly one of the filmmaker’s more minor works, Ludwig’s Cook is also indubitably an important work in Syberberg’s oeuvre in that it acted as a building block for his magnum opus Hitler: A Film from Germany, as it would also feature obscure nobodies like Heinrich Himmler’s personal astrologist and Uncle Adolf’s personal valet retelling history in a highly personalized anecdotal fashion, thereupon presenting a true ‘volk history’ that obfuscates the historical documentary record. 

 Beginning at the age of 14 in November 1882 as an apprentice in the royal kitchen of the court of King Ludwig II, Theodor Hierneis would become the ‘royal chef’ in 1884 and his reign would last until 1886 when the monarch died under dubious circumstances that same year. As Hierneis (Walter Sedlmayr) states of the experience, “For four years, I belonged to the household of an unusual king.” While describing Ludwig II as ‘unusual,’ Hierneis' respect for the man is undeniable, even if he was paid only one to two marks a day. On first meeting the king, the chef found him to be, “tall, noble, handsome, pale, a ghost-like apparition with big dark and incredibly luminous eyes…A mysterious king…that’s how I saw him the first time.” Indeed, Hierneis seems to view Ludwig II in a mystical manner typical of the Bavarian peasants who celebrate the monarch’s aesthetically pleasing legacy to this day. Rising from the rabble to the level of royal culinary artist, the chef rightfully describes his personal motto as such: “Laughed at as an apprentice, honored as a master.” Of course, Hierneis viewed Ludwig II from a servile class-based distance, and while the King tended to treat his visitors to remarkably lavish gifts, the loyal chef was never once treated to a single one. Instead, Hierneis had the honor of becoming a witness to great history from the sidelines, as a man that got to see The Fairy Tale King interact with ‘völkisch avant-garde’ poet Felix Dahn and Hungarian-Austrian actor Josef Kainz. One of the things Hierneis enjoyed most about working for Ludwig II was learning that he was just like any other ordinary person, stating of his experiences, “I found this comforting that he too had to suffer pain, like all of us. Later, in my time, the King was almost completely toothless and he always held a perfumed lace handkerchief in front of his lips and kept people at a distance.” Indeed, Ludwig II was a terribly temperamental individual of the rather whimsical sort as indicated by Hierneis’ remark, “his taste and appetite depended very much on his actual mood,” so the chef made a special menu for the monarch and prepared his meals in a manner so that they were soft enough for a new born babe to eat. 

 Although a King, Ludwig II also had his heroes, with Louis XIV aka ‘Louis the Great’ being such a major hero that he designed his royal bedroom after the French monarch’s bedroom and had a statue of the man that he would greet each day. Of course, Ludwig’s Francophilia was not limited to hero worship, as he had his cook him French cuisine even though the Berlin royals dined on Anglo-German dishes. Hierneis also unwittingly hints at the King’s homosexuality, stating, “The King did not like female servants. His valet Rutz received him from the bath with two towels,” but more importantly he understood that Ludwig II was a fanatical aestheticist who financially supported great artists like Richard Wagner (Ludwig settled all the composer's debts and provided him a lavish villa in Tribschen, Switzerland) and whose, “ideal was to have the most beautiful things from all over the world…buildings and plants, birds, deer, peacocks, birds of paradise and all that…if he could have gathered it all in one place and perhaps some people too. Well, he wanted to build a paradise…it could have happened in Bavaria.” Demonstrating a certain loyalty that is virtually unknown nowadays in the Occident, Hierneis states on the subject of the King’s famously curious mental state, “that the King might be ill or mad, this idea would never have occurred to us. We wouldn’t have dared anyway. We’ve loved him far too much for that. We looked upon his character as a sort of luxury of being, he was the King after all. Direct orders of government…we saw very little of that here. In fact, none of it.” As Hierneis reveals, when his master Ludwig died, the distinguished culinary artist went on to work as Prince Regent Luitpold 's chef from form 1886 to 1890 and then went to Berlin to volunteer in the royal kitchen of Kaiser Wilhelm II, eventually becoming court chef. Of course, like any true citizen from the Bavarian free state, Hierneis became homesick and eventually came home in 1901 and with his savings, opening a delicatessen shop in Munich as a man who ultimately “founded a bourgeois existence” as a distinguished cook with an aristocratic clientele who was eventually appointed “Royal Bavarian Court Supplier.” Indeed, like Bavaria in general with its ancient fairy tale castles that have proven to become very profitable tourist spots in the long run, Ludwig’s wayward reign ultimately proved to be quite a worthwhile experience for chef Theodor Hierneis. 

 Not all that unlike King Ludwig II, actor Walter Sedlmayr, who was also a gay Bavarian in kraut Catholic land, died a rather bizarre death that adds a certain mystery and intrigue to his character. Found dead in his Munich apartment on 15 July 1990, Sedlmayr was apparently tied up, stabbed in the gut, and beat in the head with a hammer by two of his former business partners, half-brothers Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, with a biopic about the actor and his murder entitled Wambo (2001) directed by Jo Baier starring Jürgen Tarrach in the lead role being released a decade later. Despite being a rather small film, Ludwig’s Cook ultimately earned the Deutscher Filmpreis for ‘Best Non-Narrative Film’(Film Award in Silver) and ‘Best Actor’ (Film Award in Gold) at the 1973 German Film Awards. I enjoyed Ludwig’s Cook enough that I kind of wish Syberberg directed a companion piece to Hitler: A Film from Germany of a similar meta-history spirit as the famed Führer apparently had a Jewish chef named Fräulein Kunde on loan, or so the Jewish author M. Hirsh Goldberg would claim in his book The Jewish Connection (1976). It seems British auteur Mike Leigh must have saw some merit in Ludwig’s Cook as well as his short A Sense of History (1992)—a one-man show written and starring Jim Broadbent about a fictional aristocratic fellow named ’23 Earl of Leete’ who discusses his 900+ year family history while giving a tour of his rather lavish homestead—takes virtually the same aesthetic approach, but ultimately fails to be as interesting as Syberberg’s film. In short, Ludwig’s Cook is an aesthetic achievement as it is discernibly Brechtian yet still manages to have a soul, not to mention the fact it pays tribute to German kultur as opposed to besmirching it like the kosherphile commie playwright had such a proclivity for (During his Stalinist days, Brecht wrote to a friend regarding the Moscow trials and his countrymen, “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.”), which is no small achievement for a little film about a peasant discussing a toothless monarch’s strange eating habits. 

-Ty E

nEROSubianco

After recently re-watching and reviewing Italian auteur-pornographer Tinto Brass’ avant-garde counter-culture flick L'urlo (1968) aka The Howl, I felt it was about time to dig deeper into more of the filmmaker’s pre-porn experimental works, with the Nerosubianco (1969) aka nEROSubianco aka Attraction aka The Artful Penetration of Barbara aka Black on White aka Barbara the Yes Girl being the most provocative, if not thematically and aesthetically putrid, choice. Presented by Jewish American arthouse pornographer Radley Metzger aka Henry Paris (Camille 2000, The Opening of Misty Beethoven) via his distribution company Audubon Films under the less than charming title Black and White (which was later changed to the suavely sleazy title of The Artful Penetration of Barbara), Nerosubianco—a work produced by Dino De Laurentiis (Dune, Hannibal) that was not surprisingly almost universally panned by critics, thereupon falling into relative obscurity fairly fast after its release—is a sort of avant-garde agitprop flick that is part ‘collage film’, part musical, part incoherent quasi-commie celluloid manifesto, part surrealist/avant-garde cinema tribute (with references to everyone from Luis Buñuel to Federico Fellini to Jean-Luc Godard) and all counter-culture puffery that manages to reconcile the works and film theories of Sergei Eisenstein with the spastic surrealism of the Panic movement and Fernando Arrabal and the carnal celluloid cheese of the sexploitation subgenre. A thematic and aesthetic heterosexual equivalent to great Guido auteur Alberto Cavallone’s hit miscegenation-themed lesbo artsploitation flick Le salamandre (1969), Nerosubianco is proudly ‘progressively’ degenerate counter-culture crud about a gorgeous goombah gal who cruises the streets of Swinging London while her husband goes sightseeing elsewhere, only to become infatuated with a lone American Negro. Although not very popular with the general public upon its official release, Nerosubianco was a big enough hit when it premiered at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival that it inspired some of the big wigs at Paramount Pictures to fly auteur Brass all the way to Hollywood to discuss with him adapting Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange (1962). Of course, it would ultimately be Stanley Kubrick (and, well, Andy Warhol also previously directed a strange static version of the novella in 1965 under the name Vinyl) who directed A Clockwork Orange and Brass would ultimately enter the less than dignified realm of erotica (and later working with Malcolm ‘Alex DeLarge’ McDowell on the epic erotic celluloid abortion Caligula (1979)), but at least with Nerosubianco he demonstrated that at some point in his somewhat uneven filmmaking career that he was a semi-serious artist. Rather unfortunately, the film also proves that Brass is a cultural and spiritual cuckold who gets off to the idea of black brothas banging his beauteous countrywomen. 

 Set to twelve mostly retrograde quasi-psychedelic tunes by the British rock band Freedom (a group made up of members of Procol Harum), Italian broad Barbara (Anita Sanders, who got her big break in acting appearing in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965) in a small uncredited role) walks aimlessly yet contemplatively around London whilst her wanker four-eyed husband Paolo (Nino Segurini) plays by himself elsewhere. Ultimately, Barbara’s urban journey in for-once-sunny London begins becoming interesting when she catches the sight of a yank Negro (Terry Brown, who is probably best known for his role in Jack Hill’s blaxploitation Foxy Brown (1974)). Indeed, Barbara has an acute case of jungle fever, but she has not been ‘penetrated’ hard enough by the perverse propaganda of counter-culture cultural cuckolds to give into dipping into the mud. Instead, Barbara engages in a seemingly schizophrenic psychodrama of the particularly pathological sort revolving around anti-war, anti-fascist, and anti-bourgeois subjects that always have some sort of pseudo-Freudian angle. While the anti-bourgeois Barbara is at a lavish bourgeois spa, she thinks to herself, “Who knows why people who are afraid of pubic hair are the same people who hate Negroes, Jews, homosexuals, beatniks, and hippies.” Little does Barbara realize that in only a couple decades, the same homo, heeb, and dirty hippie lovers that run the porn industry will also become afraid of a full healthy bush of genital hair. While in a beauty salon, Barbara sees all the women getting their hair done turn into large goofy cows, thus demonstrating the bourgeois babes are nothing more than beautified bovines with a lot of money to waste on nothing (or something). Later in the day, Barbara is approached by a little commie Chinaboy who gives her a couple of Mao’s red manifestos (which, as Barbara discovers after opening the book, is really the English translation of commie frog filmmaker's Jean-Luc Godard’s script of La Chinoise) and the black man returns the favor for her by giving the East Asian pinko a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, thus demonstrating his solidarity with dominating cracker bitches and the black power movement. 

 Throughout the day, Barbara sees a number of bizarre things like a father throwing his infant out the window and said infant’s mother subsequently committing suicide as a result of her homicidal hubby's insane act of infanticide.  In a scene that seems like a poor man's take on a Carmelo Bene film, a dorky vampire priest appears with his buddy the Grim Reaper and the Mummy and preposterously declares, “Encourage people to make love because it’s dangerous, but it’s not forbidden, even though more dangerous than encouraging them to make war, so from this moment dangerous and forbidden pictures of love scenes will be substituted by pictures dangerous but not forbidden of war scenes,” while an Eisenstein-esque collage (aka “pornography of violence”) featuring stock-footage from various ‘fascistic’ wars appears to inanely drive home Brass’ hippie philistine point. In another one of the countless random rants featured in the film, Barbara narrates how sexual violence is big in the USA, stating, “U.S. incidents of sexually related torture are reported in the cases of women. The torturers shove as many fingers as possible or a foreign object into the vagina and twist and tear brutally. This is also done with the anus. A tube is inserted into the anus and warm water driven into the prisoner under very high pressure. In the case of men, beatings on the genitals with long thin sandbags have frequently been reported. One trade unionist was beaten so much that a testicle was driven up in his body.” Meanwhile, the American Negro sinisterly laughs at an image of a white woman’s clean shaven pussy. Brass reveals the reason for her interest in the jigaboo gentleman when she complains regarding her hubby Paolo’s apparently contrived coital and puritanical tactics, “He always wants silent, darkness, mystery…but what mystery? That’s the whole trick…they invent mystery where there isn’t any. This is their great discovery; keep everything hidden, keep everyone in the dark until mystery breeds mystery and fear.” Luckily, black never truly gets on white as Barbara is far too bourgeois to allow herself to be defiled by an American Negro (though surreal dream images of such a scenario briefly appear), so the black buck assumedly goes home with blue balls and an even greater affinity for brother Malcolm. 

 Despite featuring miscegenation-championing images and emasculating songs lyrics like, “Free your women, let them do…anything and everything they want to do” featured throughout the film, Nerosubianco thankfully never seals the dirty dago deal in terms depicting explicit jungle fever between a Guido gal and a black brother, though the film whimsically wallows in foreplay regarding such sad sentiments. Undoubtedly, compared to auteur Tinto Brass’ subsequent avant-garde agitprop piece L'urlo (1968) aka The Howl—which although similarly playful, is a much more grim and grotesque work featuring next to nil hippie happy-go-lucky bullshit—Nerosubianco is a somewhat more lighthearted work that ‘teases’ in a similar type fashion to the filmmaker’s later erotic works. Undoubtedly, with its curious combo of big tits and asses with equally redundant holocaust footage, not to mention its flagrant fetishization of interracial sex and various other forms of modernist sexual debauchery, Nerosubianco is now ironically what the mainstream establishment is all about. Indeed, nowadays even a music video featuring sickly slag Miley Cyrus seems more edgy than Brass’ film, but then again the only intrinsic value Nerosubianco has today is as a piece of novelty celluloid waywardness created during a terribly delusional zeitgeist when anything seemed possible, even a multicultural utopia orgy where impotent hippie homos and suavely dressed American negroes are the foremost liberators of the world. Advertised with the it’s-too-retarded-to-be-true tagline, “a motion picture for the stoned age” when it was released in America by Radley Metzger under the rather unfortunate Toback-esque title Black on White, Nerosubianco also acts as a sort of intriguing historical celluloid artifact that demonstrates just how wrong counter-culture types were about their ‘progressive’ theories and how they, and only they, could and would ‘liberate’ society from injustice, poverty, racism, and self-control. Of course, with the birth of millions upon millions of bastard mulatto babies and various other mixed miscegenated beings, the apocalyptic arrival of AIDS, the total selling out of the hippie generation, and the virtual total death of the Italian film industry since the film's release, Nerosubianco now seems as eclectically naïve as films come, even putting the more fanatical of Eisner era Disney films to shame, but that is one of the things that makes the film so surprisingly entertaining. Indeed, a rare film that namedrops Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, black power, and Karl Marx that manages not to totally suck, Nerosubianco, with Brass’ two other frenzied free-association films from around the same time Deadly Sweet (1967) aka Col cuore in gola and The Howl, is a superlatively spastic celluloid pop-art piece that really reminds the viewer how screwed up the brains of the Baby Boomer generation were.

-Ty E

The Howl (1968)

Before becoming one of the most internationally renowned celluloid smut-peddlers and arthouse-pornographers, and disastrously getting involved with working with poof novelist Gore Vidal and Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione on the ultimately botched Italo-American erotic epic Caligula (1979) starring Malcolm McDowell, Guido auteur Tinto Brass (Salon Kitty, Senso '45), not unlike many European filmmakers of his 'bobo' (aka bourgeois bohemian) generation, made exceedingly experimental and revolutionary socio-politically-charged cinematic works, with L'urlo (1968) aka The Howl being arguably his most aesthetically ambitious and accomplished, if not innately incoherent, cinematic work to date. A work that gave Brass the distinguished honor of being nominated for the ‘Berlin Golden Bear’ award at the 1970 German International Film Festival (aka ‘Berlinale’), The Howl is an exceedingly erratic and explosive celluloid bomb of the aesthetically terroristic sort that iconoclastically assaults everything that old school Hollywood stands for. Indeed, like fellow goombah artsploitation filmmakers like Alberto Cavallone with Quickly, spari e baci a colazione (1971), Salvatore Samperi with Cuore di mamma (1969) aka Mother’s Heart, Franco Brocani with Necropolis (1970), and Liliana Cavani with The Year of the Cannibals (1970) aka I cannibali, Tinto Brass demonstrated with The Howl his solidarity with the dope-addled far-left student movement of the late-1960s and the anti-establishment spirit of his decidedly degenerate post-nationalist zeitgeist. Starring European arthouse counter-culture superstar Tina Aumont (Modesty Blaise, Fellini’s Casanova)—the proud progeny of French Jewish actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (The Cross of Lorraine, Castle Keep) and Dominican-born Hollywood diva Maria ‘The Queen of Technicolor’ Montez (Arabian Nights, Cobra Woman)—in the role of a bride-to-be who decides to bail out on her wedding with a wayward revolutionary and go on an orgasmic psychedelic odyssey of no-return ostensibly involving the mind, body, and soul, The Howl is the sort of unwaveringly surreal quasi-metaphysical black comedy that could have only been sired in early-1970s Italy. Politically and morally speaking, The Howl is unequivocally one of the most ridiculously retarded and patently preposterous celluloid works I have ever had the bittersweet opportunity of seeing, but aesthetically speaking, it is an insanely idiosyncratic celluloid work that deserves to be compared with the films of Federico Fellini, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Luis Buñuel, Fernando Arrabal, Dušan Makavejev, and Vera Chytilová, yet still manages to stand on its own as a singular, if not oftentimes pretentious and pompous, piece of culturally corrosive and aesthetically explosive celluloid TNT. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis (The Serpent’s Egg, Blue Velvet), The Howl was actually the bizarre result of director Brass—a proud member of the so-called ‘Italian Radicals’ aka ‘Radicali Italiani’ political party—convincing the producer to produce a film based as a political manifesto as opposed to a conventional screenplay. Declaring, “The time has come to blow up the screen!,” Brass ultimately created a curiously creamy counter-culture wetdream featuring hippies “fucking the muck” (aka copulating with dirt), wind-up toy fascist dictators, sexually impotent anti-war activists (one lady states she does not have to care about the war since she cannot achieve an orgasm), strikingly gorgeous quasi-gothic runaway brides, dirty and literally tree-hugging hippie cannibals, and other gloriously grotesque things that prove that at one point in his early filmmaking career, the Italian filmmaker had the potential to be a ‘Guido Christoph Schlingensief’ of sorts. 

 Proto-gothic gal Anita Annigoni (Tina Aumont) has been arrested for ‘revolutionary’ activity in the past and her corporate executive boyfriend Berto (Nino Segurini) knows all about it because she detailed to him at his request how she was gang-raped by the cops, which is depicted in Warhol-esque black-and-white newsreel-like flashback scenes. Anita’s tragic story about how she was porked by a pernicious pack of pigs arouses Berto so much that he proposes marriage to her, which she reluctantly accepts. Starting where Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) left off, Anita realizes her mistake during the wedding ceremony and decides to leave her hubby-to-be at the altar and run-off with a degenerate counter-culture type named Coso (Gigi Proietti), who sports classic jail stripes and describes himself as, “a heavenly dog.” Anita and Coso hitch a ride with the sort of banal bourgeois couple that the runaway bride would have become part of had she married Berto, but the two strange strangers are soon kicked out of the car due to their erratic and scatological behavior. After taking a double-decker bus into a sort of surrealist Sodom and Gomorrah, the two new non-lovers, who took advantage of the bumpy bus ride by boning on the way, temporarily take residence in a semen-themed hotel from hedonistic hell where every room has its own preternatural sex fetish theme. Assumedly parodying the ancient period pieces of P.P. Pasolini (indeed, I doubt it is a coincidence that Berto is an executive at a company called ‘P.P.P.’), Anita and Coso later get all nice and cozy with some nudist cannibals in love in a ‘family tree’ (in a possibly a Marxist allegory against racial purity and nationalism?!) In a scene with segments intercut from Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946), the two social renegades also go to a Jodorowsky-esque village where people are ritualistically murdered and a would-be-wanton woman complains, “Why should I give a damn about the war, if I continue to have difficulty reaching the climax?,” as if her out-of-order pussy is the most important thing in the world. Anita and Coso also enter a dark theater stage where a toy Uncle Adolf dressed like Napoleon goes on an egomaniacal rant in a scene where absurdist images of Hitler and Mussolini are intercut with that of a monkey. During what is undoubtedly her most iconic commie revolutionary impersonation in a scene that anticipates the infamous bank robbery photo of fallen heiress Patty Hearst, Anita and her comrade Coso kill toy Hitler with a storm of neo-bolshevik bullets. While taking a pilgrimage in a scenic graveyard, Coso is approached by a bitter Negro who matter-of-factly states, “When shit is worth something, negroes will be born without assholes!,” as if he has seen one-too-many Robert Downey Sr. flicks. In the end, Anita dies in a car wreck after driving around carelessly in a sports car while sporting her bridal dress, with her newly cold-corpse being devoured by flames and an off-screen narrator tragicomedically declaring, “A beautiful girl, intelligent but nuts, had a terrible ending. I knew it, poor girl. Terrible ending…better than I expected. Also, it’s not all her fault. We live in an age of syncretism. Whose fault is it? Everyone’s and no one’s. In fact, A is to B as B is to me. Me is to C as C is to believe. Is it clear? See is to believe. See is to believe. Nice. Very nice. Nice. Nice, nice, nice. In any case, nice.” 

 A merry yet morbid celluloid Magical Mystery Tour that seems like it was directed by a spastic and acutely schizophrenic Trotskyite with an actual sense of humor but also just as much pretense, The Howl not only makes for an excellent case against hallucinogenic drug use and loony left-wing politics, but also demonstrates that a serious celluloid artist once lurked inside cinematic titillator Tinto Brass. Rather unfortunately, a decidedly deluded utopian dreamer of the far-left sort also lurked in Brass as reflected in the audio commentary given by the director for the Cult Epics dvd release of The Howl where he pathetically namedrops such slave-morality-loving revolutionaries as Rousseau and Mao Tse-tung. On top of that, The Howling derives its name from Judaic pederast Allen Ginsberg’s obscenely retarded 1956 poem of the same name. Like Ginsberg’s putrid poetry, The Howl would ultimately land Brass in trouble with the law due to obscenity, thus resulting in a four-year ban of the film, as well as a 2-minute segment from the sperm hotel scene being excised from the work. With all the characters, including the beauteous yet mostly mute Tina Aumont, being nothing more than mere ciphers used by Brass to spread the incendiary ideas of his megalomaniac movie manifesto, The Howl ultimately takes the idea of the cinematic ‘auteur’ to pseudo-messianic extremes as if the filmmaker was play-acting at being a communist dictator, so it is only all the more ironic that he would find his niche in the usually undignified realm of high-class pornography. While not even a minor masterpiece, The Howl is certainly a hysterically humorous celluloid treat for the more adventurous cinephile. Apparently, Brass was asked to cinematically adapt A Clockwork Orange but turned it down to direct The Howl (!), which is just one more reason to respect the existence of the film as it would have been nothing short of a cinematic tragedy had Kubrick never got the chance to adapt Burgess’ novel. Featuring great one-liners like, “what a wonderful smell of smegma,” “Latin is simply manipulative action of the class system,” “contemplation is a bourgeois attitude,” “fucking the muck, fucking the muck,” “long live the married couple,” and “Your order is the order of logic. And logic is always false like morale, coherence,” The Howl also makes for a great unintentional satire of the truly ‘reactionary’ and regressive (and now thankfully retrograde) phenomenon that is far-left idealism. 

-Ty E