Jubilee

Undoubtedly, the greatest anti-punk, punk dystopian fantasy film ever made, Jubilee (1978) directed by British arthouse maestro Derek Jarman (The Angelic Conversation, The Last of England) is a decidedly pessimistic portrayal of Great Britain of the present that also simultaneously acts as a darkly romantic love letter to English high kultur and the monarchy of the past, while using the subculture it less than flatteringly depicts as the antithesis of everything that was once great and noble in the England of long ago. An unrelenting work of magical realism that is notably less homophilic than most of Jarman's film fare, Jubilee follows Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre) as she is transported to present day England by her royal occultist John Dee (Richard O'Brien) via an ebony-eyed spirit guide in black tights named Ariel (a character from Shakespeare's The Tempest, a work Jarman would subsequently adapt in 1979), only to learn that Queen Elizabeth II was slaughtered in a random senseless mugging, Buckingham Palace has been turned into a degenerate recording studio that is run by an evil Svengali character of the repulsively racially bastardized and megalomaniacal persuasion, the British patriot song “Rule, Britannia!” has been turned upside down as a decadent anarchistic punk song featuring a bombastic burlesque dance and audio samples of Adolf Hitler speeches, violent women-children with orange dyke haircuts murder police in the middle of the street and castrate their cocks, and that the all unholy anti-Christ has captured the heart and soul of once-merry olde England. A rampantly ridiculous realm where nihilism, hedonism, and senseless self-gratification of all sorts have totally replaced art and fantasy and where gender roles have been radically flipped (men lay around with other men in bed while women form violent gangs in the streets), the unhinged UK featured in Jubilee is a place where Moors murderer Myra Hindley is regarded as an artist and a feminist hero, where angelic ballerinas dance gracefully in bombed out streets around a urban bonfire where neo-barbarians burn books, and where law and order have literally been abolished, thus making it a lunatic libertine anarchist’s wet dream, yet director Derek Jarman does not portray such deplorable delinquency and debauchery as something to be esteemed, but the inevitable result of a tired and devitalized civilization in decline that has reverted back to a patently preposterous form of postmodern primalism. Featuring a number of popular punk/new wave icons in leading roles, including Adam Ant, Jordan (a protégé of Malcolm “The Sex Pistols” McLaren), Toyah Willcox, Nell Campbell (of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame), putrid punk rock tranny Wayne/Jayne County, and Hermine Demoriane (a French tightrope walker), as well as cameo performances by The Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees and a musical score by Brian Eno, Jubilee makes for an incendiary cinematic work that ironically unleashes an intrepid iconoclastic attack on the iconoclast punks themselves, thus making for an exquisitely idiosyncratic work that manages to synthesize the high camp blasphemy of Ken Russell (whose masterpiece The Devils (1970) director Derek Jarman worked as the production designer for) with the poetic elegance of Shakespeare and Michael Powell and farcical counter-counter-cultureness of Paul Morrissey, while also acting as one of the few truly refined ‘punk’ films. 

 According to a rather butch and bitchy punkess of the mentally deranged sort who goes by the fitting name “Mad” (Toyah Willcox),“The History of England” goes as follows: “It all began with William the Conqueror who screwed the Anglo-Saxons into the ground…carving the land into theirs and ours. They lived in mansions and ate beef at fat tables…whilst the poor lived in houses, minding the cows on a bowl of porridge—whilst they pushed them around with their arrogant foreign accents. There were two languages in the land, and the seeds of war were sown. At first the two sides coexisted meeting only on the racetrack and the battlefield whilst they fought the rest of the world—who they despised more than each other. Now one day, when there was no one left to fight…it dawned on them that the real enemy was at home…and that they should fight themselves. Having grown greedy on the booty they had looted from the rest of the world…they decided to fight with money. But by now this was made with paper, so it was pretty worthless. So, when they discovered this they took to fighting with guns. The rest of the world sighed a sigh of relief to be rid of them…and got on with their own business…and England slowly sank into the sea.” Indeed, while the pre-apocalyptic England featured in Jubilee has yet to literally sink into the sea (as it rightfully should), it is most certainly a seedy and sadistic cesspool of born-again nihilists and amphetamine-addled anarchist prophets whose angst-ridden anger and arrogance is only transcended by their rather wacky need to destroy anything that has yet to tainted by modernity, both in terms of cities and culture and no one, not even her greatness Queen Elizabeth I and her loyal alchemist John Dee can stop the madness of a nation on the brink of the Armageddon. To her dismay, the sixteenth century “Virgin Queen” comes to witness a recklessly wanton and naively nihilistic punk collective of fierce females (and a couple irrelevant cucks) featuring a number of curious characters, including revisionist historian "Amyl Nitrite" (Jordan), boyish "Bod" (Runacre, who also plays Elizabeth I, in an allegorical dual role), manly mute "Chaos" (Hermine Demoriane), kind-of-cute "Crabs" (Nell Campbell), and fecund-free fuhrer "Mad" (Toyah Willcox), after she is transported to the post-industrial wasteland that is the modern day UK. In a subplot, a passive pretty boy named “Kid” (Adam Ant) wants to make a career as a rock star and Crabs, whose name is probably in tribute to some STD she carries, has the hots for him, so she introduces him to a degenerate dictator of a music producer/media moguel named Borgia Ginz (Jack Birkett), who is also a nihilist philosopher of sorts that wallows in his egomaniacal subversion of the world via malignant mass media. According to Ginz, “This is the generation who grew up and forgot to lead their lives. They were so busy watching my endless movie.” Indubitably a pompous prick of the pseudo-princely sort, Ginz has no delusions that the punk music he actively promotes is of a rather poor aesthetic quality and has an equally sterile, if not sickly subversive, social value, summing up the music movement he leads as having the following purpose, “As long as the music’s loud enough, we won’t hear the world falling part.” 

 Utilizing actual real rubble from buildings that were never repaired after the London Blitz, as well as a number of real-life London ghettos, Jubilee features a Great Britain that may have officially won the Second World War, but never politically nor economically recovered, thus leading to subsequent generations of disillusioned Brits who have nil respect for nor understanding of their nation’s history and culture, and this youthful nihilism and aimlessness certainly reaches its apex in the artistically vapid form of the punk rock subculture. In Jubilee, hatred merely exists for hatred's sake and rampant boredom can only be appeased via sadomasochistic group sex and lust murder, hippie-like group homosexuality and violent lesbianism, stealing cars, playing half-naked games of Monopoly, killing trannies (out of shallow jealousy of 'her' popularity) and cops, carving ‘bloody’ words into friends' backs, watching mindless music videos on the telly, polishing lawn gnomes, partaking in duels in apartments, and setting the world aflame via all-out (and all girl) guerrilla terrorism. When the males of the punk collective are murdered coldheartedly by a fascistic policeman who relieves himself by pissing in the street during broad daylight, the less than ladylike punkettes of the group drown their sorrows in alcohol and take to the streets and castrate the cock of a cop that committed the cowardly crime, but they don’t stop there as they maliciously murder another man in blue via Molotov cocktail, shouting the punk rock cliché “NO FUTURE” as they commit the act of ultimately worthless terrorism. In the end, Mr. Big Borgia Ginz is still at the top, and he moves to Dorset, England, which is now a communist dictatorship and apparently “the only safe place to live now,” where he moves into a mansion (he “requisitioned”) that used to be owned by aristocrats, thus symbolizing the death of the aristocracy and high culture, and the reign of mass-man, who the evil record producer chronicles via his artistically vapid music. 

 In a question Nietzsche answered, Queen Elizabeth rhetorically asks herself: Is God Dead? Indeed, judging by Jubilee, one can certainly assume Derek Jarman thought so, with the new dispiriting spiritual guides of the modern world being metaphysically malevolent media moguls like Borgia Ginz, who has the audacity to admit like a true egomaniacal false messiah of the technocratic age that under his insidious influence masses of automatons, “The media became their only reality and I own their world of flickering shadows. BBC. TUC. ITV. ABC. ATV. MGM. KGB. C of E. You name it. I bought them all…and rearranged the alphabet. Without me…they don’t exist.” Indeed, while satirizing the punk movement as a natural, if not nasty, symptom of a sick society that promotes such a shallow pseudo-culture that was spawned by the very same group of people its members claim to be fighting against, Jubilee, not unlike Paul Morrissey’s equally anti-punk/anti-capitalist/anti-communist romp Madame Wang's (1981), out punks the punks, thus proving their way of life and non-philosophy is nothing but banal bunk, so it should be no surprise that director Derek Jarman sired hatred in Britain’s bourgeois anarchists, including fashion designer and business woman Vivienne Westwood, who rose to riches and popularity after her clothes began being sold at a boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren (the man who invented and named the punk rock boy band The Sex Pistols in a manner not unlike New Kids on the Block and The Backstreet Boys). Sharing aesthetic attributes with the films of Ken Russell, Paul Morrissey, Ulrike Ottinger, and Slava Tsukerman, but synthesizing it with aesthetic salutes to Shakespeare, English high kultur, and the monarchy, Jubilee brings a certain poetry and prestige to the punk world that it never saw before and would never see again. Indeed, if the punks were right about anything, it is the classic defeatist punk motto (as referenced sardonically in Jubilee, but also many times before and after the film’s release): “My generation’s the blank generation.” 

-Ty E

Love Is Colder Than Death

 

Undoubtedly, few directors, including great ones, successfully achieve making a masterpiece with their directorial debut and German New Cinema alpha-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Satan's Brew, The Marriage of Maria Braun) is certainly no exception to this unofficial rule, as his first feature-length cinematic effort, Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) aka Liebe ist kälter als der Tod is a highly aesthetically derivative, albeit particularly personalized, work that owes more to classic American film and the French New Wave than any sort of Teutonic film movement, yet it is surely an auteur piece, but one plagued by the ultimately banal practice of deconstructing and reconstructing gangster films – a cinematic practice that autistic fanboy Quentin Tarantino would ultimately take to more degenerate and philistinic extremes. Beginning with dedication to four of the film's influences, including Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Jean-Marie Straub, Linio and Cuncho (the final tribute being a reference to the two main characters in Damiano Damiani's 1966 film A Bullet for the General aka El Chucho, quién sabe?), Love Is Colder Than Death is a work that ultimately owes more to the early amateurish gangster films of Jean-Luc Godard and the ex-convict protagonist Franz Biberkopf (Fassbinder’s character in the film is even named Franz) of Alfred Döblin’s Weimar era modernist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) than the hodgepodge of individuals Fassbinder decided to actually pay official tribute to. Even the original iconic poster of star Ulli Lommel sporting a trench coat and aiming a handgun at the viewer is inspired by Alain Delon’s character from French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime flick Le Samouraï (1967), yet Fassbinder still managed to leave his novice auteur fingerprints in what is a German film that ripped off frog films that ripped off Yank films. In an interview, Fassbinder differentiated the character he plays in Love Is Colder Than Death from all other classic crime films with the following insight regarding his nihilistic gangster persona, “Franz doesn’t have any backup—he’s a loner. Not like the great loners in the American flicks, though, where it’s never really clear to me why they’re loners. They’re just heroes, I guess. Franz is no hero. He’s primitive, just wants to work for himself, doesn’t want to hand over any of what he earns.” Indeed, Fassbinder, a man who once described himself as a ‘romantic anarchist,’ essentially plays himself as a reckless renegade of the hyper alienated and antagonistic sort, even among fellow crooks, who is more interested in doing his own thing than following an established gang code and making a big name for himself, despite it ultimately having deleterious and self-destructive results. A film with a timeless title that has influenced countless post-punk/darkwave/coldwave song titles and band names, Love Is Colder Than Death – the first film in Fassbinder's early black-and-white 'Gangster Film Trilogy,' preceding Gods of the Plague (1970) and The American Soldier (1970) – is the quintessential minimalistic kraut gangster flick set in a disillusioned, post-nationalistic Teutonic zeitgeist where every man is condemned to fight alone, especially in the metaphysical sense, whether he likes it or not. As protagonist Franz learns, having a friend, especially con friends, has more cons than benefits, especially when a jealous and extremely fertile woman is placed in the middle of it all.

 Criminal dilettante, petty pimp, and sometimes bank robber Franz (Fassbinder) falls into trouble when he refuses to join a multicultural organized crime enterprise called the Syndicate. A lone man of the intrinsically individualistic lone wolf persuasion, Franz is brutally beat in an anti-melodramatic Brechtian fashion after refusing to join the Syndicate as he has enough company already as he lives with his hooker girlfriend Johanna (Hanna Schygulla) – a wanton woman who wants marriage and stability despite being a lowly flesh-peddler. The Syndicate orders a stool pigeon by the name of Bruno (Ulli Lommel) to befriend Franz so he can keep tabs on him. Rather strangely, perennial loner Franz takes an instant liking to Bruno and even invites the Syndicate member to move in with him and Johanna. On top of sharing his apartment, Franz begins to share his woman with Bruno, but jealousy of the outsider taking away attention from her man, seemingly harmless cutesy girl Johanna ends up causing more trouble than the Syndicate ever could in her pernicious scheme to drive the two men apart. In between tedious trips to department stores that involve harassing a sales woman (Irm Hermann), including Fassbinder's nod to Hitchcock when his character tells the retailer that he is, "looking for round glasses like the cop in "Psycho" had," Bruno – a man who claims he killed his dad at the mere age of 12 via a vase smash to the head and became a gang leader by age 16 – commits a couple murders and pins them on his supposed pal Franz. Bruno also has plans to slay Johanna for the Syndicate, but little does he know that the quite literal femme fatale has different plans of a more elaborately evil sort. Bored with Bruno and mad at Franz for not marrying her, Johanna tips off the cops about a bank robbery that the two men have planned, thus resulting in the murder of the Ménage à trios and the death of a handsome two-faced traitor who is drunk on his own narcissism. Regarding Schygulla's character Johanna, Fassbinder stated the following in an interview, “Hanna’s the key to everything. You can tell that the character she plays is totally bogged down in bourgeois values—much, much worse than all the others. That’s what she wants to preserve, and that’s the reason she betrays Lommel to the police, because she’d rather be alone than be part of a threesome; that she just can’t handle.” Of course, like Fassbinder’s epic cinematic miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), the homoerotic subtext between Franz and Bruno is the most personal key in Fassbinder’s dark romantic gangland fantasy, where conspiring whores make for the most malignant force against man and his most forbidden and intangible dreams.

 As a man who worked as both a pimp and hustler in real-life during his teenage years, even pimping his young, dragged-out pal Udo Kier to foreign 'guest workers,' Rainer Werner Fassbinder, unlike most filmmakers who directed similarly themed works, actually lived out the gangster lifestyle he cinematically portrayed to a degree, even if in a rather gay fashion, and he had the following to say about the underworld lifestyle, “the gangster environment is a bourgeois setting turned on its head so to speak. My gangsters do the same things that capitalists do except they do them as criminals. The gangster’s goals are just as bourgeois as the capitalist’s.” Indeed, in the context of Love Is Colder Than Death in regard to art reflecting life and vice versa, Fassbinder is Franz and Fassbinder is Franz, albeit in a much more butch fashion than the damned director would later do in works like Fox and His Friends (1975) – a work where posh fags make for much more ruthless and wretched villains than buffoonish gangsters and flesh-flaunting femme fatales. Shot over a 24 day period in April 1969 in an ostensibly overexposed fashion on the dreary streets and in the sterile buildings of Munich, Love Is Colder Than Death premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in June 1969 and the screening concluded with a loud combination of jeers and cheers, including a number of hecklers yelling "dilettantism," yet Fassbinder approached the stage like a victorious dictator who had just conquered an enemy nation and had its leaders ceremoniously executed, thus signaling the arrival of post-WWII Germany’s most important and influential filmmaker. While I am no connoisseur of gangster flicks of any persuasion (although the sort featuring Guido philistines also makes for great laughs), Fassbinder’s Love Is Colder Than Death has an ingredient that makes it radically different from, say, Godard’s Breathless (1960) aka À bout de soufflé, which is having a soul as opposed to asinine and azoic posturing and bland Bogart fetishism. While I regard Love Is Colder Than Death as being far from one of Fassbinder’s greatest works, it does make for a nice novelty in seeing a cinematic genius during his most primitive stage and how he evolved into the idiosyncratic Übermensch auteur behind Berlin Alexanderplatz – one of the most important and ambitious cinematic works in all of film history.   Indeed, with the death of two of his three great loves via suicide as inspired by his own belligerent and neglectful behavior, as well as his own lonely demise a little over a decade after completing his first feature-length film, Love Is Colder Than Death has developed all the more meaning since its underwhelming premiere at the Berlinale over four decades ago.

-Ty E

Hitler: A Film from Germany

Without a doubt, aside from being the most hated person in contemporary history, Adolf Hitler – the Austrian-born Führer of the infamous Third Reich who settled for a more serious career in revolutionary nationalist politics after failing as an artist – is also one of the most cinematically depicted figures of film history, which is quite ironic considering he was a cinephile of sorts who had his own little theatre and personal film projectionist where he would apparently watch two or three films a day, with half-Jewish Austrian auteur Fritz Lang’s two-part silent Wagnerian epic Die Nibelungen (1924) being one of his favorite and most-watched films. Indeed, while Hitler is still portrayed in movies of all sorts, including mainstream Jewish Hollywood scat-comedies, such as Little Nicky (2000) starring neo-vaudevillian philistine Adam Sandler in which Hitler is dressed in a female maid's outfit and is repeatedly anally penetrated with a pineapple by Satan himself while in hell, as well as modern mainstream German epics like Downfall (2004) aka Der Untergang where the dead dictator's last days on earth are dramatized in a fairly objective manner, few films have taken the time to examine the effect he had on the nation, people, and culture he claimed to love so dearly yet ultimately destroyed in an apocalyptic fashion, but if there is a film that does to attempt this arduous and ambitious task and then some, it is most certainly Prussian auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 442-minute avant-garde 'biopic' Hitler: A Film from Germany aka Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland aka Our Hitler – a four part Franco-British-German co-production that was produced by ‘Germany’s most successful producer’ Bernd Eichinger (The Neverending Story, The Baader Meinhof Complex) and co-produced by the BBC. A strictly conservative work of the Teutonic romanticist persuasion, a circus announcer in pancake make-up states early on in Hitler: A Film from Germany that, “this is no left wing opportunist death-camp sex film. This is a film for us. It’s about war and genocide. Auschwitz as the battlefield of race war. Who does the world hold guilty? And what would Hitler be without us?” Of course, the more important question asked by Hitler: A Film from Germany is what is Germany without its historical myths, innate irrationalism, dark romanticism?! As director Syberberg quite lucidly yet epically and arcanely reveals with his Hitler: A Film from Germany, Germany is nothing without its myths and traditional culture and it was Adolf Hitler, the supposed 'savior' and Wagnerian Hero that Germans had always dreamed of since the beginning of their history – who literally rises from Richard Wagner’s tome in the film – who incorporated all the myths and traditions of Teutonic kultur in his propaganda and war campaign, thus ultimately irrevocably tainting them for subsequent unborn generations to come after the Fatherland’s defeat after the Second World War. Indisputably one of the most ambitious cinematic works ever made and one of the few examples of cinema as “Gesamtkunstwerk,” Hitler: A Film from Germany is a work where Syberberg did the seemingly aesthetically and politically inexplicable; or as he wrote himself, “I sought an aesthetic scandal: combining Brecht’s doctrine of epic theater with Richard Wagner’s musical aesthetics, cinematically conjoining the epic system as anti-Aristotelian cinema with the laws of a new myth.” 

 Where German prophet of Occidental decline Oswald Spengler left off with his final work Hour of Decision (1933) – a best seller that was eventually banned by the Third Reich, in part, due to its prediction of Germany’s destruction as a result of naïve optimism for National Socialism – Syberberg continues in Hitler: A Film from Germany – a work innately in tune with the Teutonic traditions that the allies sought to destroy and the Germans themselves did not think twice about throwing away because, after all, they were spared total extermination and you know what they say: “if you can't beat them, join them.” And, indeed, Germany, at least the western side, decided to adopt the cosmopolitanism, globalism, Hollywoodism, McWorldism, rationalism and all the other ‘isms’ that make the world mundanely ‘one’ as envisioned and foretold by great men of Jewish history ranging from Leon Trotsky to Henry Kissinger, but Herr Syberberg, a man who once stated about himself that he was, “conservative in a Prussian sense, of the classic school, without chewing gum and pinball, not for nothing raised in the age of Stalin” and a man of minor noble blood who had the good luck of growing up in Eastern Germany, thus missing the narcotizing effects of American mass-culture and capitalism, was able to forego Uncle Sam’s influence, which is quite apparent in Hitler: A Film from Germany – a work of postmodern pastiche Prussianism and post-Auschwitz high-camp Hitlerism that quite indisputably aesthetically exterminates any and every celluloid portrayal of Hitler that came before and after it. In many ways, Syberberg’s film is a cinematic manifesto on an epic scale that pleads with the viewer to move on in regards to the infamous legacy of Uncle Adolf – the main point arguably being that he exploited the Germanic myths from Goethe to Karl May and every kraut genius in between – because as the director wrote himself, “We know about the glory and misery of irrationalism; but without it, Germany is nothing but dangerous, sick, without identity, explosive—a wretched shadow of its possibilities. Hitler is to be fought, not with the statistic of Auschwitz or with sociological analyses of the Nazi economy, but with Richard Wagner and Mozart.” In Hitler: A Film from Germany, Syberberg reactivates the myths with a vivacious vengeance that blitzkriegs the “fourth wall” to let the audiences know he is speaking directly to them so they cannot weasel their way out confronting Hitler and the irreplaceable culture that he has helped to throwaway by making a central ingredient of his regime. Featuring Syberberg's young daughter, Amelie Syberberg, in the opening and concluding scenes (with her and a puppet representing "Germany" and "democracy"), the director ties his own child to the future of Germany, which is quite telling considering Fassbinder, a homosexual who never had children and the central figure of German New Cinema, only foresaw and accepted pessimism and death for the future of his nation, while the director of Hitler: A Film from Germany was arguably the only strong link between Germany's rich cultural past and its dubious future.

 A fundamentally nonlinear work featuring a number of long monologues, Hitler: A Film from Germany is essentially divided into four main segments including: Part I: Der Gral ("The Grail"), Part II: Ein deutscher Traum ("A German Dream"), Part III: Das Ende eines Wintermärchens ("The End of a Winter's Tale"), and Wir Kinder der Hölle ("We Children of Hell"). Part I is arguably, with the possible exception of the final segment, the most important part of Hitler: A Film from Germany and largely deals with Hitler’s cult of personality as disseminated through National Socialist propaganda. Utilizing gigantic cut-outs of German expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Algol: Tragedy of Power (1920), and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), Syberberg recounts Frankfurt school leftist Jew Siegfried Kracauer’s argument in his popular work in neo-Marxist pop-psychology From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) that the early works of Teutonic silent horror foretold the ‘cultural insanity’ and the rise of a mad men like Hitler. We also see Fassbinder superstar Harry Baer philosophizing on the death of the Occident while holding a King Ludwig II of Bavaria doll, a parody of Chaplin as Hitler from The Great Dictator (1940), Uncle Adolf performing cunninlingus on a blowup doll, Hitler as Napoleon, a lycanthrope with a nazi armband with human bodies in its mouth, and a variety of National Socialist propaganda images, including caricatures of Jews from Julius Streicher’s tabloid magazine Der Stürmer and images of Eva Braun going for scenic nature walks. Sadomasochistic fetishism is an intrinsic element of many images, thus illustrating both the S&M obsessions of both Hitler and the German people themselves, thereupon linking love and death – a theme taking to its fullest extreme in the no-budget arthouse splatter flick of aberrant Aryan auteur Jörg Buttgereit (Nekromantik, Der Todesking). One of the most iconic elements of Hitler: A Film from Germany, especially during the first segment, is the utilization of grotesque Nazi puppets that makes for the gross exaggerations of Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eva Braun, and Göring’s essences.  Unlike the hysterical Hebrew in Hollywood and the ethno-masochistic leftist krauts in the German film industry, Syberberg makes no attempt to disguise the sheer and utter subjectivity of his work, especially when dealing with Hitler and his gang.

As film scholar Anton Kaes wrote in his academic study From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (1992), “Syberberg acknowledges his debt to Wagner not only through numerous musical quotations, in particular from Rienzi, Hitler’s favorite opera, and from Götterdämmerung but also through the overall structure of his film: like the Ring cycle, Hitler consists of four parts. Given also Syberberg’s fascination with German mythology, it is not farfetched to regard his film as a continuation of Wagner’s project in the age of technical reproducibility.” Keeping Kaes' words in mind, it is not a stretch to say that Syberberg could also identify with Adolf Hitler – the Wagnerite and the artist – as the director even went so far as once admitting he ‘could understand’ being an SS man at Auschwitz who 'made himself hard' to fulfill a history mission, thereupon making Hitler: A Film from Germany what is quite arguably the closest attempt a filmmaker had made at understanding from ever angle, thus antagonistically going against the grain of the over-quoted Friedrich Nietzsche quote, "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."  Indeed, Syberberg's film in many ways resembles a Wagnerian scale Germanic holocaust of the audio-visual sort. One could also say one needs a certain ‘hardness’ to watch a film like Hitler: A Film from Germany – a virtual uncensored Faustian bachelors degree in not only everything related to Hitlerism and the mad mensch himself, but also German cultural history in general. With references to obscure events of National Socialist history, including Himmler’s sending of his personal astrologists to concentration camps, Hitler’s favorite films, the torture of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach’s toddler son by American GIs, how Hitler earned his beloved Iron Cross in the First World War after he was recommended for it by a German-Jewish superior officer named Hugo Gutmann, and other seemingly odd and contradictory anecdotes from history. In its eclectic portrayals of Hitler, from the perspective of characters both real and fictional, Hitler: A Film from Germany is the rare sort of film that would inspire both hatred and interest from both Zionist terrorist and Esoteric Hitlerites as a work that says just about what everyone would could say about the fallen Führer – a man who went from being a Viennese hobo to being voted “Man of the Year” in 1938 by Time Magazine and would go on to be the most hated and reviled person in the world. 

 In its utilization of actors of Syberberg’s ideological adversary Rainer Werner Fassbinder, including Harry Baer (Fassbinder’s right-hand man who oftentimes worked as his assistant director), Peter Moland, and the rather rotund Peter Kern, as well as Austrian Jew André Heller, Hitler: A Film from Germany, quite ironically, takes a rather iconoclastic approach to promoting the restoration of German culture, Teutonic irrationalism, and Faustian myths. In fact, Syberberg goes as far as using quasi-pornographic S&M of elderly naked women grasping a ‘scale of justice’ (one side of the scale holding large dildos and the other, doll heads) in a ‘last judgement court’ against Hitler to get his point across because, while he may be a Prussian, he is certainly no prude because in his view it is the mainstream leftists who are callous, cowardly, and impenetrably close-minded. As he once wrote, “Germany was spiritually disinherited and dispossessed; anything that could not be justified by sociology and social policies was hushed up. But how can they comprehend Hölderlin if they have relocated him as a revolutionary between Lessing and Marx, how could Novalis survive as a model for the American road movie; and without irrationality, no Die Räuber [The Brigands] by Schiller and no fairy tales and no folk songs and no Runge. Give everything to Hitler and Goebbels? And is Caspar David Friedrich right-wing and fascist? Is irrationalism right-wing or left-wing? Have they forgotten that their venerated Ernst Bloch was the man who, in the last line of his The Spirit of Utopia, spoke of homeland (Heimat), the word banished from Germany? And that it was he who, in those days, when faced with the Nazis, warned about undernourishing the mass imagination? What would Judiasm be without its Cabbala? Merely Einstein? And what would Einstein be without music, without German Romanticism and Classicism? We live in a country without a homeland.”

 In the final segment of Hitler: A Film from Germany, Syberberg satirizes the post-WWII cult of Hitler where both ex-Nazis and Jews in Hollywood ironically cashed in on the Third Reich. Indeed, for all of Steven Spielberg’s hatred of Hitler and promotion of the Holocaust, he certainly made a killing off those Nazi killings and were not for Hitler, he might not have as many vacation houses or even his beloved holy land, the Jewish state of Israel. Hitler: A Film from Germany is, most importantly, a film about the Germans for once and not the Jews, who are certainly not doing too bad nowadays, but the Aryans are a decidedly dying race, who have become a group of freedom-fetishizing pacifists and hedonists with the sort of slave-morality they used to accuse their enemies of having. Towards the conclusion of Hitler: A Film from Germany, one hears Thomas Mann's melodramatic statement from New Year’s 1938, “God help our darkened and misused land and teach it to make its peace with itself and its world.” The narrator then retorts to Mann’s quote with, “What would he say today? Or our children tomorrow? Seeing what we have done with our freedom and ourselves: Soulless dwarf people in the dead plastic womb of an empty doll face are the mirrors of our cities and our language; and they created gods in this image. The end game of our existence today, a new Family of Man, in the inhuman ready-made face of our freedom, which we have gambled away. Freedom without a face….Hitler, here is your victory!” Indeed, World War II was Judea’s victory with the Aryan apocalypse and if the Germanic goy can learn anything from the Jew, it is that guilt is unnecessary and debilitating baggage of the decidedly defeated and dead kind. After all, when was the last time you heard a Hebrew apologize for the doings of a mass murderer of their own ilk, such as failed bourgeois Trotsky or a Mongol apologize for the sins of Genghis Khan?! While it takes the confirmation that Mr. anti-Semite Adolf Hitler really had Jewish ancestry and/or was a homo, or that modern day Zionist Jews are “National Socialist” engaged in ethnic cleaning for modern day Germans to shed their guilt?  As a certain totenkopf-obsessed neo-folk group used as the title of their first full-length album: The Guilty Have No Pride!

 In his posthumously published work Diary of a Man in Despair (1947) – a rather unconventional journal of the writer’s hatred of the Third Reich – Fritz Reck-Malleczewen, a personal friend of Oswald Spengler and a good Prussian like Syberberg who was executed at Dachau concentration camp via a bullet to the neck on February 16, 1945, wrote the following words, “Nationalism, no matter how loudly defended today, is almost finished, and the coup de grace will come in this most mob-like of all wars. Tomorrow it will be behind us, an ugly, sweaty dream. The idea of a united Europe was not always upheld by me, but I know now that we can no longer afford the luxury of considering it a mere idea. Europe must either make any further wars impossible, or this cradle of great ideas will see its cathedrals pulverized, and its landscape turned into a plain.” Indeed, Europe is united today in technocratic and economic slavery as a passive cuckold of America, its cultural vitality and spirit were all but destroyed in the Second World War, and cultural ingredients and cultural producers are virtually nonexistent there today, thus making Syberberg’s plea for a return to seem rather futile, especially in a strictly German context. In the final paragraph he wrote for the introduction of his screenplay for Hitler: A Film from Germany, Syberberg stated, “The final silence of childlike melancholy in a starry tear with a distant freedom fanfare beyond the mountains. That is the end of this Hitler, who is now a film. But how far we have gone in these seven hours of cinema, what things we have gone through and what things we have had to see and hear…” Indeed, if any film could have inspired the same passion that Wagner’s opera did for Hitler in dreaming of the Third Reich, it is most certainly Hitler: A Film from Germany, but it seems that few people had the eyes, ears, and soul to properly listen.  Like most modern day European nations, Germany is a sparkling Teutonic toilet for nations of the third world, which actively promotes supplanting its native population with dusky-skinned untermensch, and whose indigenous German women are far too concerned with their careers rather than child-bearing, just as German men are too interested in Asian whores to spawn any children.  From Spengler to Syberberg, Hitler: A Film from Germany is more of an elaborately epic elegy of an Gesamtkunstwerk for Germania than a call for rebirth in Germany, especially when watched over 35 years after its release. Even Syberberg seems to have changed, although where his cuckold kinsmen have only become all the more ethno-masochistic and self-denigrating, the filmmaker seems closer to Hitler than ever, at least judging by a statement in 1990, “Whoever joined the Jews and the leftists was successful, and it did not necessarily have anything to do with love, or understanding, or even inclination. How could Jews tolerate that, being that these others only wanted power.”

 As for old Uncle Adolf, Syberberg makes the final judgment via Hitler: A Film from Germany: “You are the executor of Western civilization, democratically self-elected, voluntarily, with the victory of money, of materialism over us. The plague of our century. The wretched artist as a hang-man degenerating into a politician, voluntarily, cheered as no man ever before. How can I make this clear to you and to me, and me and all the children and grandchildren, who didn’t know all this, this previous life, which they have all forgotten by now, corrupted by the new legacy of your time…The words “magic” and “myth” and “serving” and “ruling,” “Führer,” “authority,” are ruined, are gone, exiled to eternal time. And we are snuffed out. Nothing more will grow here. An entire nation stopped existing, in the diaspora of the mind and the elite. The New Ones were designed, developed, the New Man is here. The plague of materialism has won out in East and West! Congratulations!”  Of course, with MTV aesthetic garbage like Run Lola Run (1998) directed by Tom Tykwer – a mutilcultural-friendly work of crack-laced cinematic ADHD featuring swarthy krauts that would be at home in Iran and the sort of anti-kultur/anti-race audio-visual grotesquery that would wet the panties of a raver whore in heat – I think it is safe to say that even fewer Germans will understand Syberberg's message in Hitler: A Film from Germany today.  Undoubtedly, if Europe and its colonies (as well as the rest of the world for that matter) were wiped out in a nuclear holocaust tomorrow, it would most certainly not be that big of a loss, at least culturally speaking.  As Syberberg teaches us in Hitler: A Film from Germany, a people and nation is nothing without its culture, its myths, its irrational, its essence...

 Indeed, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, as far as today is concerned, is the last true ‘German filmmaker,’ a man who, unlike his cinematic compatriots of the German New Cinema, basked in the operas of Wagner, the writings of Nietzsche and Schiller, the paintings of Franz von Stuck and Caspar David Friedrich, the poetry of Heinrich von Kleist and Stefan George, and the ancient Norse mythology of the ancient Germanic people. Indeed, while German New Cinema master auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder found his self-destructive Weltanschauung in the writings of modernist German Jew Alfred Döblin, barely bothering to scratch the surface of his forsaken Fatherland's history, Syberberg dug deep and found the hole in the collective soul of Germania and tried to fill it by creating such celluloid masterworks as Hitler: A Film from Germany – a work that even Susan Sontag – a woman who once wrote, “The white race is the cancer of human history,” – had to admit, “is on another scale from anything one has seen on film. It is work that demands a special kind of attention and partisanship; and invites being reflected upon, reseen. The more one recognizes of its stylistic references and lore, the more the film vibrates. (Great art in the mode of pastiche invariably rewards study, as Joyce affirmed by daring to observe that the ideal reader of his work would be someone who could devote his life to it.) Syberberg’s film belongs in the category of noble masterpieces which ask for fealty and can compel it. After seeing Hitler, a Film from Germany, there is Syberberg’s film—and then there are the other films one admires. (Not too many these days, alas.) As was said ruefully of Wagner, he spoils our tolerance for the others.”  Indeed, such a cinematically and culturally epic work like Hitler: A Film from Germany almost ruins the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter for me and if it was not for the former's 15 1/2 hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), I would have no problem stating that the whole of German New Cinema is totally irrelevant when compared to Syberberg's achievement in pomo Hitler-hating of the rather rare right-wing Prussian Wagnerite sort.  With no great philosopher and poets in the "the land of poets and thinkers," Syberberg and his celluloid magna opera Hitler: A Film from Germany make for a worthy substitute as a work that combines all the cultural ingredients of Teutonic history that preceded Hitler and prove that the damn krauts were racially and culturally superior, but made the blasphemous mistaking of bragging about it via an Austrian untermensch of the far from blond beast (but certainly Faustian) sort.  Indeed, Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany is nothing, if not one of the most traditionally Germanic films ever made, thus making it in total and violent opposition to what everything Hollywood stands for, and, in turn, making a truly noble piece of high art.

-Ty E

Wild Side

Admittedly, the first time I saw Scottish libertine auteur Donald Cammell’s cinematic swansong Wild Side (1996), I could see why the film drove him to commit suicide, as I felt it was an ugly film about ugly people doing ugly things with the aesthetic, thematic, and erotic potency of the sort of second rate Abel Ferrara flick and certainly not a film worthy of being held in such high esteem as the director's previous films Performance (1970), White of the Eye (1987), or even Demon Seed (1977), but I recently decided to give the work a second look as I have come to appreciate the ill-fated filmmaker’s work all the more as the years have past and a film depicting Christopher Walken as a sexually degenerate money launderer surely cannot be half bad, yet, I am sad to say my opinion has hardly changed. According to Cammell’s young wife China Kong, who wrote the short story the film was based on, as well as co-writing the script, just as she did for his previous feature White of the Eye, the reason she and her damned director husband decided to tackle Wild Side (originally titled “The Grey Area”) was because they, “wanted to understand financial people. One of Donald’s best friends [Ben Jacober] was a banker for Rothschilds, so he was familiar with this mentality to an extent. It was a bit of a send up, to tell you the truth, of financial people, of our understanding of them.” Indeed, if one thing is sure about the ‘financial people’ of Wild Side, aside from the fact they are parasitic perverts of the strikingly soulless sort whose sexual degeneracy is only transcended by their love of cash, it is they are totally incapable of sustaining any semblance of a normal romantic relationship, which, not unsurprisingly, can also be said of director Donald Cammell – a pathological philanderer of the first order who was apparently known to charm both women and even men into his bed. Probably more importantly, Cammell directed Wild Side as a ‘gift’ to his young wife China (who was 26 years younger than her husband), but, ultimately, the director felt he failed thus contributing to his somewhat predictable suicide. Of course, it was when Cammell was fired from Wild Side (after a cut of the film had already been sent to Cannes) and taken over by producers and edited into a piece of totally tasteless second rate celluloid erotica (which originally aired on HBO in 1995 with the director being credited as "Franklin Brauner") that he was thrown off the deep end and put a bullet in his brain on 24 April 1996.  Apparently, the producers of Wild Side felt Cammell and his editor Frank Mazzola's original cut was too "arty" and Hebraic producer Elie Cohn, like a true smut-peddler, concluded the flash-cuts featured in the film were, "fucking up a perfectly fine lesbian scene." In tribute to Cammell and to fulfill his original cinematic wet dream, Mazzola and the director’s widow China released a posthumous “director’s cut” of Wild Side that was critically revered, but, personally, I think it is a bit a of puffery to describe the film as anything remotely worthy of being described a masterpiece, unless the idea of Christopher Walken buggering a buff brown bohunk pleases you. Make no mistake about it, Wild Side is a work of would-be-high-class trash where one is supposed to believe that Sapphic miscegenation makes for the most of truest of loves and that sex and power are one in the same.

  In Wild Side, sex, money, and power are indistinguishable from one another and those with money are doing the fucking and those without it are getting fucked. Towards the conclusion of the film, hotshot money launderer Bruno Buckingham (Christopher Walken) – a repugnant yet unintentionally humorous creep who incessantly sports silk pajamas as some sort of Guido-like Hugh Hefner, except with long black hair and a more honest sense of sleaziness – goes to sodomize his brutish underling and denies he is a homosexual stating, “This is not about sex, it’s about power,” as if he is some sort of pussy-deprived prison inmate who is desperate to stick his dick in a warm hole and needs an argument to rationalize his latent homo side. And, indeed, batshit crazy Bruno loves to demonstrate his power by buying high-dollar callgirls, thus leading him to a fateful meeting with Sapphic seductress Alex Lee (played by then-unknown, pre-dyke Anne Heche) – a loan officer in Foreign Accounts at a Long Beach bank who moonlights as a pricey prostitute under the pseudonym Johanna so she can pay her mortgage. Bruno takes an instant liking to Alex’s saucy attitude upon their first ‘date,’ but suspects she might be an “FBI slut” of some sort, so he orders his chauffer Tony (Steven Bauer of Scarface (1983)), who is really a FBI agent looking to bust his ‘boss’ and bust a load in his boss' whores, to drive her back to her hotel and try to screw her (apparently Feds only screw the ‘big dicks’ and not the ‘little dicks’), which she declines to do. Being a conspiring cop with seemingly unlimited resources, Tony finds Alex’s address and surprises her when she gets home and rampantly rapes her from behind in a most domineering fashion, but makes the seemingly idiotic mistake of mentioning, aside from being a devout Catholic with immense guilt who is looking to save his soul, his true profession as a federal agent in the process. Not long after, Alex starts a sexual relationship with Bruno’s ex-wife/girlfriend Virginia (Joan Chen of David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and Lust, Caution (2007) directed by Ang Lee) – a bisexual Chinese woman (modeled after Cammell’s wife China, who made out with potential lead actress during screen tests for Wild Side) who was raised in a convent – thus ushering in a cryptic-Ménage à trios. Alex is ordered by Tony (who can bust her as a prostitute) to expect an Asian woman (Virginia) to open an account at her bank job because Bruno is using her as a way to recover $169 million dollars (a special number that makes for an all time low in the filmmaker's 'symbolism') he has in an inaccessible account and wants to use the new dummy account setup by his ex-wife to somehow transfer it to a foreign account. Indeed, Alex bumps into Virginia at the bank, but before they know it, they passionately embrace and the frigid loan officer realizes she is really a lipstick lesbian and falls in love with the yellow woman, hence her disgust with dicks of both the literal and figurative sort. Bruno continues to bugger Alex and also uses her as his ‘protégé’ in getting back his $169 million, but things go awry when she admits to Virginia that she is a prostitute who is also banging her ex-husband, thus resulting in the East Asian erotomaniac’s failed attempt at suicide via drug overdose. Bruno later catches Tony trying to rape Alex, so he tries to rape the rapist, but Virginia shows up after awakening from her suicide-inspired slumber and aborts the homoerotic anal invasion. Alex and Virginia make up and plot an escape overseas with the money and live a luxurious life as lesbian lovers, but Bruno and Tony have different plans. 

Frankly, it is hard for me think of another film with such an unsympathetic cast of characters as Wild Side – one of only a handful of films where I was rooting for the grizzly and ungodly deaths of all the characters in the film via AIDS or drive-by shooting. Aesthetically and thematically speaking, Wild Side is indisputably Donald Cammell’s most artistically vapid work and features next to nil of the references to art, culture, and philosophy that his previous films are famous for as a work that, in terms of artistic integrity and geniune eroticism, does not even compare to the masterpieces of the Golden Age of Porn, like Through the Looking Glass (1976) and The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976). Almost entirely set in shadowy and darkened rooms, Wild Side has a strikingly superficial set-up that resembles the sort of direct-to-DVD neo-noir flicks that no one has ever seen, so it should be no surprise few know of Cammell's cinematic swansong today. Admittedly, Christopher Walken gives a top-notch performance in Wild Side that seems to be a perverse parody of the sleazy and psychopathic gangster roles he is best known for, but it is hard to overlook his aesthetically-degrading dirty old man wardrobe and repulsive midlife crisis cool guy haircut. To her credit, Anna Heche is quite convincing as a conspiring cunt-licker of a cunt and Joan Chen is not half bad either as a chinky 'cunning linguist,' but that does not change the fact that I found Wild Side about as interesting as a filler episode of The Sopranos (1999-2007) or Boardwalk Empire (2010-present). Of course, I can respect Cammell for attempting to portray banksters as debauched as possible, but I sincerely doubt any member of the Rothschild family can ‘assert’ himself like Mr. Walken, even when he has a retarded 12-year-old boy grunge haircut, but I don’t find it far-fetched that money launderer’s kosher cocks gets hard for cash and buying high dollar goy gals.

Indeed, it is nothing short of a shame that Cammell killed himself for Wild Side – a film that would have never reached the level of cinematic greatness he had hoped for, no matter how many jaded jump-cuts and fetishistic flashback sequences editor Frank Mazzola added to the film as you cannot polish a turd, especially one aspiring to be extra-erotic. But then again, if my wife was a woman whose idea for a film was about a mixed-race lesbian couple who kick two alpha-males' asses and whatnot, I would probably have more problems than getting the final cut for an over-stylized softcore flick with sub-witty dialogue and would-be-wild-and-wanton imagery. If one learns anything from Wild Side, it is that banking turns Jews and wasps into cosmopolitan cuckolds of Chinese femme fatales. Banker or not, it seems director Donald Cammell fell under the same spell for salacious and Sapphic soy sauce and it seems to have affected his judgment as a filmmaker because who can say with a straight face that the self-slaughtering Scotsman gave his greatest ‘performance’ with Wild Side?! 

-Ty E

Strike Back

Although I used to be a huge connoisseur of old school punk/hardcore music from the late-1970s/early-1980s and still am to a very minor degree, I have always had a complete and utter disgust for the common defeatist and pathological passive attitudes of punks, who seem to think having a ridiculously retarded haircut and making themselves as aesthetically repugnant as possible in appearance is some sort of grand political statement, as if anyone cares if they die in a gutter with their pants down and a needle in their dick.  After all, it is no coincidence that guys like "Donny the Punk," who put up no resistance when getting routinely raped by other man in jail, are also called "punks." Luckily, I recently discovered a kraut punk flick with the sensible message of "might is right" entitled Strike Back (1981) aka Kalt wie Eis aka Punk Angels aka Cold as Ice directed by Swiss cult auteur Carl Schenkel (Dracula Blows His Cool, Knight Moves) with an innately active nihilistic (as opposed to the passive nihilism of typical punk junk) philosophy that is heavy on visceral violence and passionate carnality about a criminally-inclined punk rocker named Dave who never tolerates being 'punked' by anyone and makes a hasty escape from prison after slitting his wrists, so he can see his girl (who has stopped visiting him) and seek revenge on the glorified gangster businessman that caused him to land in the slammer. A rare quasi-artsy exploitation action-thriller set in Berlin, West Germany that would anticipate the anti-arthouse shockers of Eckhart Schmidt (Der Fan aka Trance, Loft, Alpha City), Strike Back owes some of its aesthetic influences to "New Munich Group" auteur filmmakers like Rudolf Thome (Supergirl – Das Mädchen von den Sternen, Rote Sonne aka Red Sun) and the gritty urban realist flicks of lone wolf filmmakers Roland Klick (Bübchen, Supermarkt), but especially the degenerate sounds and styles of the Teutonic punk and Neue Deutsche Welle subcultures that were popular in the Fatherland at that time. Featuring appearances and performances from groups like Neonbabies, Malaria!, Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten, Rainy Day Women, Thorax Wach, The Birthday Party, Tempo, and many more, Strike Back is more of an exquisitely exploitative, post-Baader-Meinhof Group work against West German plutocracy and equipped with a punk rock fashion sense as opposed to an Americanized p.c.p.r. (politically correct punk rock) pussy flick made-for-punk-by-punks, thus, not unlike Paul Morrissey’s sardonic anti-punk satire Madame Wang's (1981), Strike Back does not suffer the sort of dogmatic gospel according to Jello Biafra that makes similarly themed works from the same zeitgeist seem rather poorly aged and anachronistic today. Like a putrid puss-filled zit on the ass of Deutschland, Strike Back features a patently pessimistic man who has been wronged and cheated by everyone he knows and he is quite literally about to explode, but not without taking a couple of people with him as a sort of figurative punk rock Grim Reaper who has no problem reaping what he sows and vice versa. 

 Pessimistic punk rock pretty boy Dave Balko (played by Dave Balko), a dude with bleach blond hair as opposed to a xenophiliac neo-Injun mohawk, has a hard time dealing with the incessant isolation of prison so he dumps his trashcan out on his prison cell floor so he can find his trusty old razorblade and slits his wrists so that he can at least be guaranteed that he will not have to spend another second in penal purgatory. Indeed, as a man who has “NO FUTURE” scribbled on his cell wall, Dave has no delusions about the fact that his life is irreparably ruined and things do not get any better for him when he inadvertently kills a cop while escaping from prison while en route to the hospital after his botched attempt at seppuku. Indeed, a man who has survived a serious attempt at self-slaughter and has managed to escape from one of Berlin’s heavily secure penitentiaries, Dave undoubtedly has some minor luck on his side, but it is probably owed more to his heightened sense of self-preservation, even if he is an anarchic punk who makes a daily task of putting his life in danger, than kiss from punk rock kismet. Dave’s main reason for breaking out of prison is to reunite with his beloved Corinna (Brigitte Wöllner, Playboy Miss August 1980), who neglected to write to and visit him when he was incarcerated, but he also has a score to settle with a prick Polack gangster named Kowalski (respected German actor Otto Sander of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire (1987)), who the pissed punk used to work for and was ultimately responsible for his imprisonment. Dave goes to a punk club owned by one of his friends so he can find the whereabouts of both Corinna and Kowalski and goes on his merry way, but not before brutally beating two biker-like philistines who belong to special K’s gang of barbaric buffoons. Dave eventually meets up with and spends a salacious night with Corinna and finds out she is pregnant with his baby and that she now works as a paid whore for a corrupt corporate gangster named Dr. Hoffmann (Rolf Eden of Eddy Saller’s Shameless (1968) aka Schamlos and Rosa von Praunheim’s Rote Liebe - Wassilissa (1982)). The next day, Dave has a brutal fight with Kowalski that seems damn near as long as the one between the two protagonists of John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) and he finally gets his well earned cash after hanging his ex-boss from a hook and nearly beating him to death. Unfortunately, Dave makes the mistake of stopping by Corinna’s work and he is nearly beaten an inch away from his life by Herr Hoffmann’s paid goons, even having his leg ran over and broken in the process. Dave’s friends nurse him back to health while he spends his days and nights sitting in front of the boobtube learning more about the police’s search for him as a fugitive and his adversaries Kowalski and Hoffmann; both of whom are in trouble with the law as well. When Corinna is gang-raped and maliciously mutilated by Kowalski’s street soldiers, a group of new wave leather-fags of sorts on phantom motorcycles, she calls her big bad boss Hoffmann for help, thus going over to the side of the enemy. Feeling hopelessly betrayed and without anything to lose except a life not worth living, Dave buys a stylish new motorcycle and attaches a tank of gasoline to his body so he can go out in a blaze of glory and take his enemies to hell with him. 

 No junky punk loser like punk rock icons Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders, or G.G. Allin nor a man that is unable to survive being run over by a car like decidedly dead-boy Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys, angst-ridden anti-hero Dave Balko at least realizes that if he is going to waste his life that he is at least going to take Berlin’s biggest ghetto robber baron with him as a true ‘punk rock anti-hero’ that battles the violent anarcho-tyranny of the state with violence, thus fighting like with like and fire with fire.  For all the idle talk they do about the pros of anarchy and the cons of government, punks seem to neglect to comprehend that 'anarchy' is oftentimes sired by governments and there are no greater anarchists in Strike Back then 'anarcho-capitalists' Kowalski and Hoffmann.  Thankfully, unlike Penelope Spheeris’s celluloid punk rock cult classic Suburbia (1984), Strike Back – a work that carries its simple yet effective philosophy in its English title – is not a work that wallows in a pathetic punk rock pity party where punkers are portrayed as defenseless victims of rabid Reagnite rednecks. Featuring footage of Blixa Bargeld performing some particularly pretentious and distinctly degenerate Teuton chant on a broken children’s keyboard in a posh art gallery and members of Malaria recording rather ridiculously performed vocals for their song “Kämpfen und Siegen” at a seedy recording studio, Strike Back also makes for a curious celluloid cultural artifact of kraut punk rock and Neue Deutsche Welle that reminds viewers that, for better or worse, the authoritarian krauts were typically more anarchic in their art than their American counterparts. Indeed, although in terms of cinematic art, Strike Back is not even worth of being compared to Fassbinder’s filmic feces, I would be lying if I did not admit that this piece of primitive punk rock celluloid art brought me back to my teenage days of unrefined hate for society and the state and my love for primitive kultur.

-Ty E

White of the Eye

While most fans of his work would ultimately agree that his directorial debut Performance (1970) – a counter-culture cult classic he co-directed with British auteur Nicholas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Track 29) – was the greatest film of the ill-fated Scottish filmmaker's career, painter-turned-filmmaker Donald Cammell (Demon Seed, Wild Side) would still manage to direct one of the most aesthetically artful and underrated serial killers flicks ever made, White of the Eye (1987), before he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1996. Based on the the virtually unknown novel Mrs. White (1987) written by conservative mystery novelists Andrew and Laurence Klavan (but released under transsexualized pen name “Margaret Tracy”) and co-penned by the director’s young Asian wife China Kong (daughter of Chinese actress Anita Loo), who also appears in the film in a small role and who the filmmaker started a romantic relationship with when she was still jail bait (they got married when she was 18 and he was already 44!), White of the Eye follows a suave and strapping family man who also happens to moonlight as a psychopathic killer with an unquenchable thirst for murdering beauteous women in a rather ritualistic fashion in an aesthetically and thematically subversive cinematic work featuring magnificent murder scenes that could be described as a totally transcendental form of celluloid high art. As someone who began his career as a society portrait painter, Cammell lends a certain refinement to the kaleidoscopic kill scenes, thus making for a rare cinematic work where a curious combination of beautiful broads, buckets of blood, and barbaric brutality make for a singularly breathtaking cinematic experience of the luxurious libertine sort that will make more than a marginal portion of viewers ashamed at themselves for basking in the bloodlustful show. In fact, White of the Eye wantonly yet wondrously wallows in moral dubiousness, so much so that wife of the malevolent anti-hero refuses to turn in her man after learning that he is a murderously misogynistic, coldblooded killer, which upset certain female audience members at a 1988 UCLA screening due to what they saw as implausible and totally unthinkable, thus director Cammell responded with the following explanation, “I thought it would be more interesting to have her deeply in love and, when she realized he was a psychopath, forced to decide whether to abandon him, or hang on in there and confront him with it and continue to love him, even up to the point where it degenerates in bestiality.” Indeed, aside from being an uncommonly sexual and succulently stylized serial killer flick, White of the Eye is a morbidly dark romance full of psychosexual passion and perversity that portrays the killer as an executioner of both love and life as an aberrant, ultra-masculine Don Juan figure who never ceases to charm, even up until the erotically-charged, explosive ending and a work described by director Donald Cammell as an, “artistic study of man's need to destroy.”

Paul White (David Keith) may seem like a dumb hick upon a superficial glance, but he is really a cultivated country boy who loves the music of Mahler just as much as he loves murdering wild beasts and resplendent mistresses and whose murder scenes are described by an art connoisseur of a police detective as being like, "post-cubist Picasso." A respected sound expert who installs hi-fi stereo systems in the mansions of wealthy patrons in the Arizona desert, Paul has the perfect modus operandi for slaughtering opulent women in their own homes, but, rather unfortunately, he owns a rare pair of truck tires that ultimately link him to a crime scene where the same tread marks as his own are found by police in the dirt driveway of a mutilated woman’s home. The genetic son (inherited "taints" are a secondary theme of the film) of a criminal embezzler, Paul began his life as a juvenile delinquent with a rap sheet a mile long, but over the years he became both more intellectual yet viciously visceral, henceforth making an art of killing. Unfortunately for him, Paul managed to fall in love with a New York City chick named Joan (Cathy Moriarty) who he did not have the desire to exterminate when looking into the white of her eyes, thus he eventually married her and they had a daughter. Paul met Joan when she and her then-boyfriend Mike DeSantos (Alan Rosenberg) were travelling through Arizona and both of the NYC natives become intrigued by the strikingly stoic, red-blooded redneck. Naturally, considering Mike is a cosmopolitan beta-male who postures himself as an urban bad boy, Joan falls head over heels in love with true blue bad ass Paul – a macho psychopath with a devilish charm who literally has gorgeous women begging to bone him. Although Paul has most of the townspeople from his Arizona hometown vouching for his personal integrity and professionalism, the suave serial killer has a black policeman named Detective Charles Mendoza (Art Evans) on his back who is a dilettante art critic who can detect his bloody artistic signature, not to mention trouble from his wife’s ex-boyfriend Mike and a wealthy and wanton mistress who is looking for a booty call. Detective Mendoza brings both Paul and Joan in for questioning, but the killer has an alibi in the form of supposedly spending an erotic evening with his mistress, thus causing his wife to learn about his extramarital infidelity in the process.

 Like any great method actor caught in a serious shitstorm, Mike begs for forgiveness from Joan, but she inevitably finds the souvenir body parts of his victims hidden under their bathtub. Not unsurprisingly, Paul loses his cool and reveals his nihilistic philosophy and anti-woman Weltanschauung after being revealed to be a lurid ladykiller, proclaiming to his petrified wife, “This is scientific fact. You see, the female of the species is the main reason that evolution is turned inside out.” In a state of megalomaniacal messianic fever, Paul also proclaims to be the “chosen” one who has been sent to put the fairer sex “out of their misery.” Blinded by love, Joan blames herself for Paul’s insanity, stating, “I must have made you feel all alone” and she even makes the mistake of neglecting to report her pathologically homicidal husband’s sinister crimes to the police. Not long after, Paul becomes totally berserk and covers his face with red paint that makes him look like some sort of unhinged Apache samurai and decides he must kill his wife and daughter. The mother and daughter escape, but Paul eventually finds Joan in an abandoned quarry, but ex-boyfriend Mike rescues her and takes the serial killer hostage, thus resulting in a final showdown between the two diametrically opposed men: one being a deracinated and decadent city boy who would perish if he had to spend a month surviving on his instincts in the woods and the other being a primal warrior with a wolfish lust for blood who is trapped in the wrong millenium. In the end, Joan seems more perturbed by the fact she never truly understood Mike than the fact he was a bestial manhunter who killed countless women and attempted to kill her and their daughter.

Indeed, like serial killer anti-hero Mike, White of the Eye director Donald Cammell was a sexually promiscuous man who had a proclivity for charming and cheating on countless women and eventually going out in a blaze of glory by his own hand. In fact, despite the fact that his biographers said there is no evidence to support it, apparently Mr. Cammell, like one of Paul’s victims, watched himself die after he requested his wife China put a mirror up to his face during his final moments of life after putting a bullet in his brain. And, of course, one cannot forget during the final moments of White of the Eye, Paul boasts to his weaker adversary that, “I did something with my life. I left my mark,” and I am sure Cammell felt the same way after directing one of the most aesthetically subversive and morally ambiguous serial killer films ever made that is in the philosophical spirit of thinkers as diverse as Robert Ardrey, Georges Bataille, and Aleister Crowley (whose lap Cammell sat on as a little boy as he was a friend of his father), even if he only managed to direct a mere four feature-length cinematic works during his near four decades as a filmmaker. As someone who was apparently enamored with Apache Indian legends, Cammell offered the following meaning for the title of the film, which was taken from a Southern Athabaskan phrase, and, in turn, his intended effective he hoped the work would have on the filmgoers, "the phrase "white of the eye" described those who look too closely into the eye of violence and how being a witness leaves a mark upon the viewer." Unfortunately, Donald Cammell, an apparently arrogant ‘artiste’ who self-destructively destroyed more film projects than actually fulfilling them during his relatively short life, would never and will probably never get his due as a fierce and formidable auteur, but as Robert Cettl wrote in his book Serial Killer Cinema (2003) regarding White of the Eye, “Like The Stepfather, it was a genuinely disturbing thriller that was considered to have been unfairly overlooked in the wake of such ‘safe’ thrillers as Fatal Attraction and Jagged Edge.” Of course, as a work that portrays a rural rebel as a cultivated and sophisticated killer as opposed to a half-retarded coward that resents city folk and makes them 'squeal like a pig' while getting buggered in the bum, as well as a film that portrays all women as more desiring of virile and violent European-American apha-males as opposed to scrawny and sarcastic NYC Semite-like beta-males any day of the week, White of the Eye does not exactly feature the sort of propagandistic conventions that tend to be utilized by Hollywood, thus it was naturally shunned by lesser men.  Undoubtedly, after watching White of the Eye, one gets the feeling that Hannibal Lecter was hardly a real man.

-Ty E