Hannah Arendt

Popular German New Cinema auteur Margarethe von Trotta (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Rosenstrasse) has always had a peculiar proclivity for taking beauteous blonde Aryan actresses and making them seem as sexually unappealing, frigid, and soulless as possible, turning Fassbinder’s leading lady Hanna Schygulla (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen) into a pedantic feminist literature professor in her film Sheer Madness (1983) aka Heller Wahn and statuesque beauty Barbara Sukowa (Berlin Alexanderplatz, M. Butterfly) into the most horrendous of Hebrew hag communists in Rosa Luxemburg (1986) aka Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg, the latter of which she received the German Film Award (Bundesfilmpreis) in 1986 for her bizarre philo-Semitic efforts, so it should be no surprise she did the same for her latest flick Hannah Arendt (2012), albeit with more interesting and surprising results. Once again featuring Barbara Sukowa in the lead aesthetically degrading role of a historically controversial butch Jewess, Hannah Arendt is a Hollywood-like biopic that depicts the controversy regarding German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt’s groundbreaking book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), a work written for The New Yorker that not only offended world Jewry due to its depiction of National Socialist SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Adolf Eichmann—a naughty Nazi who fled Germany after the Second World War and was dubiously captured by members of the Israeli Mossad and ultimately executed in 1962 via hanging after being found guilty of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ at an Israeli show trial that was a major media event—as a boring bureaucrat who did not genuinely hate Jews and was merely ‘following orders’ in his deportation of Jews to concentration camps as if he was the manager at a fast food restaurant like McDonalds, but also because she revealed the imperative role that Jewish leaders, especially Zionist Jewish leaders (who wanted Jews out of Germany just as much as the Nazis and sent to Palestine), had in voluntarily collaborating with the Nazis during the holocaust. To add to the hostility felt by her fellow Hebrews, Arendt was also the protégé and mistress of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1933 and never expressed an inkling of regret nor remorse for being arguably the greatest ‘National Socialist’ thinker who has ever lived. A sort of real-life ‘Romeo and Juliet’ story among philosophers, Arendt kept in contact with Heidegger for the rest of her life, even after he become a Nazi and she spent a brief period of time in Camp Gurs concentration camp in Vichy, France before escaping to America, and her relationship with the Aryan philosopher sparked her famous concept about “the banality of evil” where evil acts are not typically carried out by psychopaths and sadists, but ordinary people who are brainwashed by the state and consider actions they carry out for the government—no matter how deplorable—as normal. A German-Luxembourgian-French coproduction ironically released by a production company called “Heimatfilm”, Hannah Arendt is a fiercely formulaic flick that looks like it could have been directed by a sorry shabbos goy Hollywood hack like George Clooney, yet considering its unflattering portrayal of Israel and its hypocritical Hitlerite-esque tactics, von Trotta’s film could have never been made in Hollywood despite it depicting arguably the greatest female Jewish philosopher of all time. 

 Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) smokes like a chimney but when she takes the job of reporting on the war crimes of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, cigarettes become practically her only real friends as she learns that criticism of the Jews in any context, even if you're a holocaust survivor, is nothing short of Hebraic heresy. Being named the first female lecturer at Princeton University in 1959, Arendt is a prestigious philosopher who is also happily married to a kraut cuckold communist poet/philosopher named Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), but her life was not always so grand as she was forced to flee her birth nation of Deutschland in 1933 for Paris to escape from Uncle Adolf and she even stayed in a Vichy, France concentration camp as an “enemy alien” after Germany took over frogland, but she eventually escaped with her hubby and mother to New York City in 1941, where she became actively involved with the German-Jewish community and after the Second World War even became involved with the Zionist organization Youth Aliyah. As depicted in von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt, Arendt, an uncompromising individualist with no need for a superficial collective identity, got over her reactionary flirtation with Zionism and had no problem with factually implicating many bigwig Jewish leaders in collaborating in the holocaust while covering the Eichmann trial. While at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, Arendt notices that the big bad SS man “doesn’t scare me at all. He is insignificant” and he “speaks in horrible administrative jargon,” thus being far from the sinister Satanic SS man that threw Jewish babies off moving trains like the mainstream American and Israeli media portrayed him to be.  While Arendt confides in her Israeli friend Kurt Blumenfeld (Michael Degen)—the the secretary general of the World Zionist Organization from 1911 to 1914—that “Israel must ensure that it doesn’t become a show trial,” she is more than a little bit let down by her people’s exploitation of Eichmann as a sort of scapegoat for Jewish/Zionist (in)action in regard to the holocaust. 

 After releasing her article for The New Yorker, Arendt faces hatred and hostility from all sides and angles, including many of her lifelong friends. Only her husband and her friend Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer)—an anti-Zionist/anti-Stalinist Trotskyite of partial Jewish ancestry—backs her up against her hateful, largely Hebraic, detractors. Arendt even receives a visit from a Zionist fanatic/Mossad member sent by the Israeli government who comes all the way to the United States to threaten her not to publish her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, which she sharply retorts to with the remark, “You forbid books, and you speak of decency!,” thus alluding to the Nazi-esque tactics of Israelis in criminalizing thought. Naturally, reading hate mail from anonymous holocaust survivors that reads, “DAMN YOU TO HELL - DU NAZIHURE” (aka Nazi Whore) rather depresses Arendt, but as a true uncompromising philosopher and intellectual, she does not let the “banality of evil’ Zionist-brainwashed public opinion defeat her as it only fuels her belief in the validity of her claims. In a very telling scene featuring Arendt comforting her dying Israeli friend Kurt, who is saddened by his belief that she has turned her back on the Jewish people, the Hebraic Heidegger protégé confesses she does not love the Jewish people, stating, “Kurt, you know me though. I have never loved a people. Why should I love the Jews? I only love my friends. This is the only love I am capable of.” Arendt ultimately faces her worst criticism from her lifelong friend Hans Jonas (ironically played by Ulrich Noethen, who has planned Heinrich Himmler in at least two Germans films, including in Downfall (2004) aka Der Untergang)—a German Jewish philosopher who also studied under Heidegger who took it quite personally when his professor joined the Nazi Party in 1933—who vehemently attacks her after she gives a heated lecture to her students defending her report on Eichmann, stating quite scornfully, “You’re acting like a German intellectual quibbling who despises Jews. And you try to make us accomplices of the Holocaust!...You never accepted that the Germans have shamefully betrayed you. They have expelled you, and they’d have killed you if they had the chance! Your friend Eichmann was responsible for Gurs transportation. If you didn’t get the chance to escape in time, you would have suffered the same fate as the other women!” In the end, Arendt says to her husband Heinrich while looking outside her apartment bedroom, “the whole world is trying to prove that I’m wrong. And no one sees my real mistake. Evil can not be both ordinary and radical. Evil is always extreme. Never radical. Good is always deep and radical,” thus essentially associating her own radical thought with the Eichmann trial as “good” and those of her extreme yet mindless detractors as “evil.” 

 While certainly no masterpiece, Hannah Arendt is easily one of the best biopics I have ever seen on an intellectual figure, even if it is a bit aesthetically banal, as it demonstrates that Hannah Arendt was a rare German-Jewish thinker of courage who, despite being technically a ‘holocaust survivor’ and having the potential to milk her Jewishness to further her career, stoically sought philosophical truth, proving that not all men that do monstrous things are monsters and, indeed, the cowardliness and/or greed of Jewish leaders played a imperative role in Jewish suffering during the Second World War. As someone who has read Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), it is quite clear to me why Hollywood has never directed an Arendt biopic as the book basically discredits a good portion of the ‘holocaust narrative’ as depicted in films like Schindler’s List (1993), where the Nazis are virtually portrayed as demonic disciples of the devil himself and all Jews are portrayed as morally immaculate angels in kosher form. While I cannot say I have ever had much respect for Margarethe von Trotta or her films, I must admit Germany’s foremost female auteur surprised me with Hannah Arendt as she demonstrated that she is not just an ethno-masochistic and philo-Semitic feminist as demonstrated by works like Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Rosenstrasse (2003), but also a rare modern day Teutonic filmmaker who has the gall to portray not only mainstream leftist academia, but especially the Hebraic nation of Israel, as being true blue hypocrites who just as slavishly follow orders as Mr. Banality of Evil himself, Adolf Eichmann. Additionally, von Trotta also refrained from portraying Martin Heidegger as an evil Nazi, but instead as a wise and loving man who was not exactly the greatest genius when it came to politics.  While it is probably unlikely, I would not mind seeing Ms. von Trotta direct a biopic about Leni Riefenstahl as it might be rewarding to see how the most famous contemporary female German filmmaker depicts easily the most (in)famous female filmmaker—be it German or otherwise—who has ever lived.

-Ty E

Young Dr. Freud

Aside from A Dangerous Method (2011) directed by kosher Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, until rather recently, I did not think there was a film pertaining to the imperative role that his background as an ethnic Eastern European Jew and his hatred of Germanic peoples played on Sigismund Schlomo Freud (otherwise known as Sigmund Freud)—the founding father of the dubious ‘science’ of psychoanalysis—but luckily I recently discovered the docudrama-like made-for-TV ‘biopic’ Der Junge Freud (1976) aka Young Dr. Freud directed by philo-Semitic Austrian auteur Axel Corti (God Does Not Believe in Us Anymore, The King’s Whore) and penned by the director's longtime collaborator Georg Stefan Troller. The son of a man of partial Italian extraction who was a member of the anti-Nazi resistance that died in 1945, Axel Corti (whose birth name was Axel Fuhrmanns, but assumedly changed his surname to ‘Corti’ to show his solidarity with his Guido blood as opposed to his out-of-fashion Teutonic genes) was anything but a National Socialist sympathizer and Austrian nationalist as demonstrated by his Wohin und zurück (1982-1986) aka Where To and Back Trilogy, which follows a Viennese Jew of the far-left persuasion whose father who murdered my Nazis and who ultimately stereotypically flees to New York City and inevitably returns back to Europa as a translator/prison interrogator to deal with them nasty Nazis, so naturally his work Young Dr. Freud takes a somewhat sympathetic view of Sigmund’s Semitism and how it shaped his anti-kraut/anti-bourgeois pseudo-science, even if the film dares to psychoanalyze the ‘soul doctor’ in the process, thereupon demystifying his legacy as a man that practically created a modern form of secular Judaism via psychoanalysis. Beginning in 1938 with Freud boarding a train from Vienna to London so as to escape from Uncle Adolf’s wrath, Young Dr. Freud—as signified by its quite literal title—depicts the degenerate doc’s meager life before he was a Freudian and got addicted to cocaine and cocks, but also and, arguably most importantly, demonstrates how the psychoanalyst’s parents background as Galician Jews made him feel like an outsider of Vienna and born enemy of the Aryan Viennese. Although clearly directed by a man with left-wing sympathies and a respect for Freud, Young Dr. Freud is the sort of biopic that could have never been made in Hollywood because, aside from neglecting to portray the psychoanalyst as a humanitarian hero of sorts and mystifying his life by making a patron saint of the holocaust and humanity, the film also somewhat unintentionally demonstrates that his ‘science’ was not much of a science at all, but an intellectual weapon used by a man who saw himself as a modern day Hannibal as a subversive Semite battling against Western Civilization. 

 Opening with a scene set in 1938 of an old Sigmund Freud boarding a train from Vienna to London, Young Dr. Freud accompanies these images with off-screen narration from an unnamed narrator who acts as a sort of cinematic psychoanalyst throughout the film and states regarding the psychoanalyst, “Of all the wise men of his day, Freud is at this moment the least loved, probably by himself, too,” but, of course, after the Second World War and defeat of the Third Reich, he became a messiah among leftwing and largely Jewish academics and intellectuals who wanted revenge against the Germans and who naturally spread his iconoclastic ideas like the ‘plague’ (notably, Freud once remarked to his then-associate C.G. Jung during a 1909 trip to America that “they don’t know it but I'm bringing them the plague” in regard to introducing his ideas to unsuspecting goy yanks) and have forever tainted Western society, sexualizing everything, including infants. As depicted in the first couple minutes of Young Dr. Freud, Freud (played by veteran Austrian TV actor Karlheinz Hackl) is psychoanalyzed via interviews with an unseen narrator, starting with his childhood as a persecuted Eastern Jew who eventually landed in Vienna as a young child so his father (who came from an unreformed Hasidic Jewish background) could pursue business as a wool merchant, stating of this experience, “Vienna always held terrors for me all my life…About as cosy as an arena…You always felt surrounded by strangers…No, not just strangers, unknown beings…To survive, you had to recognize them.” In a very telling scene, Freud displays his undying disgust and shame for his father after being attacked by peasant anti-Semites and not defending himself, stating, “I never let that happen to me without defending myself,” thus demonstrating he was a born fighter and not a passive victim. When Freud grew up to be a young doctor, he told Dr. Josef Breuer—the Austrian Jewish physician who laid down the foundations for psychoanalysis—that he was disgusted with his teacher’s planned trip to Russia, stating, “In Russia they’re murdering Jews and you go there to your noble patients…But you’re Breuer, not just a Jew…But it’s my people they’re murdering in their pogroms.” When Breuer remarks to Freud that he is “no Eastern Jew,” his combative protégé retorts, “My father is,” thus proudly displaying his deep sense of attachment to his cultural and racial roots. When courting his soon-to-be-wife Martha Bernays (Sylvia Haider), he confesses to her his ultimate goal with his profession is to be, “Some sort of conqueror, I think…An intellectual adventurer…Someone quite ruthless,” which he most certainly will become as a man who will greatly contribute to the destruction of the moral fabric of European civilization. 

 Beginning with attempting to understand how eels manage to copulate despite the fact that male eels might lack testicles, Freud goes on to take on the case of “Anna O.” (pseudonym of Austrian Jewess feminist Bertha Pappenheim) with his teacher Breuer and the two release the cast study Studies on Hysteria (1895), which introduced the technique of psychoanalysis as a form of cure, though the book was initially poorly received. Although highly ambitious, which is largely inspired by his abject hatred of Aryans, anti-Semitic or otherwise, and prophetic paranoia regarding potential pogroms, Freud is crippled by self-doubt and his self-contradictory nature, but luckily his aggressive arrogance compels him to tread on with a vengeance. At the recommendation of an Aryan scientist who does not hate Hebrews, Freud heads to Paris in 1885 for a fellowship with French clinician Jean-Martin Charcot—the so called “Napoleon of the neuroses”—which is a turning point in his career that moved him towards the practice of medical psychopathology which he will be (in)famous for. Freud also starts a long and intellectually deleterious relationship with a crackpot kosher otolaryngologist named Wilhelm Fliess whose theory of 'nasal reflex neurosis' postulated that there was a connection between the nose and genitals (and ultimately relating this theory to a number of neurological and psychological symptoms) and whose idea of ‘innate bisexuality’, among countless other dubious perverse theories, will have an imperative influence on the founding father of psychoanalysis. While dealing with a professor named Dr. Meynert (Norbert Kappen), who criticizes the young Jewish doctor, stating, “You believe in hypnosis? That quackery beneath the dignity of thinking men?,” Freud becomes all the more determined to rebel against what he sees as archaic Aryan science, which rejects that men (as opposed to just women) can be hysterical. Meanwhile, Freud gets hooked on cocaine, stating of its benefits, “it boosts work capacity and relieves depression” and that “It’s a substitute for morphine and doesn’t cause addiction,” thus proving that his theories regarding human sexuality were not the only things he was wrong about. While essentially helping to lead the way for the ‘sexual emancipation’ of women and so called ‘sexual freedom’ for everyone else, Freud did not really practice what he preached as he was scared of pussy, which may have led him to be biased in forming his theory that all humans are bisexual. 

 Ironically concluding with an excerpt from a letter written by Freud to his wife Martha that reads, “Let our biographers sweat. We don’t want to make things easy for them. Let them all be right in their concept of “the hero’s development." I’m looking forward to the mistakes they make,” Young Dr. Freud is probably the most objective and thoughtful biopic ever made about the psychoanalyst as the film neither portrays him as a Hebraic hero nor Semitic saint, but an absurdly arrogant and exceedingly eccentric character whose Eastern Jewish roots could have never been deracinated, but, instead, fueled his career as a proud Semitic subversive whose instincts and interests compelled him to destroy, with extreme prejudice, German mores. Notably, in a passage from his work Interpretation of Dreams, Freud, in an attempt to make sense of why he had a metaphysical aversion to stepping foot in Rome, argued he was sort of retracing the footsteps of Hannibal—the Semitic leader of Carthage—as a member of an “alien race” in an Aryan land, writing, “Hannibal… Had been the favorite hero of my later school days… And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race… the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church,” and the film Young Dr. Freud certainly expresses this strong side of the psychoanalyst, albeit in the abstracted manner of a European attempting to understand a racial outsider. As a man who described himself as “a fanatical Jew” in a 1931 letter and on another occasion writing he had a “strange secret longings” related to his Jewish blood, Freud basically concocted a kosher intellectual weapon through psychoanalysis. As evolutionary psychology Kevin MacDonald wrote in his groundbreaking work The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (2002) regarding Freud and his (un)holy mission against Aryan civilization via psychoanalysis, “His identity as a Jew was thus associated with a self-concept in which he selflessly does battle with the enemies of the group, dying in an act of heroic altruism defending group interests—a mirror-image Jewish version of the grand finale of Wagner’s Nibelungenlied that was an ingredient in Nazi ideology.” 

 A Teutonized Hebrew schooled in Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche who hated the alien world in which he came of age but also hated himself as depicted in scenes from Young Dr. Freud where he remarks “I hate Vienna any time of the year…At present everything makes me vomit, including myself,” Freud was an all around corrosive force who did more harm to the world than good. For example, Freud’s nephew Edward, “the father of public relations,” Bernays would utilize his uncle’s theories on the human mind to brainwash the American populous with subconscious propaganda utilizing psychoanalytic techniques, which is depicted in Adam Curtis's great award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC, The Century of the Self (2002), a epic work that makes it quite clear that Freudian psychoanalysis was a weapon meant to subvert and defile people and not to help them. After all, where has psychoanalysis gotten daughter-lover Woody Allen, himself a lifelong advocate of psychoanalysis?! In terms of the few Freud flicks that exist, Young Dr. Freud is the best in terms of introducing the lifelong neurosis of the man behind psychoanalysis, ultimately making the Hollywood movie Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) directed by John Huston and starring Montgomery Clift seem like a pseudo-provocative piece of sensationalism and softcore surrealism that gives a redundant reductionist view of the man’s ideas and does not even attempt to touch his Jewishness, arguably the most important influence behind his work.  Shot in black-and-white in a vaguely dreamlike manner, Young Dr. Freud is not exactly a pleasurable picture to watch, but, of course, Freud is not exactly the most heartwarming historical figure to study, thus making the film seem like a suffocating trip through Hebrew intellectual Hades, but an interesting and important one nonetheless that reminds the unconscious gentile viewer that the psychoanalyst did not have their best interests in mind.  As the great so called self-loathing Jew Karl Kraus—one of the earliest critics of psychoanalysis and a sort of intellectual adversary of Freud—once wrote, “The Jews control the press, they control the stockmarket, and now they also control the unconscious.”

-Ty E

Dyn Amo

Plagued with and ultimately crippled by polio at the mere age of 9, which forced him to become enslaved to an iron lung, having brutal muscle transplants and never really ever recovering, even being confined to crutches and later a wheelchair for most of his life, American avant-garde auteur/documentarian Stephen Dwoskin (Central Bazaar, Trying to Kiss the Moon) was a man that knew all too well what it meant to suffer and his strikingly somber yet exceedingly ethereal cinematic works, especially Dyn Amo (1973) aka Dynamo—an ominously onieric off-arthouse work voyeuristically depicting the physical and metaphysical degradation of four somnambulist-like strippers in a superlatively seedy yet strangely dreamy titty bar that would be the director’s first feature-length film—certainly demonstrate this in a marvelously macabre manner. Based on the stage play of the same name written by Chris Wilkinson and even featuring the same actors that appeared in the live performances of the play, Dyn Amo is a minimalistic yet mesmerizing piece of celestial celluloid misery and master-slave relationships that depicts the self-imposed misery of women who sell their bodies, soul, and dignity for money and the sort of patently pathetic, perverse, and sometimes pernicious men that pay money for a peek at these lost ladies’ lecherous souls. Like an all-nighter at a Gothic strip joint co-owned by Werner Schroeter and David Lynch where only the most swarthy untermensch degenerates in town are invited, Dyn Amo is an absolutely aesthetically dynamite, if not daunting and dreary, depiction of human sexuality, primitive sexual politics, and loneliness in its most pathetically capitalist form where not only clothes are stripped, but also the soul of not just the performers, but the viewer as well in a pseudo-salacious cinematic work that acts as the closest thing to avant-garde anti-pornography. Featuring an immaculate synth-driven ethereal soundtrack by eclectic English composer Gavin Bryars that eerily complements every single second of the film, Dyn Amo is a cinematic work that is not big on plot (it has none!), but instead wallows in atmosphere of reckless pseudo-wantoness where god's most lonely and desperate women make a miserable living by fulfilling the dubious fantasies of erratic erotomaniacs who nonsensically think that their money buys them genuine love and adoration, thereupon inevitably acting upon such ill illusions in a most shuddersome yet strangely and innately intimate manner that screams perturbing psychology pathology.  A rare cinematic work that forces the viewer to be an active participant as opposed to a mere spectator due to its literally in-your-face depiction of female agony and despondency, Dyn Amo reminds the viewer of the power of cinema as an unparalleled, nuanced language without words that can express universal truths through mere physical gestures.

 Not knowing what I was jumping into (I previously viewed director Stephen Dwoskin’s documentary Pain Is… (1997), but it could not have prepared me for this film), I turned on Dyn Amo while in a somewhat sleepy mood and was instantly magnetized to the screen as I viewed a statuesque Nordic stripper dancing in a rather robotic manner while jerking-off a chain as if bored by the routine of her 'job' but also as if she had blocked out any potential for emotion between herself and other human beings, which is probably one of the most imperative tricks of the trade for strippers, hookers, porn stars, and other so-called ‘sex workers.’ For the first hour or so of Dyn Amo (the film clocks in at just under two hours), one mostly just sees a number of close-ups of the blatantly sad and objectified strippers who, as demonstrated by their blank stares and curiously mundane gestures, seem to be experiencing a sort of self-imposed out-of-body experience so as to get through their jaded ‘night job’ without going completely insane. Every once in a while, the viewer gets a glance of the more than demanding audience at the strip joint, which is mostly comprised of sleazebag types with greasy black hair who sport dark sunglasses, assumedly to hide their sickening stares as they swoon and fawn over women that would never give them the time of day in real life, thus the club offers them a contrived forbidden pleasure so as to temporarily appease their discernibly fierce fetishism. Of course, as Dyn Amo progresses, the sunglasses-adorned spectators, in their deluded erotomania, begin to take a more aggressive role as 'active' audience members, eventually joining the strippers back stage and then tying them up in bondage and completely humiliating and degrading them, with tears and terror eventually becoming quite apparent on one of the woman’s faces in an overwhelming scene without cuts (Dyn Amo has few noticeable cuts, giving it the semblance that it was shot in real-time with one mere take) that tests the filmgoer's ability to live vicariously through the misery of a nameless woman who never speaks a word, but wears her perturbing pangs of pain on her unclad sleeve. One of the sadistic spectators even goes so far as blaming the stripper for his perversions and guilt for having said perversions, hostilely yelling at her, “You stupid bitch…virgin murderer…whore…hussy…,” as if it is his god given right as a pathetic patron of perversity. After being bound for displeasure, one of the strippers is featured in an extended face close-up, sobbing with a most melancholy facial expression and moving her mouth without saying a single world, as if pleading to be put out of her misery. In the end, one of the unclad strippers is striking a heretical allegorical pose as if crucified like Jesus Christ while her patron/persecutors stand around her as if they are her executioners. 

 Featuring a song by The Rolling States set to a cowgirl-style stripper towards the beginning of the film, Dyn Amo is certainly a film of its time in terms of its uniquely unadulterated aesthetic and avant-garde experimental style, yet its overall message regarding the degradation of woman has only become all the more relevant since its release, especially considering we live in a sad, sexually dysfunctional society that includes sexual innuendos in children’s films and expects grown women to have to shave their naughty bits in order to resemble prepubescent girls. Somewhat kitschy and campy in aesthetic but anything but humorous, Dyn Amos—with its meta-voyeuristic camera angles and decidedly decadent yet dreamy sets—is a film that features socially conscious scopophilia and static dead time reminiscent of Paul Morrissey and the tasty and aesthetically titillating operatic high-camp tableaux of Germanic auteur filmmakers like Werner Schroeter, Daniel Schmid and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. A singular celluloid work that will paradoxically appeal to both morbid male sadists and pissed feminists but also chivalrous empathetic men and debauched female masochists, Dyn Amo is a rare avant-garde experiment of its time that has aged quite gracefully, which in part has to do with its universal theme of female debasement and the males that love to debase them, but also due to its intensely idiosyncratic style that reminds the viewer of the seeming limitlessness of cinema as a means of artistic expression. In a review from 1972 written by female film critic Ros Spain (who later worked as a location manage on Dwoskin’s work Central Bazaar (1976)) for Cinema Rising regarding Dyn Amo and its effect on her personally as a woman, “The film, especially towards the end, is very harrowing. The camera persistently strips each girl both physically and emotionally, and in sometimes violent ways; as a woman, l found the implication of my sex's frailty and the film's denial of female will and sex-drive disturbing,” thus demonstrating the absurdity of feminism on a real and practical level where the shackles of social-engineering are ‘stripped’ and humans revert back to their innate instincts. Despite being Dwoskin’s first feature-length work, Dyn Amo is also easily the greatest film the disabled director ever made as a work that is every bit as fetishistic and preternatural in its form and direction as the curious characters featured in it. If you’re looking for a post-silent era flick that is big on atmosphere to the point of being fiercely foreboding like the great films of German expressionism, but set in the sort of sinister cinematic women-in-trouble realm typical of David Lynch, you will never find a film quite like Dyn Amo, an odious yet otherworldly celluloid ode to the warped women who are willing to sell themselves to survive and the meager men that are more than willing to exploit these lost ladies' rather undesirable and unfortunate circumstances.

-Ty E

The Killing of America

 Despite being made over thirty years ago and being as American as apple pie in terms of its carnage-filled content, the death-filled documentary The Killing of America (1982) aka Violence U.S.A.—an anti-gun agitprop that chronicles the most infamous murders, assassinations, race riots, and serial killer/mass murderers since the death of JFK leading up to the early 1980s—has yet to be officially released in any format in the United States, which is not surprising, at least at the time of its initial release, as it is undoubtedly one of the most unflattering depictions of the USA ever made as a sort of cinematic rap sheet of American barbarism. A pseudo-intellectual mondo mix-tape of Americana murder and mayhem that strives for enlightening the viewer but thrives on sensationalism of the bloody and ultra-violent sort, The Killing of America is not a work that will entertain sadists and masochists (or a combination of the two) but also cinephiles as it was co-written and co-directed by screenwriter Leonard Schrader (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Naked Tango), the elder brother of writer/director Paul Schrader (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, The Comfort of Strangers). Describing America as the “land of a million murders and one hundred million guns” and a place with a homicide rate comparable to Third World shithole countries like Cambodia and Nicaragua during a civil war, The Killing of America wastes no time in portraying the United States as a fallen place of dramatic social, cultural, and moral decline, yet it ultimately has no serious answers as to why, as if the directors (Schrader co-directed it with relatively unknown documentarian Sheldon Renan) and writers (Schrader’s Japanese wife Chieko Schrader also contributed to the script) were too politically correct and fixated on their rather redundant anti-gun idealism to give it much thought, though they ‘dare’ to hint that the assassination of president JFK was a conspiracy. Featuring real-life stock footage of negroes being killed by white pig cops and race riots, as well as interviews with infamous criminals, including (but not limited to) anti-Zionist assassin Sirhan Sirhan, serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, and mass murdering cult messiah Jim Jones, The Killing of America works best as an uncensored history of post-WWII American true crime, which makes more sense when one considers it was originally made for the Japanese market, who must have laughed their scrawny East Asian asses off after realizing how screwed up the nation that defeated and nuked them during the Second World War really is. A mundanely narrated archival document of American decline, The Killing of America inadvertently depicts a nation that, after embracing civil rights, multiculturalism, counter-culture movements, and liberalism, degenerated into a nihilistic negro-crime-filled real-life nightmare, so it is only fitting that the documentary concludes with the barely tragic assassination of alpha-hippie scum John Lennon. 

 According to The Killing of America, Japan, England and West Germany have a combined population (at least, at the same of the docs release) equal to that of the United States, yet while the former three countries have around 6,000 murders a year, the U.S.A. has about 27,000, thus demonstrating that the krauts and Japs should have probably won the Second World War and England should have sided with their Germanic brothers as America—the stillborn cultural and racial mongrel—is a misbegotten bastard from hell. According to the narrator Chuck Riley of The Killing of America, President John F. Kennedy was a “symbol of his handsome young country” (one must ask what Barack Obama is a symbol of!) and his dubious assassination more or less sparked America’s decided degeneration and assassins, snipers, political terrorists, cult charlatans, serial killers, and ‘mad saviors’ starting popping up all around America as if the country’s population starting worshipping death and destruction. In reference to blacks starting race riots and burning down America’s cities one by one in the name of ‘equality,’ the narrator states that the “government fought a war with its own people,” as if the burning down of cities and assaults against whites should have been simply tolerated. On top of that, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War lead spoiled bourgeois whites to rebel against the government, thereupon leading to a lot of the garbage counter-culture and Frankfurt School/New Left ideas that have become quite mainstream today, albeit in a degenerate form. As The Killing of America reveals, most snipers, assassins, and especially serial killers, are white males from middleclass backgounds with genius IQs, which is depicted in endearing interviews with real-life man-hunters Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper. In terms of murderous nonwhites, one gets to hear a heartwarming interview with Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-American Christian whose greatest wish is that, “there should be peace in the Middle East.” One is also introduced to the whitey-hating crimes of Mark Essex, a negro spree killer who killed 9 people, including 5 police officers, and wounded 13 others in New Orleans in late-1972/early-1973 simply because they were white. Of course, aside from Essex and a black sniper who is featured being gunned down the police in broad daylight, The Killing of America totally underplays black criminality. In an aesthetically foul yet fitting (especially considering the film’s leftist anti-gun angle) conclusion, the assassination of John Lennon is discussed while the Brit hippie messiah’s hit shit single “Imagine” plays in the background. 

 Like a Michael Moore pseudo-documentary minus the Irish-American slob's infantile sneering humor and actually featuring a number of deaths in real time, The Killing of America is undoubtedly a work by a carelessly cliché leftwing ideologue who does not have the balls nor the common sense to discusses why the United States is turning into a multicultural Third World full of crime and corruption and lacking in even the most rudimentary of culture. Being a perennial peasant nation comprised of Europe’s rabble and ex-slaves whose ancestors were brought here unwillingly from Africa, not to mention an absurdly large and growing Third World population who have no interest in assimilating (not that I blame them, nor that most of them actually could if they tried), the United States is a monstrous mongrel of the untermensch sort, so it is only natural that criminality and cultural chaos reign here and one can certainly expect more of the same in the future as demonstrated by the latest news headlines. The Killing of America essentially depicts a country that, ever since winning the Second World War, has lost its moral compass and racial identity and thrives on fear and terror, as if these things are substitutes for real cultural ingredients, like classical music and arthouse cinema. With the assassination of communist-pawn charlatan Martin Luther King, Jr. resulting in race riots in no less than 125 cities as mentioned in The Killing of America, one can only wonder the sort of chaos that would erupt if some mental midget decided to assassinate the metrosexual mulatto messiah that is now, quite absurdly yet symbolically, the President of the United States. 

 As someone whose grandfather moved to the United States out of necessity when his own nation was destroyed during the Second World War and ultimately regretted obtaining citizenship in the so-called “New World”, I also think that The Killing of America overrates America as a nation before the assassination of JFK as America’s prosperity after WWII is almost solely the result of Europa’s destruction and the raping/pillaging/occupying of the Occident by the Americans. Culturally speaking, at its height, America was, at best, an over glorified European colony, but with the arrival of Jews and every other non-European race, it has thrived completely and totally on formlessness of the racial and cultural variety, where personal material gain is the sole collective ‘Weltanschauung’ that ‘unites’ the people in any sense. Personally, considering how things have deteriorated in every regard since its release, I found The Killing of America to be a bit ‘lighthearted’, especially considering we now live in a deranged pseudo-culture that respects serial killers (Se7en, Dexter) and criminals (Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy), thus the documentary would probably appeal most to serial killer fetishists and those with an interest in true crime, though those who have already read a book or two on the subject while learning nothing new, even if it features an iconic assassination or two. Undoubtedly, even the title of The Killing of America is outmoded as the United States is not being killed, but is already dead as a berserk zombie corpse with a Hebrew brain that is determined to infect the world with its deadly disease. Written by the older brother of the man who penned Taxi Driver (1976)—a film featuring an anti-hero eerily reminiscent in his thinking to various serial killers and assassins featured in the documentary—The Killing of America is ultimately a symptom of the forsaken society it condemns, but also a half-interesting, forgotten celluloid piece of American cinema history that strangely makes for a great double-feature with Martin Scorsese's underrated documentary American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978), a celluloid cultural artifact that provides a somewhat concise depiction of when and where (but not why) America lost its innocence, or at least its semblance of it.

-Ty E

Cecil B. Demented

Aside from possibly A Dirty Shame (2004), Cecil B. Demented (2000) is undoubtedly John ‘Pope of Trash’ Waters’ most aesthetically repulsive and innately idiotic semi-mainstream film to date, which is rather ironic considering it is not only a satire of Hollywood and its plague-like diseasing of the American populous' already fragile minds, but also a sardonic cinematic snipe at both underground filmmaking and avant-garde auteurism; two worlds the director has worked in and cinematically defiled. Aside from being a proudly debauched director of both mainstream and underground trash, Waters is also a lifelong cinephile and in no other film does he pay greater (anti)homage to his celluloid heroes and enemies than Cecil B. Demented; a film about terrorist filmmakers in the spirit of the Red Army Faction (in fact, one of the original promotional posters for the film featured a star/gun logo similar to the RAF logo) led by an eponymous character played by Stephen Dorff who kidnaps a positively pompous A-list Hollywood actress played by Melanie Griffith and forces her to star in their own sub-underground film, which is shot in a psychopathic cinéma vérité-like manner of nonsensical ultra-violence that makes the radical realism films of Werner Herzog and Harmony Korine seem like they were produced by George Lucas. Like the Patty Hearst (who actually has a small role in the film!) story meets The King of Comedy (1983) directed by Martin Scorsese meets the Troma-maniac ‘masterpiece’ Terror Firmer (1999) directed by Lloyd Kaufman, Cecil B. Demented shows what happens when a queen bitch of a diva develops a nasty case of Stockholm Syndrome and engages in cinematic terrorism against the mainstream Hollywood studio system, the ‘social-conditioning’ centers aka movie theaters that screen high-budget trash, and the brainwashed mainstream filmgoers who keep on literally and figuratively buying into Tinseltown’s lies, thus giving credence to Baltimore sage H.L. Mencken’s dictum, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” A film that is just about as emotionally and aesthetically vapid as any of the mainstream films it ludicrously lampoons, except with seemingly infinite references to various films and filmmakers that only an idiosyncratic sleaze cineaste like the unholy “Prince of Puke” could dream up, as well as low-camp exploitation scenarios featuring a number of mainstream actors in uniquely unflattering positions (Melanie Griffith's career essentially ended after being in the film), Cecil B. Demented is not only Waters’ most cinematically reflexive film, but also proof that a cinematic work can be totally aesthetically and thematically irredeemable, yet be wildly witty and exceedingly entertaining. Featuring then-rather-unknown Michael Shannon (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, Boardwalk Empire) as a gay white trash trucker and Fassbinder fanboy, Mestizo Entourage star Adrian Grenier as a heroin-shooting junky with an unhealthy obsession with Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a seemingly autistic Crowleyite who worships the films of Kenneth Anger, among various other certifiably sick cinephiles turned cinematic terrorists, Cecil B. Demented is cinema history heresy in its most hopelessly and haphazardly humorous form. 

 Like any rational person who has been to the superlatively shitty quasi-Third World city, popular A-list Hollywood actress Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) hates Baltimore, but being a psychopathic actress seemingly modeled after Julia Roberts (whose brother Eric Roberts has a cameo role in the film) and whose ostensible sweetness and positivity is nothing but a false front for the press, she tells the media that, “Baltimore is the best,” even if crab cakes make her want to puke.  Luckily, little does Ms. Whitlock know that an anti-Christ auteur named Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff) and his motley crew of ‘Kamikaze filmmakers’ named ‘Sprocketholes’, who live in a shabby Warhol Factory-esque factory in an abandoned movie theater, have plans to kidnap her, makeover her appearance in a manner that seems like she was run over by a truck driven by John Waters’ deceased man-muse Divine, and force her to play the lead role in their ultimate work of unhinged underground cinema, which involves real terrorism, shootouts, and deaths. Having infiltrated every movie theater in Baltimore as undercover employees, including the place of the premiere where they kidnap Honey Whitlock, the Sprocketholes have already carefully calculated where their entire film-within-films will be set. Upon kidnapping Honey Whitlock, who has very little respect for the art of cinema, especially of the low-budget underground variety, Mr. Demented has his Sprocketholes, a slavish crew of screwballs with idiosyncratic personalities and flagrant sexual perversions, who sport tattoos of their favorite directors, introduce themselves, which include an art director named Lewis (Larry Gilliard, Jr.) who is probably the only black rapper in the world that likes David Lynch, an ex-porn star turned lead actress named Cherish (Alicia Witt) who worships Warhol but is in lecherous love with Mr. Demented (even if she can't fuck him until they finish principle photography for the film), a self-loathing heterosexual hairstylist named Rodney (Jack Noseworthy) who has a special place in his balls for homo Hispanic auteur Pedro Almodóvar, and a negative Nelly of a negress named Chardonnay (Zenzele Uzoma) who works as sound artist and wallows in the celluloid hate of Spike Lee, among various other rejects of the film world whose taste in cinema parallels their perversions and pathologies. 

 After being given a Liquid Sky-inspired makeover from hell by faux-fag Rodney, Honey Whitlock, who would almost rather drop dead than star in a no-budget movie, is forced to give the performance of her lifetime, which she initially does less than halfheartedly, but after having her life threatened, she does it with gusto, even upstaging her 'dead serious' (they are more than willing and will ultimately die for celluloid) kidnappers. The group's first major filming location is a beyond bourgeois luncheon featuring a number of anally retentive Hollywood turd types for the Baltimore Film Commission and against her better judgment, Honey Whitlock jumps off a building in a daring stunt at the behest of Mr. Demented and in the aftermath, a shootout breaks out between the Sprocketholes and the cops, which kills Rodney and wounds Cecil. In the chaos, Ms. Whitlock makes the amateur mistake of attempting to turn herself in after committing the cinematic crimes, but her new comrades save her, thereupon completing her course in Stockholm syndrome, even declaring herself “Demented forever!” and embracing a demented brand being burned into her arm. In a seeming unlikely scenario, a sequel to Forrest Gump entitled Gump Again is being filmed in Baltimore and the Sprocketholes make it their business to crash the film production, bringing celluloid carnage that ultimately results in the maiming and death of a number of Demented’s debauched comrades by way of obese Teamsters who hate non-union film crews. Honey and the Sprocketholes seek shelter in a porno theater where there is a showing of ex-porn star Cherish’s anal sex flick, so a bunch of masturbating perverts help her and her comrades evade the police. In the end, the final scene of Cecil B. Demented’s movie is shot at night at a Baltimore Drive-in theater and to show her commitment to the cause, Honey Whitlock sets her precious hair on fire and the Sprocketholes commence the shooting wrap-up by having sex (Demented demanded nothing less than abstinence during the production!) While screwing Mr. Demented, Cherish is shot dead via a bullet in the head by a cop and the deranged director, who is crippled from the various times he has been shot/maimed, sets himself on fire and rides a wheelchair off a building, thus enabling Honey Whitlock to make a great escape, which she fails at, but does not matter due to her newfound popularity as America’s most famous A-list criminal actress and certified demented diva, even if she will probably have a lengthy stay in prison. 

 Described by Roger Ebert as being like a “a home movie [with] a bunch of kids goofing off” and featuring music by synth-driven grindcore/mathcore group The Locust, Liberace, Moby and even a negrofied rap theme song entitled “Demented Forever,” Cecil B. Demented is indubitably celluloid trash at its most aesthetically worthless and degrading, yet it is also an iconoclastic piece of sardonic cinephilia directed by a man who clearly loves cinema, be it the homoerotic Hollywood Biblical epics of Hebrew Cecil B. DeMille, the artistically meritless exploitation films of Semitic smut-peddler Herschell Gordon Lewis, or the autistic anti-auteur pieces of Andy Warhol, thus making it a sinephile's semi-botched wet dream. Satirizing Hollywood for their vanity-inspired philanthropy (the film begins with a scene of a crippled kid who was able to have a heart transplant due to donations from a film premiere) and soulless comedy-dramas like Patch Adams (Cecil B. Demented’s crew invades a theater where audience members are sentimentally crying about kids with cancer) which turn audiences into infantile philistines, but also underground filmmakers with the auteur-inspired egomania and proclivity toward celluloid fetishism (indeed, it is no mistake that every Sprockethole has some sort of preternatural sexual perversion), Cecil B. Demented is a true work of equal-opportunity cinematic offensiveness that is more like a cinephiliac romp than a rant. While I did not take too kindly to Cecil B. Demented upon its release over a decade ago, the film has certainly grown on me since, sort of like a pair of goofy boxer shorts, and I now regard it as one of John Waters’ greatest mainstream flicks. After all, who could hate a film directed by the Pope of Trash featuring Michael Shannon playing the role of a homo hick who is unsoundly obsessed with the girth of Mel Gibson's Catholic cock?! If there ever was a filmmaker with a total incapacity for taking anything serious in life seriously—be it cancer patients, terrorism, or his own films—it is most certainly John Waters and, quite arguably, no other film of his better personifies this in 'mainstream' form than Cecil B. Demented, a work featuring a fantasy underground cinema revolution that would be great if it actually happened, but certainly never will, especially in an anti-culture sewer like Baltimore. Also, one must give credit to John Waters for ruining Melanie Griffith's acting career, for the actress never looked so ludicrous in a totally tasteless way and that is saying a lot!

-Ty E

Daisies

 While I was originally introduced to the work of revolutionary avant-garde auteur Věra Chytilová—easily the most ill-restrained female filmmaker of the Czech New Wave and arguably the Slavic world in general—via Fruit of Paradise (1970) aka Ovoce stromů rajských jíme about a decade ago, I soon forgot about the feisty femme of a filmmaker and would not be reintroduced to her work until my girlfriend recently recommended Daisies (1966) aka Sedmikrásky, easily the director’s most (in)famous and critically revered film to date. Although made within the state-sponsored film studio, Daisies was ultimately condemned as “depicting the wanton” and banned by the Czech communist regime upon its initial release, in part due to the wastage of food (a big no no in Marxist countries where many people are half-starving to death), but mainly due to the film’s unwaveringly and innately ‘orgasmic’ and gorgeously grotesque essence. Directed by a philosophy and architecture student who was the only member of the fairer sex when she enrolled at FAMU in 1957, Daisies is a decidedly decadent, yet critically so, Dada-esque work that has been incessantly described as a feminist flick since its release, yet director Chytilová has denied she had any pretensions towards ‘female power,’ describing the film as “a philosophical documentary in the form of a farce” and that the film’s plot-less structure was designed to “restrict [the spectator’s] feeling of involvement and lead him to an understanding of the underlying idea or philosophy.” Centering around two marginally pretty, pixie-like ‘princesses’ that both have the name, Marie, who declare a sort of retarded and ultimately fruitless (although much fruit is involved!) war against patriarchy and con a couple ugly older men into supporting their unhinged addiction to hedonism, namely voraciously eating, playing childish pranks, and histrionically demanding attention, but, inevitably, due to their own self-absorption and unquenchable thirst for pleasure, bringing upon their own annihilation, Daisies is a film about pure evil in a uniquely unlikely form: that of two cutesy girls of dubious intelligence who decide that the world is for their taking. Ultimately seeming more anti-feminist and anti-counter-culture in its scathing sentiments due to its depiction of two moronic ‘progressive’ ladies with very little gray matter who see their naïve youthfulness and mindless self-indulgence as their greatest ass-ets, Daisies is aesthetic and thematic decadence to such comical extremes of excess and ungodliness that it makes the hippie movement that hit the Occident like the innately intemperate behavior of spoiled children who think their farts smell like, well, daisies. Celluloid sitophilia at its most exquisitely and keenly yet ultimately deceptively kaleidoscopic, Daisies is a cinematic philosophical criticism of humanity at its most potently pretty and least prudish, especially for an avant-garde flick. 

 Beginning with industrial and battle footage, including the Pacific Theatre during World War II, Daisies takes a dramatic change of pace when it introduces its two cutesy ‘protagonists Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová), both of whom are in bathing suits and, despite their corny charisma, were played by non-actors. Marie II—a redhead with an unflattering bowl cut who is somewhat the ‘leader’ of the two gals—narcissistically describes herself as looking like a ‘virgin,’ but that will soon change when the two soon-to-be-lecherous lasses tell the world to go fuck itself. Before the viewer knows it, both Marie I and Marie II are dancing in front of a tree that is reminiscent of the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ from the biblical story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3 and naturally one of the girls decides to sink her teeth into a piece of forbidden fruit, which causes both little ladies to fall and nonsensically land in their apartment and make their dramatic transformation from virtual ‘clean slates’ with next to nil personalities into sinister yet silly succubi who emotionally and economically use men to support their beyond gluttonous appetites for food, attention, and girlish destruction. After Marie I cons an unsuspecting sugar daddy to take her on a date at a fancy restaurant, Marie II, using a false identity, randomly appears at the dinner table and proceeds to eat everything in sight, proudly declaring, “I love food. It’s delicious” while criticizing her dinner companions for eating like civilized folk. Of course, Marie II’s food fetishism influences Marie I to eat just as decadently as well and after dinner she belittles her ‘mature’ date due to his advanced age, as if he, being an old and unattractive fellow, can be blamed for being interested in dating a young and attractive girl. Later on, Marie I and Marie II head to an anachronistic nightclub with a ‘Roaring Twenties’-style Charlie Chaplin-like dancer and a frisky flapper, who look like they could have stepped off the set of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and whose decided decadence reflects that the ‘liberation’ of the 1960s is nothing new, but merely something that has been drastically repackaged. 

 Not surprisingly, the two girls get good and wasted and cause childish social chaos at the nightclub and afterward Marie II—the most aggressive and ‘progressive’ of the two girls—goes to the apartment of a butterfly collector and provocatively places framed butterfly displays in front of her naughty bits. Of course, dead Papilionoidea only manage to captivate Marie II for so long as she naturally gets hungry again and she reunites with Marie I to quench her imaginary starvation. On their way to indulge eating like foul food sluts, the two girls take a small rowboat for their trip and the girls discuss their decided dissatisfaction with an old gardener ignoring them, one Marie complaining, “I wonder why that gardener didn’t notice us?...Why didn’t he at least tell us off?...He wasn’t even sorry for us!...” and the other equally narcissistically stating, “What an old fogey! We’re still young…We’re young and we’ve got our whole lives ahead of us!,” but little do the two little ladies realize that their senseless and wasteful gluttony will ultimately lead to their self-prophesized premature deaths. Eventually, Marie I and Marie II end up at a rundown Soviet-like factory where they have the good fortune of discovering an extravagant, kingly feast prepared assumedly for psychopathic communist leaders. In a retardedly ritualistic manner, Marie I and Marie II gorge the food and make a huge mess like little piggies and destroy the inside of the factory, even swinging from a giant chandelier, but before they know it they are treated like common witches and dunked in water like common witches (they are more like philistine pixie bitches) with the text, “is there any way to mend what’s been destroyed?” appearing in the background. Having a change of heart in regard to the hyper-hedonism and cock-teasing trickster like ways, the girls decide to repent by cleaning up the huge mess they made in the commie factory, but in the end, their efforts are in vain and too little, too late as both Marie I and Marie II are crushed and killed by the same chandelier that they were having fun swinging from only moments before in what is probably the best death-by-chandelier in cinema history. 

 Ironically concluding with the dedication to people who “get upset only over a stomped-upon bed of lettuce” (the film was, in part, banned due to the flagrant waste of film during the production), Daisies is indeed, first and foremost (at least, thematically speaking), a celluloid morality tale, or as director Věra Chytilová told “Comrade President” Gustáv Husák—the long-term Communist dictator of Czechoslovakia and of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1969–1987)—in a 1975 letter regarding her film: “DAISIES was a morality play showing how evil does not necessarily manifest itself in an orgy of destruction caused by the war, that its roots may lie concealed in the malicious pranks of everyday life. I chose as my heroines two young girls because it is at this age that one most wants to fulfill oneself and, if left to one's own devices, his or her need to create can easily turn into its very opposite.” Indeed, whether Chytilová’s intention or not, Daisies certainly depicts the mindless “flower power” of the hippies as a sort of self-destructive figurative road to hell paved with daisies and butterflies, thereupon making a sort of peculiar avant-garde equivalent to Italian auteur Fernando Di Leo’s less than politically correct anti-hippie flick Avere vent'anni (1978) aka To Be Twenty where two self-absorbed and brainwashed feminist hippie chicks ultimately pay with their lives for their male-hating arrogance and angelic heads being shoved way to far up their rosy little asses. Of course, aesthetically and thematically speaking, Daisies is in league with the works of Serbian auteur Dušan Makavejev, Soviet Armenian auteur Sergei Parajanov, and revolutionary Japanese Renaissance man Shūji Terayama, but also singular female auteur filmmakers like suicidal Welsh feminist Jane Arden, Austrian humble housewife turned quasi-Actionist Valie Export, and German-Jewish dyke auteur Ulrike Ottinger. Quite possibly the most ‘pretty’ and girlishly aesthetically pleasing piece of celluloid aesthetic terrorism ever made, Daisies is a rare Dada-esque psychedelic picture with enough philosophical meat and wacky humor to entertain even the most committed of anti-hippies, myself included. 

-Ty E

Yesterday Girl

 Without question, there is no great metaphor for German New Cinema ‘father figure’ Alexander Kluge’s filmmaking career as a cultural cuckold, shabbos goy, and pedantic ethno-masochistic lunatic other than the fact he decided to cast own Aryan sister, Alexandra Kluge, in the role of a down-and-out Jewish daughter of holocaust survivors for his first feature-length film Yesterday Girl (1966) aka Abschied von gestern - (Anita G.), a patently plodding 'modernist' celluloid work that is just as much inspired by French New Wave auteur filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard as it is by the static Theatric Marxism of Brecht and cultural Marxism of the Hebraic kraut-hammering Frankfurt School. Directed by a fiercely philo-Semitic far-left lawyer turned filmmaker who once proudly and pretentiously proclaimed, “I don’t know what an artist is. I’d say, my roots are in Hebrew theology; in the Critical Theory of Horkheimer, Adorno, Oskar Negt; in Walter Benjamin,” Yesterday Girl is a cinematic work that is so superlatively soulless in terms of its pedantic politics and shockingly static aesthetics that it acts as a potent reminder of  how German cinema has degenerated since the days of F.W. Murnau, Leni Riefenstahl, and even Veit Harlan. Clearly taking his buddy Adorno’s infamously idiotic words of Hebrew hostility, “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” to heart, Yesterday Girl is about a poetic as a cattle prod to the prick and as aesthetically audacious as the syphilis-ridden brain of a purged Bolshevik revolutionary’s corpse. Essentially the German New Cinema equivalent of Godard’s obscenely overrated first feature Breathless (1960) aka À bout de soufflé—the supposed French New Wave classic where the director proved that even Marxist morons can love capitalist Hollywood and stupid Americans as demonstrated by the film’s counterfeit frog Humphrey Bogart-wannabe—Yesterday Girl is the sort of innately insipid and ultimately pointless pseudo-iconoclastic work that gives arthouse cinema a bad name due to its putrid and pansy political posturing and patently prosaic aesthetics, and overall brazenly banal story. The hopelessly mundane and meandering celluloid non-story of a young and rather annoying East German Jewess with large Anna Karina-like eyes, Yesterday Girl is not only an inane indictment of West German capitalism and democracy, but an assault on ‘bourgeois’ Teutonic society in general that, more than anything else, accuses the German system and populous of harboring ‘everyday fascism'. 

 As explained by a judge during a court case regarding her supposed theft of a cardigan sweater and some other items from a coworker's locker, “Anita G., born April 2, 1937, unemployed, no fixed abode, single, with no prior convictions, appears before the Braunschweig Court as she is duly suspected of having had the intention to take and carry away movable property.” During the trial, Anita also uses the race card, though she denies it is her intent, by bringing up the fact her kosher parents' factory was taken away from them by the naughty Nazis and the trauma of said events inevitably led her to leave East Germany to seek her (un)fortune in West Germany, but the rather physically grotesque kraut swine judge has no sympathy for the children of holocaust survivors, so her Jewishness does not save her as one might expect it to in the real world. Ditzy and compulsively ‘cute,’ Anita is certainly not someone you would peg as a kleptomaniac Jewess, but then again the celluloid realm of attorney at law turned auteur Alexander Kluge has always been more of a place of sterile ideas and theories and intentionally lackluster direction as opposed to aesthetically pleasing magic and true (as opposed to imaginary Marxist) social realism. The story of Yesterday Girl is fairly simple and especially anticlimactic as it basically depicts the failure of a commie-trained kosher chick to integrate herself into society and find a decent boyfriend/job, so she goes from job to job and boyfriend to boyfriend, until she eventually gets arrested for theft (of course, probably in Kluge’s mind “property is theft” or something like that), thus demonstrating the supposedly brutal authoritarianism of capitalist krautland. At her first apartment in West Germany, Anita is kicked out for failing to pay the rent on time, thus beginning a series of temporary stays at various motels and apartments as she is a born screw up, though, of course, director Alexander Kluge clearly expects the viewer to believe capitalism, latent fascism, and anti-Semitism are to blame for the little lass’ failures. Undoubtedly, Kluge also reveals that Anita is Jewish, despite her appearance to the contrary, to demonstrate that were she not both a direct and indirect victim of the holocaust, she probably would not be a petty criminal or something along those lines and that her criminality is even justified considering her special Semitic situation. Of course, all the crypto-anti-Semites in the film give her no breaks. Dealing with everything from a brief stint with pussy-peddling to a bastard boyfriend that gives her the gift of bruises, Anita is certainly used and is abused, but because of Kluge’s pedantic and sterile direction and the director’s sister’s lack of acting talent, it is all but impossible to empathize with the tragic girl and her terribly trying situation. Concluding with the inter-title, “We are all to blame for everything, but if everyone knew it, we would have paradise on earth,” one wonders if Alexander Kluge is one of the most, if not the most, whiniest and self-righteous filmmaker who has ever lived. Naturally, I blame Kluge for making an empty film for empty people.

 Judging by Yesterday Girl and Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (1973) aka Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin, which also stars the director’s sister Alexandra Kluge, one must question auteur Alexander Kluge’s dubious quasi-incestuous direction of his sis, but if one thing is for sure—sister lover or not—he is a filmmaker with a special knack for making the most clinically assembled celluloid works ever, as if he were a cultural mortician and Aryan Uncle Tom hired by his Hebraic homeboys at the Frankfurt School to deconstruct and ultimately destroy Germany’s deep and singular legacy of romanticism and historical myths. Incidentally, Kluge, who once served as a shabbos goy legal counsel for the Frankfurt School, was encouraged by Theodor W. Adorno—the Guido-Hebrew cultural Marxist messiah who spent a good percentage of his time criticizing German/European kultur with his ‘Critical theory’ and trashing the German people for the holocaust (hence his dickheaded 1949 dictum “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”)—to become a filmmaker in the first place, thus knowing that the lawyer-turned-auteur would never become the next Veit Harlan, but a sort of intellectually masturbating, anti-aestheticist who would degrade Teutonic culture and cinema for the greater good of the chosen amongst god's chosen. One of 26 signers of the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, Kluge undeniably helped launch German New Cinema, but as the naked melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, darkly romantic adventurist works of Werner Herzog, and the anti-leftist Wagnerian works of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg demonstrate, the kraut new wave thrived in spite of Kluge and not because of him. Despite Kluge’s cultural Marxist filmmaking career and supposed support of fellow directors of German New Cinema, Czech animator/auteur Vlado Kristl, who won the main prize at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival for his work Don Kihot (1961), once revealed the Yesterday Girl director was not a Marxist who practiced what he preached, stating, “Even though they claimed to be socialists, Kluge and a few others were almost careless in the way they showed their true face.” Indeed, as a proud anti-Marxist/anti-leftist myself, I have no problem admitting some of my favorite filmmakers, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, were card-carrying commies, yet Kluge’s films are as materialistic, mundane, soulless, and—most importantly—culturally corrosive as his political beliefs. With a pointless dream-sequence involving SA Nazi stormtroopers and American GIs chasing Anita and then Anita subsequently stomping on a good Christian woman’s hand (with gorehound-esque blood spattering and all!) being the most enthralling aspect of Yesterday Girl, it is probably safe to say that Alexander Kluge is one of the most aesthetically inartistic, unappealing and autistic filmmakers to have ever lived, hence why very few people watch his films today, yet names like Herzog, Fassbinder, and Wenders will be remembered forever. 

-Ty E