The Witch Who Came from the Sea

If Andy Warhol’s failed assassin Valerie Solanas—the bull-dyke author of the infamously moronic SCUM Manifesto (“Society for Cutting Up Men”) and would-be-filmmaker (indeed, one of the reasons she shot the pop-con-artist is because she believe he stole her script)—had been a fan of ‘fun in the sun’ and made an exploitation film before she died a deranged bum, it would probably resemble the vaguely artsy fartsy and hysterically melodramatic video nasty The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976).  Directed by Jayne Mansfield’s Judaic one-time-husband/baby daddy Matt Cimber—a filmmaker who, among other things, dabbled in racially insensitive porn via Africanus Sexualis (Black Is Beautiful) (1970) and once directed both Orson Welles and Stacy Keach in the work Butterfly (1982)—penned by semi-talented Roger Corman screenwriter Robert Thom (Bloody Mama, Death Race 2000), and shot by Halloween (1978) cinematographer Dean Cundey (who would go on to shoot various other John Carpenter flicks like Escape From New York, as well as blockbusters like the Back to the Future trilogy), this rather curious piece of celluloid trash assuredly transcends the brazen banality of typical exploitation cinema, as a sometimes genuinely creepy tale about a crazed cunt with decidedly debilitating daddy issues who gets a kick out of castrating the cocks of unsuspecting musclemen and related alpha types. Featuring a pretentious reference to Early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s iconic 1486 painting The Birth of Venus, heavy-handed symbolism, half-decent acting performances, and rather lacking in gratuitous sex and violence, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is certainly not the kind of work that will act as a quick fix to the sort of gorehound cinpehile who gets a hard-on from seeing buckets of blood and guts Guido exploitation flicks, as it is a psychologically castrating flick where graphic murder and mayhem take a backseat to fierce female mental illness. Indeed, like what you might expect if Fassbinder suffered brain damage after snorting too much coke and penned a script that he had the slightly more talented heterosexual brother of Andy Milligan direct, Cimber’s conspicuously crappy yet strangely captivating work is like a feminist flick for white trash female serial killers who have watched one too many soap operas (indeed, I can certainly see Aileen Wuornos masturbating to the film). Featuring an aberrant anti-heroine of the severely scatter-brained sort who literally and figuratively cuts men down to size (in fact, the film's tagline is: “Molly really knows how to cut men down to size!”), The Witch Who Came from the Sea is certainly not the seaside supernatural horror flick that one would probably assume it is due to its totally misleading title and absurdly sensational, if not somewhat aesthetically pleasing, poster art. Mixing elements of hagsploitation, the old school Hollywood ‘woman's film’ genre, bargain bin psychedelia, and pseudo-Hitchcockian thrills and chills, The Witch Who Came from the Sea might be one of the most grotesque dramas ever made, but it certainly seems like a Max Ophüls flick when compared to similarly themed filmic filth like I Spit on Your Grave (1978). 

 30-something-year-old unmarried waitress Molly (played Millie Perkins, who is probably best known for playing the eponymous star of George Stevens’ classic 1959 holy-caust propaganda flick The Diary of Anne Frank) loves telling her young nephews romantic stories about her sea captain father who she absurdly believes became lost at sea because, “He was perfect…too good to live on land,” but there is more to her stories than she would care to admit.  Molly’s overweight and seemingly perennially disgruntled sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) has slightly less nostalgic memories regarding their long dead father, as she describes him as a “drunk bum” and “evil bastard,” among other not-so-nice things. As it turns out, Molly was routinely raped by her father when she was just a preteen child and she developed the whole fantastic ‘sea captain’ story to save herself from going completely insane. Of course, as a woman who fantasizes about the grizzly deaths of beefy body builders while having a nice day on the beach with her nephews, Molly is a ticking time bomb of murderous misandry and if there is anything she hates more than men, it is men's members. Indeed, Molly hates man-meat so much that after seducing two professional football players—a negro and equally braindead honky—and beginning a miscegenation-based ménage à trios involving weed and bondage, she slices off both of the unlucky athletes’ dongs and gongs, thereupon resulting in their emasculating deaths. Of course, being a crazed little creature who unconsciously utilizes delusion and denial as a means of self-preservation, Molly does not remember fatally castrating the two football players, though a heavy burden seems to be weighing down on her forsaken soul.  Due to her reasonably attractive appearance and petite body, Molly is told by her sister Cathy that she should become a stripper, but the bat-shit crazy broad refuses to because, as she aggressively states, “I’m not going to show my ass and tits for the sake of a tip.” A fuck-up at virtually everything she does aside from castrating cocks and lying to herself and everyone around her, Molly is always late for work, but her swarthy old fart boss—a fellow with the quite fitting name ‘Long John’ (played by Lonny Chapman, who appeared in various old Hollywood classics, including Elia Kazan’s 1956 Tennessee Williams adaptation Baby Doll and Hitchcock’s The Birds)—is also her fuckbuddy/father-figure, so she gets away with it. Despite taking advantage of a clearly mentally perturbed not-so-young woman, Long John unquestionably cares very much for Molly and does what he can to deter her further derangement, but of course, as anyone knows who has ever had to deal with mentally perturbed people regularly, there is only so much he can can do to keep the murderess at bay (after all, Molly is an ocean kind of girl).

 When Molly somehow manages to crash a party inhabited by a bunch of pompous and superficial Hollywood snobs, she happens upon a reproduction painting of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which she becomes completely entranced by. Molly is told by the man throwing the party regarding the image of Venus, “She’s a witch…come out of the sea […] Venus was born in the sea. Her father was a god…they cut off his balls…his sperm dropped into the ocean. The sea was knocked up. Venus was the kid.” Of course, as someone who loves cutting off balls, Molly states to the party host regarding the Venus painting, “She’s not a witch, she’s beautiful.”  Naturally, before she knows it, Molly is trying to bite off the party host’s boner. Surprisingly, the host manages to get away with his accoutrements intact, but the partygoers accuse him of attempting to attack Molly, as he had to smack her around a little bit while attempting to get away from her, thus slightly injuring her in the process. After Molly is injured, a dashing TV commercial actor comes to her rescue and pretends that he is some sort of hero. Of course, as someone who largely lives in a fantasy world of television, Molly becomes obsessed with the actor, especially when she sees him in a shaving razor commercial and schizophrenically believes she hears him say, “Why don’t you shave me you hot sweet little bitch,” as he begins to slit his own throat. Of course, Molly eventually kills the actor, but not before hacking off his naughty bits. Naturally, when Long John wakes up next to Molly and sees that she is covered in blood, he becomes more than a little bit suspicious of her dubious behavior.  After being questioned regarding her actions, Molly eventually confesses to committing the killings, ridiculously stating regarding the belated hack TV actor, “I guess I did kill him. Why did I do that? He was so beautiful. I think, I don’t know…Did he love me? He did…a little bit.” As depicted in a flashback scene, Molly’s father not only repeatedly raped her, but he also died on top of her at the end of coitus after suffering an orgasm-induced heart attack, thus ultimately causing the loony lady to equate sex with death. It is also revealed that Molly’s father had the same topless mermaid tattoo as she does (which she gets about midway through the film from a creepy gypsy pirate dude whose face is covered in terrible tats). During the last scene of the film, Molly envisions herself being pulled out to sea in a wooden raft in an allegorical scenario reflecting her isolation from reality.   Indeed, in the end, Molly's transformation from sullen sea bitch to schizophrenic sea witch is complete.

 More psycho-whore-horror than mere mindless bargain bin exploitation, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is ultimately more offensive due to its low-budget kitschy handling of rather serious topics like incest, child abuse, posttraumatic stress, and mental illness than due to its depiction of a crazed cunt who gets her rocks off by cutting off cocks. Of course, it is also probably in poor taste that an actress best known for her debut childhood role as Anne Frank in the Academy Award winning film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) is featured portraying a man-hating murderess of the cock-chopping sort who gets involved in threesomes with alpha-buck negroes (apparently, Millie Perkins agreed to star in the film to support her screenwriter husband Robert Thom), but that is also one of the film's greatest charms, as an exploitation film on steroids featuring Hollywood royalty. To add to the singular sleaziness, the film’s casting director, George “Buck” Flower (who also plays a detective in the film), cast his own preteen daughter Verkina Flower to portray anti-heroine Molly as a child during the father-daughter rape scenes. Of course, as a film directed by Matt Cimber—a man whose greatest claim to fame is probably being responsible for directing the first American hardcore porn flick, He & She (1970), to receive national distribution—The Witch Who Came from the Sea was never destined to be a work of high celluloid art.  Despite its decidedly dreary and disconcerting subject matter, the film also features a couple of moments of genuinely humorous comic relief, especially during a scene where a busybody white trash (non)babe remarks, “All football players are faggots…Closet queens.” An aberrant (anti)Electra Complex piece that maliciously molests Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) and semi-cleverly cannibalizes the culturally confused Mishima adaptation The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976) starring Kris Kristofferson, Cimber’s trash-with-class ‘masterpiece’ is indubitably a provocative and reasonably original celluloid work lost in a cinematic sea of mostly forgettable exploitation and celluloid sleaze. Undoubtedly, if there is an exploitation film that can make you feel guilty about liking exploitation films, it is most certainly The Witch Who Came from the Sea.  Indeed, for better or worse, Cimber's largely forgotten film is certainly a cream of the crop piece of work when it comes to video nasties, as a certifiably sick flick that will have lesser men grabbing their gonads in pain.

-Ty E

Hommage à 'La Sarraz'

Rather ironically, as their various strong national movements and general intolerance towards Hollywoodism/Americanism demonstrates, it seems that the eastern half of Europe that was under virtual slavery to the Soviet Union for about half a century is less deracinated, decadent, and ‘liberal’ than the western half that lived under the softcore dictatorship up Uncle Sam, Ronald McDonald, and the Rothschild Army Faction. In fact, American neo-Spenglerian philosopher/revolutionary Francis Parker Yockey was so convinced that America and the rest of the American-colonized West was such a lost cause and that the Soviet Union was less taunted that by late 1952 he argued that Yank and European nationalist groups should align themselves with the Russians to cut the tentacles of Americanization once and for all, but I digress. Undoubtedly, post-WWII German cinema is a good place to study in regard to discerning the different effects of Americanization and Soviet communism, as while virtually all of the West German filmmakers associated with German New Cinema were hardcore leftists, feminists, and neo-Marxists, Eastern Germany at least produced a couple of filmmakers that had not succumbed to the various spiritual ailments (i.e. ethno-masochism) that were quite common in the American-colonized segment of the Fatherland. Indeed, although associated with German New Cinema, Prussian auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King, Hitler: A Film from Germany), who would go on to become one of the most hated filmmakers in Germany due to his political persuasion and scandalous public statements about certain ‘protected groups’ (i.e. Jews, communists) and dared to mix kraut commie Bertolt Brecht's doctrine of epic theatre with romantic Wagnerian opera aesthetics, was associated with GNC, he actually grew up in Eastern Germany. Additionally, painter, filmmaker, and multi-media artist Lutz Dammbeck (Herakles Höhle aka The Cave of Hercules, Dürers Erben aka Dürer's Heirs), who has spent a good portion of his career focusing on the history of National Socialist aesthetics and Teutonic art in general, is from the commie GDR, but that did not stop him from utilizing NS aesthetics, including Arno Breker statues, for his early art instillations during the 1980s. Indeed, although best known for his documentary The Net (2003) aka Das Netz—an experimental work about technology and its relation to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, LSD, the CIA, and the counter-culture movement—the seeming majority of the director’s work has had to do with National Socialism in some shape or form, with his early 12-minute experimental collage short Hommage à 'La Sarraz' (1981) be a rather striking, if not aesthetically corrosive, example of this. 

 Featuring a radio recording of National Socialist propagandist Fritz Hippler of Der Ewige Jude (1940) aka The Eternal Jew infamy, excerpts from the völkisch quasi-avant-garde Nazi flick Enchanted Forest (1936) aka Ewiger Wald directed by Hanns Springer and Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski, the romantic musical Wunschkonzert (1940) aka Request Concert, and audio recordings of Austrian-German singer Marika Rökk and Dutch actor Johannes Heesters, as well as clips from various 1930s UFA newsreels, contemporary news clips, and various other forms of recycled footage, Hommage à 'La Sarraz' was made with quite different intentions than its subversive ingredients might indicate as it takes its name from and pays tribute to a meeting that took place in 1929 among members of the European/Soviet film avant-garde at La Sarraz castle in Switzerland where a number of important auteur filmmakers made a manifesto condemning two specific things: “The commercialization of film and its subservience to ideology.” Of course, as a meeting attended by the likes of bolshevik auteur Sergei Eisenstein, whose whole career was based on subservience to an ideology (even if he did find himself in trouble at different points in his career), as well as Walter Ruttmann, who later became an assistant to Leni Riefenstahl on Triumph of the Will (1935), it is quite dubious as to whether or not these men stuck to their pledge, but that is ultimately irrelevant as Dammbeck’s film was intended as a tribute to that spirit of the avant-garde, or as the director wrote himself, “And the result was my own experimental "La Sarraz" revival studio, where we adapted the idea to the present day in an attempt to carry on in the "La Sarraz" tradition.” Originally part of a multi-media project created by the director called the ‘Hercules Media Collage’ that combined performance art, painting, dance (Fine Kwiatkowski), film (‘La Sarraz’), and photography, Hommage à 'La Sarraz' is not exactly something you would expect to have been assembled by a GDR artist (in fact, the director submitted a script for an experimental film that was ‘unalterably rejected’ by the ‘Dresdener Studio für Trickfilm’ aka Dresden Cartoon Studio in 1984), as a sort of innately anarchistic postmodern ‘neo-Heimat’ celluloid poem of sorts. 

 Teutonic art faggotry at its finest where autistic animation, home movie footage (including a humorous scene where Dammbeck and his friends are introduced as (in)famous Nazi filmmakers), about half a century's worth of eclectic German film/news footage, and a truly throbbing ‘music’ track by noise group Throbbing Gristle, Hommage à 'La Sarraz' feels more or less like the chaos of the Volksgeist of a Volk without a true Heimat, or as Syberberg once wrote, Germany is, “spiritually disinherited and dispossessed…a country without a homeland, without ‘Heimat.”” Indeed, during one especially interesting scene, Dammbeck juxtaposed footage of an ugly post-industrial highway with the following narration from the film Enchanted Forest: “From the forest we came, like the forests we live, from the forest we crave out Heimat and space. Like the forests our souls expand, full of life, lust, and need. Full of questions. God, please tell us, what is the hidden meaning of death?” Of course, there are no forests in the film, as the technocratic plague has bulldozed them down, with East Germany being blessed with the ungodly Soviet aesthetic. In another standout scene, a guy being interviewed for a contemporary news show remarks: “For Goebbels it was always important to provide good entertainment […] they [people] don’t want to watch anything where at the end of the film they say: “We might as well hang ourselves, there’s no sense in living!” No: People want to be entertained!” Of course, Hommage à 'La Sarraz' was not created to entertain, as it is a sort of playful aesthetically terroristic wake-up call about a divided nation that only has an undigested past and thus no future, hence the Burroughs-esque ‘cut-up’ technique style use of vintage footage and audio recordings. Undoubtedly, while watching the short, it is clear that the director has a genuine interest in understanding his nation’s history and his subsequent works, especially his for 4-documentary “Kunst &Macht” project certainly demonstrates that. Of course, only when Germans have properly ‘accepted’ their past will they be able to go on with the future and once again create truly groundbreaking cinematic art.  Naturally, the same can be said about the rest of Europe, hence the all but total evaporation of not only national cinema movements, but art and culture in general.

-Ty E

Near Dark

Long before she became arguably the most overrated female filmmaker in cinema history, Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) directed a couple of cult flicks that did not get their due upon their releases and made the future of her career seem dubious at best. While her considerably overlooked debut work The Loveless (1981)—a nihilistic reworking of the Marlon Brando vehicle The Wild One (1953) co-directed by David Lynch producer Monty Montgomery (Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Hotel Room) and starring a then unknown Willem Dafoe—is still pretty much unknown except among certain types of cinephiles, Bigelow’s genre-bending ‘vampire western’ Near Dark (1987) has developed a sizable cult following over the decades. Admittedly, when I first saw Near Dark as a kid, I was fairly disappointed, as I expected a modernist too-cool-for-school vampire flick that was even ‘cooler’ than the similarly leather-clad and genre-twisting bloodsucker blockbuster The Lost Boys (1987), but ultimately discovered a redneck cowboy vampire flick that was big on atmosphere, low on comic relief, and as stoic as a rampantly heterosexual hillbilly on black market steroids. Of course, when I first saw the film, I did not realize it was originally intended as a western by director Bigelow, who only decided to make it a cross-genre undead cowboy flick after she and her co-writer Eric Red (who previously penned The Hitcher starring Rutger Hauer and who would later co-pen the 1996 TV movie Undertow with Bigelow) realized it was impossible to find funding for old west style celluloid dung during the Reaganite 1980s. Indeed, vamp flicks where quite vogue at the time as demonstrated by the commercial success and/or popularity of bloodsucker flicks as varied as The Hunger (1983), Fright Night (1985), and Once Bitten (1985). Unfortunately, Near Dark was released only three months after the highly successful vampire classic The Lost Boys (which grossed over $32 million)—a work that had a lot of advertising muscle behind it as a Warner Brothers produced picture—and was thus seen as a poor rip-off and failed miserably at the box office, though serious film critics ranging from Jonathan Rosenbaum to David J. Skal were more perceptive regarding the work and realized its somewhat singular aesthetic value. Apparently the third vampire-western film ever made following the mostly worthless works Curse of the Undead (1959) and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), Near Dark is more than just a genre-hybrid flick as a work that also owes credit to Bonnie and Clyde (1967) due to its outlaws-on-the-road theme and even Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) due to its postcard perfect cinematography of scorching American deserts and ethereal open plains. Borrowing a good portions of the cast of Aliens (1986) directed by James Cameron (who knew and later married Bigelow and even has a cameo role in the film ‘flipping the bird’ to Paxton’s character), including Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein, the film certainly has memorable performances and standout characters, but owes most of its potency to its poetic cinematography by Adam Greenberg (a Polish Jew that previously shot Once Bitten and The Terminator), strangely soothing yet foreboding atmosphere, eloquent pacing, and visceral eroticism. Indeed, if it were not for the film’s Hollywood style one-liners, (anti)genre conventions, and big explosions scenes, the film would almost qualify as a rare semi-mainstream arthouse ‘horror’ film. The more rebellious yet more mature and stoic little brother of The Lost Boys, Near Dark is also a rare example of where the largely European vampire subgenre has been seamlessly and appropriately Americanized to accommodate the ostensibly fearless and feral-like frontier spirit of the Yanks, who ultimately drained the North American continent dry. Indeed, for better or worse, if it were not for Bigelow’s undead redneck rebel flick there would be no True Blood. 

 Young dirty blond twink cowboy Caleb Colton (played by Adrian Pasdar, who is of ½ Iranian/ ½ German ancestry) is a young horny buck looking for a cowgirl and while hanging out with his immature cowboy comrades, he spots a blonde ‘heroin chic’ white trash beauty named Mae (Jenny Wright) that looks like she could be his twin sister. Caleb and Mae hit it off instantly as if they were born for one another, though the latter sometimes acts strange as if she is not telling her new beau something important. When it gets close to sunrise, Mae becomes increasingly strange and abruptly tells Caleb she has to leave, but before she can, the cowboy demands a kiss, but he ultimately gets more than a mere juicy peck as the naughty nymph-like beauty bites him on the neck and runs away. Of course, Caleb begins chasing Mae just as the sun rises and becomes startled by the fact that his flesh is burning. Unbeknownst to Caleb, Mae has given him a sweet kiss of death that has transformed him into a member of the bloodlusting undead. Before Caleb knows it, he is scooped up off the road and pulled inside a blackened ‘Winnebago from Hell’ (as Bigelow has described it) by Mae’s outlaw 'family' of cool-as-a-corpse confederate bloodsuckers, including charismatic yet seemingly half-crazed leader Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen), butch pseudo-blonde bitch Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), neurotic and equally nasty child-vampire Homer (played by Joshua John Miller, who previously played the deranged kid in Tim Hunter's underrated 1986 masterpiece River's Edge), and psychopathic Lizard King wannabe Severen (played Bill Paxton, who would once describe regarding his role, “I guess I was kind of living my Jim Morrison fantasy”), who wants to kill the hopelessly naïve cowboy. Unfortunately for sick Severen, Mae has turned Caleb into a bloodsucker so instead of draining him of his vital fluids, the van of vamps decide to give the novice vampire a trial period to prove whether or not he has what it takes to be one of them. As Mae tells Caleb regarding their potentially perennial future together as vampire lovers, he and she can do, “anything we want…until the end of time…but you have to learn to kill” because, after all, “the night has its price.” Unfortunately, Caleb is a pussy poser cowboy who does not have what it takes to kill. Meanwhile, Caleb’s farmer father Loy (Tim Thomerson) and little sister Sarah (Marcie Leeds) begin traveling the open road looking for their loved one and naturally they seem like no match for a pernicious pack of bloodsucking predators of the country fried sort. 

 Since Caleb is hopelessly shy when it comes to slaughtering and draining blood from humans, his lover Mae does the murdering and even feeds him like a baby, with a nice negro truck driver being the first victim of their peculiar feeding arrangement. To the vampire family’s credit, they mostly kill and feed on subhuman scum, including carjackers, cheap cowboy-riding sluts, dickheaded rednecks, and other rabble that will hardly be missed by the general populous. When the vampires take Caleb to a bar as a last test to see if he will kill, the undead pseudo-family ultimately slaughters virtually every patron in building, including the bartender.  Of course, coward Caleb pussies out in regard to killing a young man that is about his age, so the vamps decide he is too weak and plan to exterminate him. Ironically, Caleb falls into favor with the family the next morning after saving the day when the same young man he let go the previous night calls the cops, who raid a seedy motel where the vamps are staying. Indeed, after putting his life on the line during a Bonnie and Clyde style police raid, Caleb buys himself some time, but it does not last long, as his father and sister end up staying at the same hotel that night by happenstance. When Homer—a rather old child-vampire who is quite self-conscious of his pathetic prepubescent body and is pissed that the newcomer has stolen Mae from him (apparently, Homer was the one responsible for 'turning' Mae)—spots Caleb’s Sarah, he decides he wants to make her his baby vampire bride. Of course, Caleb is not happy with this and begs bloodsucker boss Jesse to leave his family alone. Ultimately, Caleb manages to escape with his family when the sun comes up. In a scenario that defies all vampire film logic, Caleb is transformed back into a human after being given a blood transfusion. Seeking revenge and knowing that the Colton family can reveal their undead identities, the vampires decide to wage war. While using Mae to distract Caleb, the vampires steal Sarah, who Homer still wants to make his mate. Riding on horseback because the vampires have slit his car tires, Caleb goes looking for his sister and first encounters sarcastic psychopathic sicko Severen, who he gets in a long battle with using a tractor-trailer that ultimately leaves the bad ass bloodsucker in pieces after the twink cowboy jackknifes the big rig, which almost instantly magically explodes into seemingly millions of pieces. Of course, Jesse, Homer, Diamondback, and Mae go after Caleb, but the two girls help the young man escape. Somewhat absurdly (or maybe not so if one considers how rough some rednecks live their lives), the vampires begin chasing Caleb at daybreak in an automobile with blackened windows that they have covered with spray paint. Quite selflessly, Mae helps save Sarah by breaking through the back window with the little girl in her arms. Of course, Homer, who still wants his virginal child bride, follows them, but he is burned up by the sun. In a last ditch effort to takeout Caleb, Jesse and Diamondback attempt to run over the cowboy and his little sister, but they and their car explode due to exposure from the light. In the end, Caleb manages to reverse Mae’s transformation by giving her the same sort of barnyard blood transfusion he had, thus enabling them to live a short banal life together as boring everyday human beings. 

 As far as I known, Near Dark is the sole worthwhile hick bloodsucker flick, as well as the greatest vampire-western ever made, though fanboys seem to like conspicuously contrived works like Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989) starring Bruce Campbell David Carradine and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). Of course, Near Dark is the only one of these three films that has any true class and plays everything straight and does not wallow in being tediously tongue-in-cheek, as a work that thankfully lacks the putrid postmodern irony of the two other mentioned works. The rather bizarre film Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1987) directed by British far-left filmmaker Alan Clarke (Baal, Made in Britain) may seem like a vampire-western upon a superficial glance as the title hints, but it is actually a goofy semi-absurdist comedy-musical about the ‘cue sport’ snooker. Featuring a highly complementary musical score by Teutonic electronic music maestros Tangerine Dream, as well as a cover of the song “Fever” by punk proto-psychobilly group The Cramps (who also contributed music to other 1980s horror classics like The Return of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Near Dark is undoubtedly an all-around aesthetically agreeable work that ultimately proves that there is still some room to rework the vampire subgenre without resorting to the predictable cynicism and irony that plagues so many similarly themed flicks nowadays. In fact, Bigelow’s film does not even feature the use of the word ‘vampire’ a single time as if the human characters in the flick are completely unaware of the fact such supernatural beings exist, thus adding to the mystique of an already mystifying film where the bloodsucker is the ultimate outlaw and where holy objects, roses, garlic, holy water, and mirrors never come into the equation, thus enabling the viewer to fantasize about the possibilities of the largely unexplained mythology. 

 A remake of Near Dark co-written by Bigelow and Canadian actor Matt Craven (no relation to Wes) and starring Bill Paxton and Heather Langenkamp of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) fame began shooting in 2007, but the studio apparently did not like the dailies and the production was apparently aborted (even though apparently over a 1/3 of the film had already been shot), though as of November 2011, another remake was in development.  Of course, the last thing the world needs in another super shitty horror remake that rapes and defiles everything that was great about the original film.  Largely erotic in the sort of way a budding trailer park beauty is before she has had one too many beer bottles and dirty dicks in her mouth, Near Dark manages to give the whole cowboy outlaw way of life some much needed legitimacy that has not been seen in cinema since the nihilistic revisionist westerns of Sam Peckinpah. Indeed, the film also demonstrates that Bigelow has more of a poetic vision than her mostly banal and obscenely overrated political thrillers indicate. Interestingly, in the featurette Living in Darkness (2002), cold and cool Nordic American man man’s Lance Henriksen stated regarding the experience of working with Bigelow on the film, “She made me think a matriarchal situation in filmmaking is really wonderful.” Indeed, despite featuring nocturnal homicidal hicks and redneck ‘rebel flag’ renegade bloodsucking (Henriksen's character claims to have fought for the Confederate Navy during the American Civil War and even has the stars-and-bars flag from his ship stitched inside his trench coat), Near Dark certainly has the sort of nicely nuanced eroticism and subtle yet perversely potent sensuality that only a feminine touch could have been capable of, thus acting as a rare example where lacking testicular fortitude can be beneficial to a filmmaker. 

-Ty E

Manila (2000)

Although just mere speculation based on a lifelong obsession with cinema and over a decade of studying film, I am going to have to assume that Germans are easily the most cinematically besmirched, reviled, and mocked people in cinema history, with Hebraic Hollywood doing the majority of this beaten-to-death post-WWII Teutophobia (of course, anti-German sentiment goes back at least to the time of the First World War, with Hollywood playing a central role in the hate-campaign against those evil ‘Huns’). Indeed, from chief rabbi of the celluloid holocaust Steven Spielberg to infantile toilet-humor comedies like DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (2004) and Brüno (2009) to philo-Semitic pseudo-arthouse fag Wes Anderson, Hollywood has every angle of kraut-bashing covered, so it seems absolutely unnecessary that German filmmakers themselves would wallow in Germanophobia, yet such filmmakers exist as demonstrated by various directors associated with German New Cinema from the late-1960s to the early-1980s, with Volker Schlöndorff being one of the major pioneers of the so-called ‘anti-Heimat’ (aka ‘anti-homeland’ film) sub-genre. Of course, like any so-called ‘progressive’ nation, Deutschland has received its fair share of untermenschen immigrants from the global south, especially of the Turkish and/or Muslim sort, including a number of filmmakers like Sohrab Shahid Saless (Utopia, Hans - Ein Junge in Deutschland), Kutlug Ataman (Lola and Billy the Kid aka Lola + Bilidikid), and Fatih Akın (The Edge of Heaven, Head-on), who have all paid back their host nation with celluloid Hun-hating. Unquestionably, one of the more curious cases of ‘Teutophobia’ (if it can even be called that) inside of Germany is the work of contemporary arthouse auteur Romuald Karmakar (The Deathmaker aka Der Totmacher, Nightsongs aka Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder) who, although German by way of birth (he was born in Wiesbaden) and culture, is the racially schizophrenic progeny of an Indian man and a French woman (though one would not be able to tell this by looking at him, as he looks like some sort of Nordic/Mediterranean mix). Of course, as his first feature The Deathmaker (1995)—a work clearly inspired by Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and possibly Ulli Lommel’s Fassbinder-produced masterpiece The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) aka Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe—demonstrates, Karmakar clearly considers himself a part of some sort of Teutonic cinematic heritage, albeit a mostly unflattering one filled with sodomite serial killers, genocidal Nazis, and majorly melancholy bourgeois degenerates. Influenced by the revolutionary auteur filmmakers of German New Cinema (in fact, he once worked as an assistant to Bavarian absurdist artisti Herbert Achternbusch on the 1989 film Mix Wix) and punk rock, Karmakar has assembled a striking and reasonably subversive oeuvre that his given him a mostly deserved reputation as one of the few interesting and provocative contemporary German filmmakers. Starting with the amateur feature Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (1985) aka A Friendship in Germany, which features the director playing Adolf Hitler, Karmakar has also demonstrated a lifelong obsession with Teutonic history and kultur, but of course, it is of mostly the dark and negative sort.

 Undoubtedly, more than any of the director’s other films, Manila (2000) demonstrates Karmakar’s love-hate relationship with German history. Promoted with the totally tasteless tagline, “No Matter How Far You Travel, You'll Always Be a Bastard!,” the film was almost unanimously trashed by German film critics and filmgoers upon its release to the point where Karmakar apparently felt the need to personally apologize for the film when introducing it at German film festivals. Indeed, as Elke de Wit wrote regarding the film for the Central Europe Review: “The verdict of every single person that I spoke to about MANILA (2000) at the 51st Berlinale was negative. The film was described as boring, predictable, portraying stereotypical Germans and bringing nothing new […] my suspicions were further aroused when Karmakar virtually apologised for his film as he introduced it to the audience. He said that he did not know why it had been treated so disparagingly by everybody and that he had never intended to offend anyone. He had simply wanted to tell the story of all these individuals.” Indeed, depicting a group of Germans stuck at a crowded Philippine airport as a bunch of loud, boorish, brash, vain, prideful, racist, homophobic alcoholic-addled kraut neo-colonialist perverts who sexually and financially exploit yellow people and act with an unwarranted sense of superiority, Manila is certainly more intricately anti-Teutonic than a piece of xenophiliac pseudo-arthouse hipster trash like Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (2007) where a smartass young American Hebraic hipster type tells off some loud, fag, and ugly elderly German tourists, as if American Jews are the world's foremost patrons of civility. Of course, as a work featuring Fassbinder superstar Margit Carstensen (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven) and Edgar Wallace star Eddi Arent playing himself (and even performing a mock murder mystery), as well as popular contemporary Germany actors like Sky du Mont (Derrick, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut), kraut comedian Herbert Feuerstein, Martin Semmelrogge (Das Boot, Derrick), and Jürgen Vogel (Rosenstraße, The Free Will aka Der freie Wille), Manila is a work that wallows in Teutonic cinema history of both the cultivated and kitschy sort. It should also be noted that the film was co-written by German novelist Bodo Kirchhhoff, so he certainly deserves some of the blame for the film’s Teuton-trashing. A sort of intentionally claustrophobic tragicomedy featuring kraut-cock-loving Jewesses, unsavory sub-Aryan sex tourists, prosaic Jew-pandering school teachers, and pseudo-suave psychopathic airline managers all trapped with one another at a Philippine airport as they wait while in an increasingly agitated state to get back to the Fatherland, Manila unwittingly reveals why traveling aboard can ironically lead to one adopting more nationalistic views. 

Beginning with footage on a television of a seemingly half-crazed and flaming gay Filipino Christian preacher demanding that his followers “bow your heads” to the “lord” while crying in a creepy fashion, Manila instantly gives the viewer the feeling that the Philippines is a rather culturally and spiritually confused nation due to various Occidental influences.  Of course, the Spanish are gone, but now other Europeans, including the Germans, use the Southeast Asian island as their own personal playground. The bourgeois krauts at Manila airport are less than happy as there is a delay for their flight, so they must pass the time by getting drunk and mingling with one another. The guy in charge of the airport, Jochen Osterfeld (Sky du Mont), is a pseudo-charming psychopathic prick that has the gall to ask his hot archetypically Aryan blonde flight attendant named Kerstin (Nina Heimlich), “are you menstruating again?,” after he becomes offended by her tone of voice.  Married teachers Regine (Margit Carstensen) and Knut Görler (Peter Rühring) no longer enjoy one another’s company, so the latter begins chatting with an extroverted fellow on the brink of old age named Walter (played by Michael Degen, who previously starred in Roland Klick’s kraut cult classic Supermarkt), who has married a native named Maribel (Chin Chin Gutierrez) and proudly states of his financially beneficial marriage arrangement, “He who marries a Filipina, also marries a whole Philippine village.”  Walter is going back to Germany to bury his lifelong comrade Kurt who he met while just a child in the ‘Volkssturm’ (A militia setup during remaining days of WWII comprised of underage boys and old men) and who was a tough man that survived everything, including malaria, but ultimately succumbed to a foul filipina’s deadly diseased snatch. Walter also credits his dead friend Kurt for cleaning up the Philippines by remarking, “It used to be a real nut house before. The lowest level, fags, transvestites…all mixed up. But then Klaus came and cleaned it all up.”   

 Naturally, brainwashed liberal educator Regine takes some offense to Walter's remarks and states regarding herself and her semi-cuckolded husband Knut, “We don’t think like that, Mr. Walter. We are both teachers. German and History. And when we for example were in Prague or Warsaw…we knew exactly what that meant. Not only Hradschine…but also Heydrich. Not only ghetto, but also Brandt.”  Unluckily for Regine, Knut begins to take a special likening towards alpha-male Walter as he makes him feel more like a real mensch.  Meanwhile, a creepy looking kraut named Herbert (played by Manfred Zapatka, who read a 3-hour Heinrich Himmler speech for Karmakar’s 2000 experimental documentary Das Himmler-Projekt aka The Himmler Project), who looks like an older, fatter, and more alien-like version of Conan O'Brien, and his much younger cousin Rudi (Jürgen Vogel) begin chatting up a German-speaking Jewess named Elizabeth (played by mainstream Hollywood actress Elizabeth McGovern, who has starred in everything from Robert Redford's Ordinary People to Kick-Ass) whose parents fled Deutschland in 1937 but decided it was ok to comeback to the country when charismatic crypto-commie West German chancellor Willy Brandt won the glorious Noble Peace Prize. Herbert is such a patent pig that he makes his introduction to Elizabeth by letting her see a piece of paper with the name “Heike” written on it and then subsequently revealing that it is his wife’s name and that it was “written by a pussy” (indeed, apparently the pathetic guy paid a Filipino prostitute a pretty penny to put a paintbrush in her pussy). When Rudi remarks to Elizabeth, “That’s interesting, I never spoke to a Jewess…” and Herbert retorts, “There aren’t many left in our country anyway…Don’t get me wrong,” the Jewess replies to them by strangely stating, “I get you right, don’t worry. We’re all not kosher.” After revealing her seemingly ethno-masochistic fetish for Aryan men, Elizabeth recites poetry that acts as a major theme of the film: “A German at home…that’s an ideal world and for that reason not very interesting […] A German far away from home…that’s always a small, open wound.” 

In a feeble attempt to appease the increasingly agitated German passengers, airport manager Jochen Osterfeld brings out old school German star Eddi Arent as entertainment and proudly states that the man has starred in 28 Edgar Wallace films (Rudi corrects him by stating, “In 29, you fag!”). To keep them entertained, Arent plays out a mock murder mystery in the middle of the airport and boorish bastard Herbert is fittingly named as the killer after the actor uses Thomas Mann’s classic 1912 novel Death in Venice as a clue. Meanwhile, a degenerate Austrian would-be-pimp pervert named Franz (Martin Semmelrogge), who has a pathological obsession with showing off his prized “redwing shoes” and lurks around the bathroom as if he owns the place, attempts to hook up various German tourists with Filipino prostitutes and even shows nerd Knut photographs of filthy-looking Flip gashes, to which the teacher remarks regarding his wife’s ‘Casa Vulva’, “Regine’s does look different.” Although it is never made clear who she actually is, a Filipino janitor that resembles an obese 12-year-old American Indian boy named Mercy (Ces Quesada) is constantly at Franz's side and she seems to take pride in the fact that she is with the most spastic, degenerate, and seemingly half-autistic Austrian in all of the Philippines. Meanwhile, Herbert becomes agitated while talking to his cousin Rudi about his wife and it is soon revealed that the angry kraut is secretly receiving a blowjob from a Filipino under the table, as if receiving oral sex makes him all the more angry and hateful.  Of course, eventually everyone at the airport notices Herbert's indiscretion and Jewess Elizabeth sardonically remarks while alluding to the holocaust regarding the unsavory scenario, “If Buchenwald had seen more of that, the Germans would be better off now.”  Since he did not get to finish what he began with the flip flirtina cop-all, Hotheaded Herbert opts for going solo and unloading his sub-Aryan seed in the bathroom and fucked Franz, who seems to be on the verge of suffering a cataclysmic autistic fit, follows him and goes completely crazy, accusing him off owing him money for hooking up with a prostitute (for whatever reason, Franz seems to think both Filipino women and the airport bathroom are his own personal property). While furiously masturbating, Herbert begins to weep while Franz continues to pound on the bathroom stall in an increasingly fanatical and spasmodic fashion.  After everything is said and done, Hebert busts a load in the toilet and Franz's fat untermensch lady friend leaves him, but not before calling him a “cheater” and a “pig.”  At the other end of the airport, Knut’s wife Regine, who is quite mousy and hopelessly introverted, starts a conversation with Walter’s young Filipina wife Maribel about how she and her husband fought for 20 years to set up a memorial for the Jews, “so the remembrance of the holocaust should not fade,” as if the so-called Shoah is not thrown in German peoples' faces 24/7.  Meanwhile, hyper horny kraut Rudi manages to get his miscegenation on with Jewess Elizabeth, thus hinting that there might finally be peace between Germans and Jews. At the end of the film, all the German passengers get together in a dichotomous scene depicting the two extremes of German kultur; as what starts with Knut conducting an imaginary orchestra devolves into a beer-hall sing-a-long song worthy of the drunkest of brownshirts. The scene becomes all the more significant when one considers what director Karmakar once said regarding the film: “I see this film as one great human orchestra. It was my task to write the score so that it didn't degenerate into a cacophony, but produced a melody in five bars or acts.”  Of course, in the end, the Germans finally make their way back to Deutschland, but not before leaving their irreparable mark on the Southeast Asian island.

 A rare German ‘dramedy’ that is not totally retarded, completely unfunny, and aesthetically insipid like Good Bye Lenin! (2003) and countless horrendous Til Schweiger films, Manila is ultimately a rare film that attempts to depict both the good and bad regarding the German people without resorting to too many cliché kraut stereotypes (of course, the film features many of the typical stereotypes, but also features a couple of new ones as well). Indeed, a work of cultivated krautsploitation directed by a man who seems more influenced by Brecht than Russ Meyer, Karmakar’s quasi-chamber-piece (or ‘neo-Kammerspielfilm’) is softcore Teutophobia with a bittersweet heart that, unlike the cinematic works of an adamant anti-kraut like Spielberg, features next to nil ill will to the Teutons, but instead merely pokes fun at their supposed quirks and idiosyncrasies in a rather playful, if not sometimes borderline pernicious, fashion. That being said, I can practically imagine Karmakar during pre-production of the work driving around in his car while blasting Rammstein and dreaming up scenarios for the film. More than anything, Manila—with its large cast of curious characters, long scenes of dialogue, and somewhat minimalistic laidback style—seems like an aberrant Aryan take on the theatric yet naturalistic and mostly plot-less films of American auteur Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts). While not exactly as good as Karmakar’s minor masterpiece Deathmaker, Manila is unquestionably infinitely more interesting than Spielberg’s similarly themed Tom Hanks vehicle The Terminal (2004). With its overt and not so overt references to the holocaust and cast of mostly homely (if not sometimes downright ugly) krauts, not to mention the fact that the film received a considerably negative backlash in Germany, Manila is a film that should have inspired some new young German auteur filmmakers to direct films that more adequately depict their countrymen just as the laughably horrendous Hollywood miniseries Holocaust (1978) inspired Edgar Reitz and various other filmmakers of German New Cinema, who wanted to take their history and heritage back from foreign hands, to create their own masterpieces, but it seems that contemporary Germany has a serious void when it comes to serious auteur filmmakers.  Notably, not one of the characters featured in Karmakar's film seem like they have the capacity to be a great Sturmbannführer, but then again, none of the characters seem like they have what it takes to be a great artist like an F.W. Murnau or even a Max Ernst either, as if the Fatherland is out of geniuses and only has rich boorish assholes who only know how to consume as opposed to produce. While World War II was certainly quite dsygenic for Germany, I do not believe the land of poets and thinkers has completely degenerated into a post-völkisch technocratic nightmare of banal bureaucrats and beer-bellied buffoons.  With that being said, I think communal viewings of Manila and readings of Nietzsche might be more beneficial to the next generation of German film students than analyzing Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and learning the latest 'cutting-edge' techniques from industrial filmmakers in Hollywood.  Indeed, a somewhat wicked work of kraut constructive criticism as created by a racial outsider, Karmakar's film is proof that, in some small way, members of the Ausländer community can contribute to society, even if it is virtually always in a 'negative' way.

-Ty E

Age of the Gods

While the Allies, especially the Americans, have gone to great pains to present themselves as flawless angel-like heroes who saved the world from the Great Satan Adolf Hitler and his demonic armies of kosher-baby-eating killer krauts, they also committed their fair share of crime and atrocities against humanity, especially of the aesthetic sort, as while the Nazis are constantly criticized for looting art, the Yanks and Brits intentionally destroyed ancient cities, cultural landmarks, and especially contemporary neo-classical statues like true jealous and opportunistic barbarians who finally got to achieve their depraved dream to wipe out the great cultural legacy that their own philistine nations lacked. Indeed, aside from the firebombing of Dresden, which was the brainchild of bloated alcoholic Winston Churchill and done with the quite questionable intention of merely spreading terror and chaos in already war-ravaged Germany, destroying an ancient city (which, being old, was largely made of wood and thus easy to incinerate), and senselessly killing mostly innocent civilians, the Allies perpetrated countless other crimes that are not that well known, including the destruction of over 90% of German sculptor Arno Breker’s public works. As a man whose ancient Greek inspired neo-classical sculptures reflected the strength, beauty, and godlike essence that was officially endorsed by National Socialism, Breker naturally found his work to be the target of Allied resentment yet, somewhat suprisingly, he was partly rehabilitated after the Second World War and in 1946 was even offered a commission by Joseph Stalin of all people. Of course, as a personal friend of Jean Cocteau who created busts of people ranging from Jewish poet Heinrich Heine to alpha-surrealist Salvador Dalí, Breker was not exactly a true believer in the Nazi cause and in the artsy fartsy documentary Zeit der Götter (1992) aka Age of the Gods director Lutz Dammbeck attempted to find out what made the sculptor transform into a budding modernist/avant-gardist into one of the most powerful artists in the world as the “official state sculptor” of the Third Reich who was commissioned in 1938 to redesign Berlin as the “World Capital GERMANIA.” Part of Dammbeck’s rather idiosyncratic four-part “Kunst & Macht” art documentary series which is, in turn, part of the director’s Heiner Müller-inspired “Herakles-Konzept” (aka “Hercules Concept”)—a highly personalized multi-media theory that began in 1982 and utilizes paintings, collages, installations, films and other artistic mediums—Age of the Gods is an exceedingly ambitious (and thus somewhat convoluted) work that largely uses the life and work of Breker as a pretext to discuss the modernist influence of National Socialist art, the corruption of an artist by the prospect of power, and the strange occult influences that gave birth to both the National Socialist Weltanschauung and aesthetic. Directed by a seemingly apolitical auteur from the communist GDR who seems more interested in provocative mysteries from German art history than pedantically preaching about how innately evil Breker’s Uncle Adolf approved statues are, Age of the Gods is a work of art in and of itself that demonstrates that Teutonic art history is not exactly as transparent as whiny left-wing art historians would have you believe. 

 Age of the Gods begins with the story of an unnamed kraut sculptor from an old town in Prague who became the Minister of Fine Arts for the GDR after the Second World War and was commissioned to create the largest Stalin sculpture in the world, only to later kill himself after coming to the realization that he, “betrayed his youthful artistic ideals to this power” and failed to become an heir to “all the sculptors in his country’s history” (of course he failed, as he was a cuckold of communism and thus a traitor to himself and his country's history). Of course, this unnamed sculptor’s tragic story somewhat superficially parallels that of Arno Breker who was seduced by Adolf Hitler when the Führer apparently said to the sculptor in 1936, “Young man, from now on you will only work for me.” Of course, as the doc reveals, Breker always had an interest in both romantic and völkisch Teutonic ideals as demonstrated by the fact that he was a member of the Wandervogel and was once heavily inspired by listening to Teutonic philosopher Ludwig Klages—a member of the Stefan George circle who was certainly no friend of the Jews—read from his work Man and Earth, in which is described by Dammbeck as, “an appeal to revolt against Nihilism…an invocation of the Germanic and pagan gods which progress, capitalism, and Christianity work to defeat.” As Dammbeck describes, Breker ultimately broke with a played-out 200 year artistic tradition that started with the French Revolution that attempted to depict the so-called “equality of the people” via statues, as the National Socialist sculptor apparently had, “another vision, something more ancient, more powerful rooted far back in history…not always visible, but always present.” 

 Ironically, according to Breker’s main model Gustav Stuhrk, it was Breker’s Greek wife Mimina who convinced the sculptor in 1935 to begin creating neo-classical works and get involved with the “national wave in Germany,” as so-called “Gothic Expressionism” had been labelled a degenerate art. In no time, Uncle Adolf discovered Breker’s art and had Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels look around Berlin for the mysterious young man whose sculptures he greatly admired. As Dammbeck subjectively narrates, by 1938, “Breker, now a Nazi party member, is on his way to the top but he has no theme anymore. He and his art are now part of a mighty machine, attempting to redesign the whole world, in conjunction with the vision of the return of the gods.” Indeed, Breker’s transformation into an artistic god is most apparent in an infamously iconic photo from June 23, 1940 of Breker posing with Hitler and architect Albert Speer in conquered Paris, which Demmback describes as follows: “Before a suggestive backdrop, Hitler, Speer, and Breker imitate a scene from antiquity: Hitler as the successful general, Pericles. Left: Albert Speer as building master Iktenus. Right: the sculptor Arno Breker as his new Phidias…from now on sworn to the future ruler of the world.” As the documentary makes quite clear, Breker seemed more interested in hanging out with his fellow artists than conquering the world, as he befriended frog sculptors Charles Despiau and Aristide Maillol and started an enduring friendship with poet/filmmaker Jean Cocteau during his stay in Paris in 1942. Cocteau and Breker also went to a private screening of Carmen (1944) starring the former’s rather Aryan-looking boyfriend Jean Marais, whose life was saved by the German sculptor. Indeed, as Marais himself describes in the documentary, he was arrested after beating up a Nazi-collaborator journalist who worked for the Gestapo and if it were not for Breker’s influence, he might have met a grizzly end at the hands of the Gestapo. Interestingly, Marais, who had a rather Aryan appearance, starred in the Vichy era Cocteau adaptation L'éternel retour (1943) aka The Eternal Return, which is a modernist take on Tristan und Isolde that some viewers felt had Nazi undertones.

 Undoubtedly, one of the more interesting segments of Age of the Gods is an interview with German Conservative Revolutionary novelist Ernst Jünger who, on top of being almost a centenarian at the age of 97 at the time he was interviewed, is featured sporting a goofy Japanese button-up shirt featuring dragon designs that is quite in contrast to his dubious reputation as an elitist ‘nazi artistocrat.’ Ultimately, the novelist sums up Breker better than anyone else in the doc by remarking, “The political doesn’t interest me in an artist…only the artistic. What political bend he has…is absolutely secondary in comparison. I don’t agree with everything Breker did, especially not the very large things, but I’ve always felt that he’s very capable.” Jünger, who once sat for 8 days for the sculptor for a bust that was made of him, also compliments Breker’s sensitivity as an artist by stating, “I suppose, the bust he did of me is good. I have to rely on my wife there. She said, he’d captured elements which were only familiar to her. One has to extract the best of a person. I tried to with Breker too. I’ve always had a heart for persecuted persons.” Jünger also concludes that Breker was naïve about the war and National Socialism, remarking that if the sculptor had realized Germany was involved in a ‘Weltburgerkrieg’ (global civil war) as opposed to a national war during the Second World War that, “he may’ve made figures like Harmodios and Aristogeiton, that is the Greek figure, where two heroes kill a tyrant.” 

 Despite revolving around the life and work of Arno Breker, Ages of the Gods is ultimately a work that is more about whether one can separate the aesthetic from the political, especially in regard to a disgraced/blacklisted artist, as well work about the timeless dichotomy of opportunism versus autonomy among artists, than a traditional biographical documentary. Additionally, auteur Lutz Dammbeck also uses the documentary to propose various theories and speculation, including that Uncle Adolf may have had gay love for the sculptor. Indeed, during one scene in the doc, the following 1942 diary entry by Jean Cocteau is read by the director: “When Hindenburg worked with Hitler, he became totally attached to him. When Hitler went to Munich, Hindenburg never slept until he had a call from Hitler. So is was with Hitler and Breker: He asks him to drive carefully. He loves him. He is his adoptive son, like Jeannot for me.” The documentary also reveals that in 1990 Breker helped found a seemingly homoerotic neo-Männerbünde group called the ‘Alexander Order’ with frog fag novelist/diplomat Roger Peyrefitte and Austrian Jewish painter Ernst Fuchs that was dedicated to the “glory of male genius and beauty in the spirit of eternal antiquity.” The documentary also goes on a number of bizarre and seemingly random tangents about proto-Nazi occult groups and occultists like the Thule Society and Lanz von Liebenfels. Interestingly, the doc features rare footage of an SS expedition to Tibet and other Ahnenerbe expeditions, as well as random references to SS man Otto Rahn’s failed attempts to locate the Holy Grail in Southern France. Unfortunately, Dammbeck also attempts to associate Conservative Revolutionaries Ernst Jünger and German poet Stefan George with the same anti-humanistic aesthetic trend that led to National Socialism, as if they are also culpable for the holocaust despite the fact that both men rejected the Third Reich. In fact, towards the end of the documentary, the director interviews fairly unknown and rather eccentric contemporary German völkisch poet Rolf Schilling, who collaborated with Breker on a poetry book, in a fashion that seems like a rather pathetic way to discredit the sculptor. Quite ironically, both Jünger and a typically boorish Soviet officer agree that Breker’s art totally transcends its political connotations. 

 At the conclusion of Age of the Gods, director Dammbeck narrates the following words in a pseudo-sinister fashion as if to warn Germans about some imaginary Luciferian National Socialist uprising: “The attempt to realize the vision of the return of the gods failed politically in 1945. The artist Arno Breker, who had served this vision, also failed. The building blocks of this vision remained, to be reconstituted at will. ‘Giants and Titans grow first in the dawn’ says Ernst Jünger. Are the old gods returning today, after an interim period?” Interestingly, the last couple of minutes of the documentary features grainy footage of one of Breker’s lost sculptures that was trashed by the Allies after the Second World War being salvaged from a lake in a somewhat silly scene that insinuates that the old Germanic gods are rising from the abyss for the first time since 1945.  Naturally, one must take into consideration that the doc was made around the time of the German reunification, so many Teutons had fears regarding the future of Deutschland that ultimately proved to have no basis in reality.  Of course, Germany has only become all the more socially and culturally degenerate since Age of the Gods was first released over two decades ago, so it is rather unlikely that the nation will produce another Hitler or Breker anytime soon. Describing his “Herakles-Konzept” as an attempt to present, “a cybernetic concept, an endless loop made up of guilt, and violence, and attempted disintegration,” Dammbeck certainly proves with the documentary that he has the sort of nihilistic and self-flagellating psychology that is quite typical of post-WWII Germans, albeit to a lesser degree (indeed, it seems Western Germans are much more screwed up in that regard), so the Breker flick must be viewed as a collection of wrongly assembled yet nonetheless provocative puzzle pieces that were put together by a figurative blind man.   Indeed, maybe if contemporary Germans looked to the aesthetics of masters like Breker, Jünger, and George instead of celebrating the senseless extermination of their grandparents in firebombings like the distinctly degenerate and exceedingly ethno-masochistic pro-Zionist ‘Antideutsch’ movement does, then the Teutonic people might survive to see the next century.  Undoubtedly, for those individuals with even the slightest interest in German art history and/or the Third Reich, Age of the Gods, as well as the other three documentaries in Dammbeck's Kunst & Macht series, makes for mandatory viewing. After all, what other documentary can boast featuring an elderly Ernst Jünger speaking kind words regarding Breker while sporting an eccentric Jap shirt?!

-Ty E