Der Todesking

While never destined to reach a wide audience – a thought that would perhaps shock him just as much as his work would shock the masses – the films of cult director Jörg Buttgereit have a dedicated underground following. His two most notorious features, 1987’s Nekromantik and 1991’s Nekromantik 2, having previously been issued as deluxe packages by Arrow, they now turn their attention to his 1989 anthology, Der Todesking (The Death King).

“The Death King makes people want to stop living,” Buttgereit explains in an archive “making of” included on the disc. “It’s a mythical figure, the personified urge of man to put an end to his existence.”

Nekromantik having been described as a “no budget film,” Der Todesking was created with only fractionally more resource yet the structure, seven short films about death, makes the work more focused than the loose narratives of his feature films, his actors providing better performances when given something stronger to latch onto and a more specific and compact remit to embody.

In Montag (Monday), a man (composer Hermann Kopp) lives alone with his goldfish, arranging the details of his life and terminating his employment before he terminates himself, overdosing as he lies in the bath; told in unforgiving extended takes, the camera swirling around the apartment like the fish in its bowl, the segment was inspired by the widely reported death of the German politician Uwe Barschel in Geneva in October 1987.

Maintaining his style of unvarnished realism but bringing a change of tone is Dienstag (Tuesday), a film within a film as an over-the-top Nazisploitation video of a tortured captive (played by Buttgereit himself) is rented by a man who goes on to murder his girlfriend, the piece mocking 1975’s notorious Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS which also satirises the conceit that video violence inspires real violence.

On Mittwoch (Wednesday) a man mourns his wife whom he loved and then killed, Buttgereit offering no comfort, no salve for the wounds of a harsh life, before the abstract but profoundly moving Donnerstag (Thursday), the simple architecture of a bridge examined from all angles accompanied by the names, ages and occupations of all who have leapt from it to their deaths.

On Freitag (Friday) a chain letter brings death, while more shocking now than when it was made because the world in which we live has changed, on Samstag (Saturday) a mass shooting at a concert takes place, the final moments of the victims and the killer captured on film, while on Sonntag (Sunday) a man dies a lonely death, beating his head against the walls, perhaps in madness, perhaps in frustration.

Meditations on loneliness, isolation, desperation, grief, illness both physical and mental and the consequences of such, Buttgereit is unafraid of bodies, and surprisingly for a genre where female flesh is frequently displayed to the exception of all else, he has no issues with male nudity, alive or dead, the stories framed by the continuing decomposition of a body, the construction of the full-size prosthetic corpse shown in detail in the features.

Also on the disc is an interview with Buttgereit from the 2016 Manchester Festival of Fantastic films, the director frank and thoughtful as he explains that there is no horror culture within Germany, and similarly that despite using the images of Nazisploitation in this film that no such works exist in his homeland, that his generation was still so traumatised by the war that they would never exploit it, but that he himself sees it as something ridiculous which takes power from the legacy of that regime.

His fans as committed and fearless as his performers, there are also features on the tattoos inspired by Der Todesking, an interview with Kopp discussing the soundtrack and demonstrating examples of his interesting instrumentation, early short films by Buttgereit and producer producer Manfred O Jelinski and, in the limited edition box, a separate disc of the soundtrack.

Der Todesking is available now as a dual format boxset from Arrow Films

Comments

comments

Show Buttons
Hide Buttons