The death king
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The death king |
| Country of production | (West) Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1990 |
| length | 74 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK no age rating |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jörg Buttgereit |
| script | Jörg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen |
| production | Manfred O. Jelinski |
| music | Daktari Lorenz , John Boy Walton , Hermann Kopp |
| camera | Manfred O. Jelinski |
| cut | Jörg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen, Manfred O. Jelinski |
| occupation | |
The death King is a 1989 turned low-budget - episode film of Jörg Buttgereit . As with Nekromantik before , The Death King takes up a taboo subject, in this case suicide and death in general.
action
The film consists of a total of seven episodes, each with the name of a weekday. They are shown chronologically from Monday to Sunday. The only thing that seems to connect a few of the stories is a mysterious letter in a brown envelope that appears several times in the film. At the beginning, a naked male body can be seen on a black floor, the decomposition process of which is shown in detail between several episodes. In the end, only the bony skeleton remains.
Monday: A man named Persch returns to his apartment and writes several letters. He calls his manager to quit for personal reasons. This is followed by a long tracking shot through his apartment, which suggests a strong interest in fish due to the furnishings. Meanwhile, you can see Mr. Barsch doing everyday activities, such as vacuuming. In everything he does, a strong tendency towards precision and cleanliness can be seen. Finally, he shaves, undresses, folds his clothes and gets into an already filled bathtub. He swallows a significant amount of pills, suggesting an overdose, and sinks unconscious into the water.
Tuesday: A young, long-haired man steals the mail from the mailbox, goes to the video store and borrows a film. While he is talking to the salesman he knows, he reads the letter and concludes that someone he knows has killed himself. Back at home, he relaxed and watched the video when suddenly his girlfriend stormed into the room and told him angrily that he had to go to someone else's birthday for him. Obviously annoyed, he sticks out a pistol, shoots his girlfriend and hangs a picture frame around the blood that has splashed on the wall . This, in turn, can now be seen on the TV screen in another apartment, in which someone hanged himself at the same time.
Wednesday: In pouring rain, a woman is walking down a street with a letter in hand. She sits down on a bench next to a very soaked man. He tells her about his frustrating sex life with his wife and how he killed her driven by hatred on their wedding day together. His conversation partner then pulls a gun from her handbag and points it at him. He takes it from her and kills himself with a head shot.
Thursday: You can see a bridge that is filmed both inside and out. The names of people of different ages and with different occupations are faded in, which apparently (at least that's what the audience thinks) only connected by the suicide by falling from this bridge.
Friday: A lonely elderly lady looks peacefully out the window and watches a young man in the apartment opposite. She turns away from the window, distraught, when she sees him kissing another young woman tenderly and lovingly. She leaves the apartment for a moment, where she finds a letter that apparently several residents of the house have received. She looks through another resident's mail slot and goes back into the apartment. There she calls someone (probably the man she saw earlier), but nobody answers. Then she opens the letter: a chain letter in which a "Brotherhood of the Seventh Day" calls for suicide. She tears up the letter and takes chocolates and a bottle with unknown contents. She lies down and dreams of a childhood experience in which she observed her parents during sexual intercourse as the cause of their disturbed relationship to sexuality. A short time later you can see the young couple from the apartment across the street covered in blood and lying in bed without touching them.
Saturday: Old film tapes with archive recordings are played in a screening room. It shows how a woman reads facts about the psyche of a typical gunman from a book to a young child. Then the woman stands in front of a mirror and attaches a camera to her shoulder. From this point on you can see the woman filming her rampage from the first person's perspective, and only the rattle of the film projector can be heard. She breaks into a concert hall in which a rock band is currently performing and shoots at the band and audience at random until she is shot herself in the end.
Sunday: The last episode shows a man apparently plagued by frustration, despair and Weltschmerz, who rolls howling on his mattress and on the floor. Since he obviously doesn't know what to do otherwise, he bangs his head against the wall until he collapses.
Towards the end, a little girl can be seen on a playground, who, like shortly at the beginning of the film, draws the “death king” as a skeleton-like stick figure with a crown on a piece of paper with “This is the death king. He makes people no longer want to live ”comments.
Remarks
Even if many viewers rated the film as very depressing: The distance to the protagonists in particular shows the futility of suicide, and it almost gives the impression that they would commit this act for no reason. This also distinguishes “Der Todesking” from other Buttgereit films, as you hardly learn anything about the exact motives of the individual characters and only get clues. As usual for his films, Buttgereit prefers to stage the individual events aesthetically and artistically rather than as spectacularly as possible.
Trivia
- The Norwegian band Taake covered the theme song on Sadistic Attack / Nordens doedsengel , a split EP with the band Amok.
- In the Monday episode there is a record player in the background and next to it an LP case leaning against the wall on which a fish is depicted (matching the interior of the apartment). This record is the untitled 12 "EP of the Berlin avant-garde group Die Tödliche Doris . It contains the track 7 fatal accidents in the household , which, just like the film, deals with the omnipresence of death. There is also Jörg Buttgereit like the group itself was active in the West Berlin punk and art scene of the 80s and both know each other personally (singer Wolfgang Müller and drummer Käthe Kruse have a guest appearance in Nekromantik 2), one could even assume that it was Der Todesking is a cinematic interpretation of the piece.
- According to various sources, the bridge from the Thursday episode is actually known for the many suicides who fell to their death from there. It is unclear whether the people listed in the episode really existed and committed suicide there.
- Bela B. (drummer for Die Ärzte ) made a small guest appearance as singer and guitarist of a heavy metal band in the Saturday episode .
- As in Nekromantik 1 and 2, the Death King also shows excerpts from a fictional film that is an allusion to a certain genre. The protagonist of the Tuesday episode borrows a black and white film called Vera - Angel of Death of the Gestapo , in which a man in chains (played by Jörg Buttgereit himself) is castrated by Nazis. The name Jörgi Butti is given as the director of this non-existent film . It is a reference to the film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
- The video store from Tuesday called Videodrom is actually in Berlin. The protagonist goes unnoticed past a necromantic video cassette and a poster of the same film hangs in the background.
- The album Vilosophe by the Norwegian band Manes contains an excerpt from the Wednesday episode .
- The German black metal band Irrlycht uses samples from the Saturday episode for their song Der stumme Schrei .
literature
- (Axel Estein): "The death king - Out of the blue and into the black." In: Splatting Image , # 2, February 1990, pp. 22-27
Web links
- The Todesking in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ [1]
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
