Page 211 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

dealt with in films such as Schlondorff's 1979 film The Tin Drum. (Here, the squealing of the boy
Oskar shatters the specimen jars of the doctor who seeks to cure him of his refusal to grow up into
Fascism.) But such imagery also existed before the rise of the Nazis, specifically in the Expressionist-
inflected 'mad-scientist' movies of the early twentieth century. Films such as Homunculus (1916), in
which a decidedly Faustian scientist pre-empts Hitler's 'final solution' by setting out to overcome the
bounds of human knowledge in the creation of a his own Superman, a theme echoed in both The
Golem (1915) and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).
Beneath the rational consciousness of the street, beneath the present's repressions of the past,
Buttgereit seems to argue there is an essential irrationality. It is an irrationality, as for Syberberg,
that lies at the heart of the German consciousness and which can be seen in the nightmare world
of the ghost train, the crazy logic of dreams, and in the representational strategies of avant-garde or
experimental cinema itself. Notably, both Nekromantik movies contain lengthy or repeated dream
sequences. Examples include Rob's rural visions of a white-clad, long-limbed woman striding across
a rural landscape, carrying a severed head in a box before removing it to play a game of catch. This
is echoed by Mark's drunken nightmare of burial up to his neck and having his own head placed
beneath a box and then stamped upon by a spike-heeled shoe. And there is also Monika's torch song
when, accompanied by an androgynous blond pianist on an 'Eterna' piano she sings a love song to
death as a giant blood-spatteted skull revolves in the background. Surreal visions of death, desire and
love coalesce here in a strange dream-logic that self-consciously questions not only the transparency
of the cinematic medium but also the certainties of rational discourse, specifically the discourses of
history.

DIMENSIONS OF VISUAL PLEASURE

It is notable, in the light of this, that Rob and Betty's erotic desire for the corpse and, hence, their very
subjectivity as necrophiles, is predicated upon an act of remembering. That such subjectivity is also
tightly bound to the act of looking further implicates us, the audience, in the discourse's scopophilic
powers that lie at the heart of Buttgereit's films. Early on in Nekromantik, for example, a television
psychiatrist talks at length on the ways in which phobic individuals can become de-sensitised to
the object of their fear. Such rherapy is based on the psychiatrist's observation that teenagers who
repeatedly watch video nasties, can become inured to the horrors of what they see. De-sensitisation,
the psychiatrist argues, is a product of repeatedly experiencing the horrific - or mass-cultural
renderings of the horrific - and experiencing it visually. But as Buttgereit realised early in his movie-
making career, there are some things that German eyes, however countercultural, find difficult to
look upon. The inclusion of concentration camp footage in Bloody Excesses in the Leader's Bunker, for
example, was simply too much for audiences to stomach, whatever their punk credentials.
Might it be the case that de-sensitisation to violence is just as likely to happen when we refuse to
look, when we turn our head away from reality and look elsewhere - at the world of nature, the rural
community, at the falsified present? Nazi cinema, of course, wirh its promorion of a volkish ideology
of national community and blood and soil (which entailed the concomitant purgation of all liberal,
democratic, progressive or cosmopolitan elements) had effectively instituted a cult of the beautiful

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