Page 214 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

and a representation of human desire that rejects the power dynamics of heterosexual pornography
and slasher-horror alike.
ALL LIFE ONCE MORE IS DEATH

This, of course, makes Buttgereit a highly self-referential director, one who consistently references,
and re-configures, the cinematic medium in his work. Monika and David of Nekromantik II, for
example, meet at an avant-garde movie, a very funny parody of Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre
(1981) entitled Mon dejeunner avec Vera. Here, a man and woman feast on hard-boiled eggs whilst
sitting naked at a table on the roof of a block of flats. The linkage between the title and any notion
of 'truth' remains, of course, opaque. Between the two Nekromantik movies, Buttgereit made Der
Todesking (1990) in which, ostensibly in the mind of the little girl who introduces the piece, seven
characters kill themselves, one for every day of the week. Mulling upon the permeable membrane
between lived reality and cinematic representation, Der Todesking repeatedly deploys a Brechtian
Verfremdungseffect, whereby the constructed nature of the repeated suicide-tableaux is foregrounded
through often amusing plays on the medium of film. The entire 'Tuesday' sequence (which includes a
man renting a film at a video store and going home to watch it) turns out, for example, to be a horror
video, being screened in an empty room in which a body hangs dead in the background. Implicit in
German life, as the foetal figure that transmutes into a decomposing corpse intimates, is death. The
two are locked in an endlessly repeated cycle, a Nietszchean return, in which the tragedies of German
history are endlessly enacted by and repeated in death.
All of this, of course, comes to a head (so to speak) with Rob's suicide in the final moments
of Nekromantik. Lying on the bed he once shared with Betty, and for a brief interlude with their
dead lover also, Rob masturbates his memorably tumescent penis whilst slowly disembowelling
himself, coming in an impressively colourful splatter of blood and semen, back-masked sound and
chiaroscuro lighting. Far from being gore-for-gore's sake, Rob's suicidal masochism does seem to posit
a subjectivity so wracked by sexual dysfunction, existential despair and utter isolation that, as is the
case for many of Fassbinder's ill-fated hero-protagonists, suicide is the only option. Populating his
films, like Herzog, with characters that exist on the margins of society but, nonetheless 'are not freaks'
but 'aspects of ourselves',14 Buttgereit proposes that a tragic will to self-destruction that manifests
itself in failed relationships with the living, and a mordant fetishisation of the dead, lies at the heart
of German subjectivity.
It is precisely this paradigm, of course, that is embodied in Monika of Nekromantik II, a film whose
very credits are interspersed with a grainy, monochrome re-running of Rob's suicide scene (another
counter-memory). Disinterring Rob's corpse at the opening of the movie Monika protractedly
vacillates between her erotic pleasure in, and visceral disgust at, her sexual encounters with Rob
- whose head and (greatly reduced) penis she retains. This cyclical repetition of the love of death, the
repression of that love and the visual representation of that death is, of course, echoed in Monika's
conscious attraction to the idea of a relationship with the pornographic-voice-over artist Mark, who
nonetheless bores her sexually and, as we have seen, finds her liking of animal-dismemberment movies
obscene. Echoing the marriage of Maria and Oswald in Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Broun

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