Page 215 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

FIGURE 42 The love of death in Nekromantik 11

(1978), and numerous other New German Cinema renderings of the same, theirs is evidently a
relationship founded on a shared loneliness, in a world where 'people can't live alone, but they cannot
live together either'.15
The relationship culminates, of course, with Monika's decapitation of Mark during sex, her placing
a tourniquet around his still erect penis and replacing his head with that of the exceedingly rotten
Rob. The result of such congress with the living dead is Monika's pregnancy. Although this echoes the
unnatural reproduction of Hot Love, it does offer some model of authentic subjectivity emerging from
her union with the dead. If not, all life once more is death, all becoming is an ending.
Such a cyclical model of life in death and death in life is, of course, built into the very form of
Buttgereit's movies. This is most significant in the infamous scene in Nekromantik, when prompted
by the television psychiatrist's de-sensitisation discourse, Rob appears to recall a distinctively
disturbing episode from his past. Here, another unpleasant father figure, in decidedly unattractive
blue knitwear, in a distinctively industrial setting, picks up and slits the throat of a fluffy black and
white bunny. Said rabbit is subsequently skinned and gutted and hung up by its legs (in a pose most
redolent of SM porn), whilst inter-cut footage of an autopsy of a human corpse visually echoes the
scene. Thus, the insides of both creatures become their outsides as fur and skin are stripped away
and internal organs are removed in wet and gloopy chunks. Once again, Buttgereit is forcing us
to look at something we would rather avoid — the industrial scene of slaughter, the protagonist's

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