Page 216 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

resemblance to the directors father and the Heimatfilm killer of Rob and Betty's beloved corps
being most pronounced.
But there is, perhaps, a further historic reference going on here: the term 'rabbit films' 0
Kaninchenfilme being the collective noun for the twelve films that were banned in East Germany in
1965. These were films rhat were felt to be too sceptical, nihilistic, relativistic or subjective to conform
to statist ideology. As Sabine Hake puts it:

The directors' failure or unwillingness to develop a dialectical conception of reality, the
argument went, had resulted in stories, images and, perhaps most importantly, dispositions
and attitudes that were irrelevant, if not detrimental to the self-definition of G D R society. [The
move] forced filmmakers to retreat to uncontroversial topics and conventional treatments."'

Quite apart from its capacity to shock, what is most extraordinary about the rabbit sequence is the
fact that it is replayed, and replayed backwards, in the closing sequence of the film, as Rob ejaculates
blood and semen on his bed of death. The rabbit once dismembered is literally put back together
again. The trauma that lay deep in Rob's past is exorcised in death: 'what has been destroyed is now-
restored; old wounds heal and bad things turn good again.' 17 A n d once more, of course, we are there
to look upon the process.
The Nekromantik films of Jorg Buttgereit, shocking in subject matter, unflinchingly visceral in
their portrayal of sex and death, are evidently important works of recent German cinema. Taking as
their premise the horrors of a past prematurely buried, they work to expose the complicity of the film
medium in acts of ideological manipulation of the subject and, in turn, point to the ways in which
that medium can bring about a re-sensitisation to the horrors of the past. They do so, moreover, with
wit that is both suitably mordant and perversely life-affirming. No wonder they have been so widely
banned.

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