Melancholie der Engel

Melancholie der Engel
DVD cover
The Angels' Melancholia
Directed by	Marian Dora
Produced by	Georg Treml
Starring	Zenza Raggi Carsten Frank Janette Weller Bianca Schneider Patrizia Johann Peter Martell Margarethe von Stern
Cinematography	Marian Dora
Edited by	Marian Dora
Production company	Authentic Film
Distributed by	Shock Entertainment
Release date	1 May 2009 (2009-05-01) (Weekend of Fear)
Running time	158 minutes
Country	Germany
Language	German[1][2][3][4]

Melancholie der Engel (English: The Angels' Melancholia) is a 2009 German independent experimental art film directed, shot, and edited by Marian Dora and cowritten by Dora and Carsten Frank (under the pseudonym Frank Oliver, used due to artistic disagreements).

It was planned since 2003 though the shooting was delayed due to monetary issues. It premiered at Weekend of Fear Festival in Erlangen and Nuremberg, Middle Franconia, Franconia, Bavaria, Germany, on 1 May 2009. It was also screened at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in New York City on 27 October 2009, where it won Best International Feature Film – Arthouse Genre. It was later screened at BUT (B-Movies, Underground, and Trash) Film Festival in the Netherlands on 7 June 2013. The DVD was released on 30 July 2010 in Austria.^[1][2][3][4]

The film received largely negative reviews. While some commended the cinematography, it was seen to be an exploitive hardcore film with repetitive and meaningless depravity communicating its nihilistic message.

Synopsis

The film opens with a woman named Katja giving birth to an infant which is immediately beheaded by two mysterious figures. Depressed, feeling his mortality, and fearing he is reaching the end of his life, Katze decides to meet his old friend Brauth, who has a Christ-like appearance, at an old house in which they used to delve into dark pleasures. They meet two sixteen-year-old girls, Melanie and Bianca. Together they enter a bar where a woman, Anja, joins the group. Katze also finds two other old acquaintances of his are attending: Heinrich, an elderly artist who claims to be a dead man, accompanied by a young woman named Clarissa who is tied to a wheelchair. Clarissa can only excrete through a urine bag or artificial bowel outlet.

The group decide to allow Katze to go out in style as their fun turns increasingly more depraved and horrific. The film contains explicit representations of coprophilic and urophilic actions: one scene involves a man defecating on a woman while taking her panties off, wiping himself, and shoving the pair in her mouth, all the while gesturing harshly to put her finger in his soiled anus.

During the same evening, the protagonists begin to consume alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine, and to think about different philosophical approaches. Katze, Brauth, and Anja reveal their nihilistic nature to the two girls, claiming they do not believe in heaven, and they will not be missed after dying. Then Katze, using a scalpel, deals cuts on Anja's breast as she vomits semen while cutting herself under the enthusiastic look of Brauth and the perplexed look of Melanie and Bianca.

The following morning the group travels to a pond near a factory: here Brauth reveals that Katze does not have much time to live. Melanie and Katze move away from the others. Near a farm, he meets a nun (Martina Adora) who leads him to a neighboring church. The nun begins to pray and then undresses and masturbates while Katze enters the crypts, watching the tombs with morbid curiosity; at the same time Melanie assists hunting and slaughtering a pig and Brauth rapes Anja. Several newts, frogs, rats, cats, and snails are also killed throughout the film.

That night Katze has an illness whose cause is attributed by Heinrich to the indifference of God towards him. Brauth becomes tired of Clarissa's laments, slams her into a basement and tortures her by ripping her colostomy device off and jabs his fingers into the hole, then throws her down from her wheelchair and abandons her. During the night Bianca awakens and says she "heard the voice of the dead." Katze checks and finds nothing but a rabbit hanged by Heinrich, beheaded and thrown by Katze himself.

The next day Brauth connects with Melanie and Blanca and locks them in a stable before sending Heinrich to abuse them. However, the two girls succeed in escaping from him: Heinrich later abuses Clarissa. The girl commits suicide the next morning, throwing herself off a cliff; at the same time Anja finds the remains of the pig discarded by the butchers and is sexually excited by touching them while having a goat lick between her legs.

Young Bianca, derisively called Snow White, is also murdered by the group. After her womb has been removed with a knife, her skull is thrown. Heinrich is murdered by Katze and Brauth by having his entrails stabbed out of him. Afterward, an orgy takes place in which the four remaining members of the group burn Heinrich, still alive, at a pyre while the participants engage in sexual acts and urinate into the fire.

Anja finds Katze in a confused state, bruised and pained. Bianca comes crawling from the old house, while Melanie looks at a tiny skull inside a pendulum clock and finds a tape containing the scene shown at the beginning of the film; the figures who killed the infant are shown to be Katze and Brauth, and the skull found in the clock is that of the infant itself. Melanie crushes the cassette and uses the tape to masturbate while Bianca is reached and beaten by Anja, Heinrich, Katze, and Brauth. The latter then knocks her with a knife and abandons her to death. From the flames there is a flash that hits Katze's face, blinding him permanently. There are only a few hours left to live and the following afternoon Anja accompanies him to his tomb where he speaks. Anja honors Katze by ornamenting his tomb before reuniting with the nun and walking away silently.^[1][2][3][4]

Commentaries

Two direct-to-video films were released as a diptych, intended as commentary on Melancholie der Engel. The first, Reise nach Agatis (English: Voyage to Agatis), is a 74-minute film produced by Engelfilm. It was shot between 27 and 29 May 2008 in Croatia, on a budget of €10,000. It premiered at Weekend of Fear on 2 December 2010, and was released on DVD on 16 April 2014 in the United States. It was nominated for the BUT Award at BUT (B-Movies, Underground, and Trash) Film Festival in Breda, Breda, North Brabant, Netherlands, on 8 September 2011.^[1][2]

The second, Debris documentar, is a 75-minute film released on 28 September 2012 in Germany, produced by Buna Films and distributed by Werkmann Filmverlag. This film deals with the everyday life of a man, Carsten (Carsten Frank), who works on the set of the 2004 film Zombie Nation for Ulli Lommel, and was filmed at the time Dora worked there as assistant, producer, actor, and technician.^[5] David Hess composed most of this film's score (the rest is by Sebastian Veelbehr).

Cast

Production

To maximize the authenticity, the director was the only one with access to the script during the shooting. The film was shot for a period of three weeks around Eselsburg Valley, near Herbrechtingen, Heidenheim, Ostwürttemberg, and Dornhaldenfriedhof, Degerloch, Filder, Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, and Bogenhausener Friedhof, St. George, Bogenhausen, Bogenhausen, Munich, Upper Bavaria, and Nördlinger Ries, near Nördlingen, Donau-Ries, Swabia, Bavaria, Germany, and Auschwitz, Oświęcim, Gmina Oświęcim, Oświęcim County, Lesser Poland, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland. Dora described the shoot as nightmarish due to drug abuse and violence on set. The dialogue was mainly spoken in poetic verses.

Themes

At the center of the film is Katze, whose thoughts and feelings are revealed to the audience via voiceover. Often, different philosophers and poets are quoted e.g. Rainer Maria Rilke, Lord Byron's 1816 poem Darkness, Marquis de Sade's 1791 novel Justine and 1782 short story Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, Eduard Mörike's 1838 poem Am Walde and 1832 poem Verborgenheit, Georg Büchner's 1828 poem Die Nacht and 1836 short story Lenz, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1832 poem Faust, Part Two, Friedrich Nietzsche's 1883 novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the 1600 song Sorrow, Sorrow, Stay, Lend True Repentant Tears by John Dowland, Wolfgang Koeppen's 1954 novel Death in Rome (the book Katze is shown reading and being buried with, itself referencing Thomas Mann's 1912 novel Death in Venice and Dante Alighieri's 1321 poem Inferno), or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in addition to Psalms 23 and 1 Chronicles 22:1, while Frederick Eckstein's 1936 book Alte, unnennbare Tage: Erinnerungen aus siebzig Lehr- und Wanderjahren about Empedocles, Ray Hoekstra's and Tex Watson's 1978 book Will You Die For Me? The Man Who Killed For Charles Manson Tells His Own Story, and Elly-Leonore Henkel-Michel's paintings of Gudrun Ensslin, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Andreas Baader are also mentioned. Dora received several death threats as a result of making this film.^[1][2][3][4]

Reception

The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre panned the film, writing:

There is no plot or comprehensible meaning to speak of, there is no rationale, philosophy or understandable characters, just very broken people doing disgusting things in an 'artistic' movie pretentiously pretending to be exploring the German psyche. I would have liked to say that the movie merely depicts very disturbed people, cruelty and vileness, but the movie actually revels in it and seems to think of this as art and emotional pathos.^[2]

Melancholie der Engel was referred to as "the most notorious, undeniably hardcore German release to date" by Severed Cinema, which said that while it could be annoying and suffered from dullness and repetition due to its length, the film was beautifully shot, possessing haunting and nightmarish cinematography with lyrical quality to it. The website concluded its review by stating: "Filled with unspeakable atrocities, Melancholie der Engel is completely devoid of morality. It is a depraved, perverse and nihilistic endurance test."^[3]

Horror News similarly commended the cinematography and acting, however, it also said of the film, "There is talk of spirits and demons and ghosts, there is talk of a mysterious event from the past, there is talk of a change for the future, but the story itself is lost amongst everything else and we find ourselves watching disgusting and/or horrifying scenes but not sure what it all means."^[4]

References

External links