Sunday June 7th 2015, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Kamikaze 1989 (Wolf Gremm, 1982). In German with English subtitles. Free admission. Door opens at 20:00, Film starts at 21:00.
Set in the not-so-distant future, this film depicts a brave new world where illness has been eliminated, culture has been dumbed-down, there is no unemployment and a single conglomerate controls all the mass-media. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (in his final acting role) stars as the off-beat police lieutenant Jansen who is assigned to investigate a string of murders, but the deeper he digs the more complex and twisted the situation becomes. This is not the sort of film that leads you by the hand into a dystopian future, but a movie which dumps you in total alienation and a convoluted cultural anarchy- it’s Eurotrash, camp, arthouse and over the top.
Based on the 1964 novel Murder on the Thirty-First Floor by Per Wahlöö, this “West German cyberpunk thriller” features Fassbinder who was on his last legs when he starred in this crazed film. He is wildly dressed in a gaudy leopard-print suit, chain-smoking, sweating, and as one person said he is “lumbering around like a wounded walrus”. But that also adds a lot of flavor to the chaos. The decor and costumes are stuffed full of sci-fi kitsch, and that also adds to its nostalgic charm. The color scheme is gaudy, and the cinematography is by Xaver Schwarzenberger who shot Berlin Alexanderplatz along with most of Fasbinder’s last films. Besides Fassbinder the film also features Günther Kaufmann and Franco Nero. An extremely rare cult film from the Germany punk scene of the 80s with a vision of the future as an insane, senseless, labyrinthine junk world.
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