Hans-Jürgen Syberberg has made a new film, the first for a long time.
The news is a sensation for the film artist's supporters, but apparently irrelevant for others.
The Forum section of the Berlinale, to which Syberberg had submitted a three-and-a-half-hour preliminary version, rejected it.
For aesthetic, strategic or even ideological reasons?
When asked, the Berlinale announced that it only commented on films that had been selected.
fair enough
Syberberg himself is "stunned" to the FAZ and sends a stream link: "Demminer Gesänge" in two parts.
At the beginning the program appears in white letters: “to record what is happening here.
In images and sounds what was lost when the world ended".
Then the director's hoarse voice rises: “How was it back then?
When the Russians Came.
.
.” The tone is set, the provocation seems in sight.
This will be a film about the Germans as victims.
About the mass suicide in Demmin, about what happened here in May 1945: mothers who cut their children's wrists, women who killed themselves in the burning city for fear of being raped.
Syberberg witnessed the night of terror as a child.
Here, however, he initially limits his memories to two minutes.
Then he jumps to here and now, to the reconstruction of the marketplace, to community work on site.
Photographs filmed shakily from the screen document the filmmaker's ambition to rekindle the "extinguished core" of the hometown.
In the background you can hear old hits, excerpts from the Requiems by Mozart and Brahms and again and again the melody of "Lobet den Herren".
An ancient music teacher conducts her former students and waves goodbye to the camera.
In between there are always sharp, deviated cuts.
A photo of Hansjoachim von Rohr, the supporter of the German national opposition to Hitler, then the dream-walking Edith Clever, then graves from the Ukraine.
Suddenly, scenes from Valery Gergiev's propaganda concert in the recaptured Palmyra.
Syberberg from the off: "What if the Russians had won in Demmin in 45?
With Bach?” But he immediately puts a stop to himself: “The other Russia that is being propagated here, if only it were like that.” Providing explanations, creating meaning – that's not Syberberg's thing.
Instead, he fishes in the flood of images in his visual diary.
And he came across photographs of NPD marches on May 8th - he whispered shyly: "The market endured it", "that's part of it too".
Is there an intolerable attitude to be recognized in this?
That would be denunciatory given the stylistic principle of the film.
Syberberg has submitted a collage in an emphatic and therefore nerve-wracking sense that energetically connects the unconnected.
The "Demminer Gesänge" are not for a broad forum.
But as part of a "special demonstration" they would have to be shown here.
This not only requires respect for a formative figure in German film history, but also corresponds to the self-advertisement of a festival series that is allegedly interested in "aesthetic obstinacy".