I was scavenging for some obscure film once and happened upon one from 1989 called’Der Todesking’ (lit. The King of Death). Then found out soon after the maker of the film, Jörg Buttgereit, was also behind Nekromantik, I had seen none of them but felt inclined to sit through and try to take something from them. The former I much preferred in its obscurity, and series of unassociated events. I fell into a very absorbing mood within the first 5 minutes of the film, as it displays a time laps of a rotting corpse in black and white. This continues throughout the duration and shows the stages of decay as the skin becomes hard and falls off and maggots eventually consume the flesh from the inside out. Der Todesking is truly experimental German film and is not meant for the weak hearted. I thought it was rather fucked up and still do but have grown conditional to it, and remains one of my favorites. Their exists a linear flow to the concept of it, which does not employ characters, but attempts to represent the essence of suicide and mental illness or human suffering, set on a timeline over 7 days which are the days of the week.
Watch Video after the jump…
Continue reading about Der Todesking through hereMonday: A depressed man writes what are probably suicide letters, then cleans his apartment and kills himself in his bathtub with poison. His fish dies at the same time, as some kind of symbolic connection.
Tuesday: A guy rent a Nazi exploitation film which is then watched. A german woman castrates a prisoner and uses the blood to paint a swastika on his chest. The girlfriend of the man watching this comes back to him and they start arguing before he shoots and then hangs a frame where the blood splattered on the wall.
Wednesday: A man and woman meet somewhere in a park, and he starts telling her about his terrible sex life with led to him killing his wife. The woman attempts to shoot the man with a gun at the park but he takes it and shoots himself instead.
Sunday: A miserable man is alone in his room, crying and banging his head repeatedly against the wall until he gets brain damage.
The other days will be a mystery.
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