Der Riese

Um estudo sobre como a presença da música dramatiza, conduz e cria sentidos.




by Michael Klier

Date: 1983 Running Time: 81:00

Klier uses material drawn from surveillance cameras scattered throughout Germany to create an 80s' version of the "city film." "At once the purest, most detached, even objective documentary that could ever be and a collage film as subversive in its way as The Atomic Cafe, Der Riese could best be described as a science fiction. The tape opens with an airplane being monitored as it lands at the eerily empty Berlin-Tegel airport, taxiing down the runway amid mysterious blobs of light to the accompaniment of portentous symphonic music. It's the welcoming touchdown to a very particular planet: after this overture (with its discomforting echo of Hitler's entrance in Triumph of the Will), 'the giant' turns to technological free-association. Parades, subway platforms, and traffic in the rain flit through its mechanical consciousness....

"Der Riese is drawn from a spectacle produced without a cameraman or director, with neither script nor actors, for a spectator who is less a voyeur than a cop. It's almost totally dehumanized, yet, towards the end, a few individuals are created. A video image generator belonging to the Dusseldorf police manufactures the faces of prototypical criminals; the fidgety inmate of a Berlin mental hospital is observed as he's interviewed by a doctor; another sort of patient has electrodes attached to her temples, so that even her brain waves can be scanned. But the tape ends, as it began, in a landscape unmarked by a human presence a video simulated environment used in the training of tank commanders. The short coda shows how this simulation was produced, with a motorized camera moving over a model countryside and through a toy-sized town like some towering, mechanical tornado.

"Blandly and brilliantly totalitarian, [Der Riese] announces a routine fact of postmodern times, hailing der uber alles." (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)