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Video: Gaja Madžarevič

After the screening of A Proletarian Winter’s Tale at Kinodvor, the director, scriptwriter and editor Julius Radlmaier revealed that the film’s eclectic style was influenced among others by Pasolini’s treatment of political motifs, 1920s Soviet authors (e.g. Mihail Bulgakov) and Czech films. The director explained that the film was addressing the possibilities of rebellion against neoliberal exploitation. In this respect, the film characters faced many problems – their opposition to the unyielding class structure is ultimately based on idleness as a means of disobedience. The filmmaker, who has also translated two books by Jacques Rancièr into German, believes that revolution does not require a theoretical base of an avant-garde working class and, hence, prefers to use Chaplinesque characters in order to make a political film. The film was funded by the Film Academy, and meagrely so. “The film’s great hypocrisy is that the crew was exploited,” he joked, adding that, “That’s why I permitted them their idleness.”

Radlmaier also said that the spirit of the past was still overwhelmingly present in Germany, especially in terms of unreflected historical revisionism, which is expressed symbolically, in the initiatives, for example, to demolish the socialist buildings and instead build the Prussian ones that used to stand there. The director, who developed a propensity towards a blend of political and artistic themes while studying art history and film theory, applied all of these elements to his film. The black hole metaphor is not merely a method of portraying the meaning of modern art with dignity but furthermore represents the sought-after merging of dimensions that separate the filmmaker, the medium and the viewer. In contrast, the white cloud seen towards the end of the movie is not deeply symbolical – “We used it as a deus ex machina,” explained Radlmaier. The film will be screened again on Monday, 17 November, in CD’s Kosovel Hall and on Thursday, 20 November, at Kino Šiška.

Andraž Jež

Photo: Iztok Dimc
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