Slaves of Inheritance / Part 2/ TestamentMaschine

Slaves of Inheritance / Part 2/ TestamentMaschine

Production country: 
de
dk
Year: 
1992
Duration: 
50'
Edition: 
1992
Format: 
film/video
"Slaves of Inheritance / Part 2/ TestamentMaschine" by Knut Gerwers, scan from the VideoFest ‘92 program booklet.

Germany/USA, 1945/1991 - history in agony. The eternal recurrence of the same in another story, another history. A stream of images taken from documentaries, movies ( Fritz Lang a.o.) as well as staged scenes. Boundaries of time are fused, figures and (hi)story are intertwined in a new way. Actors act out history, “reality” invades the film, roles and (hi)story are changed, expansion and explosion of memory. This is an attempt to reanimate art, this corpse buried underloads of interpretations, a fight against mental death through loss of memory. Germany after 1945: refugees like those in 1991, just the sides have changed. Hoyerswerda, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, the Gulf War - the growing of past seeds and the faces of those born afterwards. Not only Dr. Mabuse has found his heir. His “terror of the crime" becomes today the final conditioning of facts, in between mass graves and the blindness of documents. The machines must not stand still. A running machine does not die. “What remains is the gift of bombs. ” (Heiner Muller) - as long as too few bombs are dropped and the machine is kept running, we must/can live on these ruinous gifts.

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