Monuments of the failure of a utopia

was premiered As a "Passion" recently at the Visions du Réel in Nyon, urged a handful of spectators in front of the entrance of the cinemas in the Grande Salle. You were on the waiting list, because inside was already full. You probably haven't even noticed that it is "Passion" the documentary, the rejected, the Solothurn film days, a few months ago – what a Protest Petition has been filed.

Maybe it was you but no matter, they were not in Solothurn, but at the Visions du Réel, where the Film delivery as the only Swiss contribution in an international competition. "Passion" was "big and ambitious", says festival Director Emilie Bujès. If she says "gross", she says, the in the sense of the French "grand": strong, powerful.

"Passion: Between revolt and Resignation" lives of monumental images, as it was in the cinema for a while. The camera in January of deceased Pio Corradi and Simon Guy Fässler, in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, California, or Dubai to the iconic snapshots of a world divided sought, which is in the grip of consumption, spectacle and profit mania: a super-capitalism, the perverted needs, and habitats destroyed.

Bach as a counterpoint

the shopping Mall in Dubai, on the wall of a beach is projected to be found, or the cruise ship in Venice, which pushes through the water and looks as if it would overwhelm the town. They filmed a slaughterhouse in Buenos Aires, the treadmills in the building. In a Japanese retirement home, a robot with the Elderly easing power exercises.

There are images, like phantoms, into dimly lit Soundscapes submerged sign of an incredibly powerful system, where automation and virtualization to produce only more inequality and alienation. As a comforting counterpoint to Christian Labhart shows the St. Matthew Passion of Bach, rehearsed by the Collegium Vocale Gent. The 66-year-old Zurich-based film Director ("Giovanni Segantini"), with flashbacks to the stations of his own life: from the 1968 riots in 1980 to start a family and Job as a teacher and filmmaker.

the Official Trailer for the movie "Passion".

A typical biography, which is why it Labhart's not about a self-reflection. Much more space he gives the texts of Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, or Slavoj Zizek – that's better than the mans, can not say anyway.

What has become of the world if you wanted to change, however, shows "Passion", without that it needed a chatty comment. "The images are not neutral, but charged, because they want to show how I see the world," says Labhart. Everywhere he searched for examples of how it's going wrong and where the mechanisms of the system visible. Such mechanisms of profit logic, he observed in everyday life: "When I walk through the city, I need to shake it more often to the head."

Decadent, surreal, ecstatic

The spectators, it may happen that he is so much altlinker criticism of the totalitarian society Were the opposite of what we want to demonstrate Labhart. If the filled subway in Tokyo, to pictures of Livestock will be edited for broadcasting, felt also a feeling between revolt and Resignation, however, it applies to the Film itself. Other shots have an almost ecstatic quality, so that the world will win a beauty. The trip in all-terrain vehicles on the dunes of Dubai, for example, is quite decadent, but at the same time a sight of surreal splendor.

"Passion", however, remains in all of this crazy relentless and shows the monuments of the failure of a utopia, the flashing according to Labhart, only sometimes. The balance sheet of an eventful life horror produced, and disappointment. Never, the conditions change, because any resistance is absorbed. On the other hand, if he go now to the climate of the demos and the young people "Who sini Selects? Eusi Selects!" hear the call: Then he got Labhart sometimes tears in the eyes, so.

While Passion has become not the whiny confession of a Old-68ers, but rather a phenomenological essay on the reign of the machine, supported in theory and literature. You must not see everything as Labhart. But if you look at it, it's pretty overwhelming.

Today's cinema, 12: 15 PM preview at Lunch. 20 at the Podium in the people's house with Christian Labhart, activist Jonas Kampus, Tamara Funiciello and Economist Gian Trepp on the topic: "Have screwed up the "Old"?". In the cinema from the age of 18. April.

(editing Tamedia)

Created: 11.04.2019, 18:43 PM