‘Film is a perishable good, destined for swift consumption’, Wolfgang Büld claimed as early as the 1970s at the Munich Film Academy – a principle he has adhered to ever since. In 1977 he shot the epochal documentary Punk in London together with the late Helge Weindler as his cameraman. This was followed by his relatively successful exploration of the murky depths of Germany’s box office cinema, spawning films such as Gib Gas, ich will Spass, Manta Manta and Trip – die nackte Gitarre. Since then he has gone over to working largely with small budgets on video, and now his last but one film has finally been released on DVD: Penetration Angst (Epix Media, 2004, bilingual).
At first sight, Helen seems like any other pretty, quietly naive girl from a small town somewhere in England. She is looking forward to her evening date with a jerk and his flashy car whose overriding purpose, of course, is to lay his fingers on her. She urgently warns him, she implores him – anything, anything but vaginal intercourse! Brushing her pleas aside, when he finally rapes her in the passenger seat he gets the shock of his life. Nothing of him remains, wiped out bar his shirt and trousers, which are deposited on the expensive leather upholstery. Helen’s problem is that she suffers from a complaint proverbially known as vulva dentata, which in her case not only nibbles away at the men who get too close to her but wholly devours them when she orgasms – and does so with an increasingly insatiable appetite from one man to the next.
Helen’s fatal disposition has psychological origins and is fuelled by a repressed guilt trauma – indeed, an absolutely classic case of Marnie syndrome: as a child Helen had been pursued by her mother’s lover and ended up accidentally crippling him. Helen soon has to flee her home town to escape the advances of her lecherous, wheelchair-bound stepfather as well as her sweet but feeble admirer who chastely and selflessly worships her. She hits London in search of new prey.
Reluctantly, she has no choice but to feed the craving demon inside her and so mutates into a female Jekyll and Hyde. In the vast metropolis this romanesque plot takes bizarre twists and turns, but ultimately for the healed Helen it all comes to a happy end on the Isle of Wight. As the story unravels, we witness some of the most memorable scenes a German director has shot in the last ten years, not least of which are the sex scene with the Siamese twins.
Good taste is not exactly a key issue of this film that Wolfgang Büld shot in 2003 with an English cast in original locations.
But it is precisely on this issue – in stark contrast to the way the directors of a German cinema so tortured by artistic superegos usually make such a big deal out of daring to consider a tad more splatter, a shade less political correctness, a touch of bad taste – that everything is refreshingly different.
With Büld, the sex, the abstruseness, the full catalogue of exploitation movies he constantly quotes from with such imagination, all these things somehow crop up in uncannily matter of fact way, always furnished with irony. At times, things are taken to a ludicrously nonsensical end, but they are always shown with astonishing directness.
The innocence of the heroine (Fiona Horsey) as she prowls for her next victim is thus transferred onto the entire film. And this is what makes it so sexy, vigorous and astounding.
Thanks to Fiona Horsey, who is staged as a ‘scream queen’ but further enhances her leading role with an impressive display of hard-boiled and unapproachable Englishness, this spectacle occasionally verges on a true intimation of melancholy and darkness.
Sex, crime and fun were the clarion calls of a particular generation of German directors in the 1980s, the very period which film critics and historians today are so keen to dismiss as an ugly void in the tradition of German film. As a result we are now chugging full steam ahead back to the old world of fusty artistic correctness as embodied by the autorenfilm or film d’auteur, back to seeking tiringly earnest international renown. Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that someone like Wolfgang Büld has chosen video as his preferred medium for this blithe mix and mayhem of genres (Drop Out, 1996) or has switched to England to shoot his films. The ‘Making of’ DVD offers a further glimpse of how much fun it can be to make films with enthusiastic independence and freedom.
Dominik Graf is currently directing his latest film ‘Roter Kakadu’.
Translated from the German by Matthew Partridge
Read this article in German language at www.faz.net - file for "Das Marnie Syndrom"
You can order PENETRATION ANGST direct by mail from Salvation Films online shop or at amazon.co.uk
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