On Continuity

Continuity in the cinematic sense involves fabricating the illusion of consistent time and space. When cinema deals with the history of colonialism and fascism it is confronting continuity of a different kind: historical continuity that is hijacked to reveal the presence of the past in the here-and-now.

Der lachende Mann – Bekenntnisse eines Mörders

Walter Heynowski/Gerhard Scheumann, GDR 1966, 35 mm, 66 min

“The laughing man – Confessions of a murderer” is a documentary about the German mercenary Siegfried Müller, known as “Congo Müller”. In 1964 Müller was involved in the suppression of the Simba rebellion in the Republic of the Congo (now DR Congo). The GDR film crew place Müller against a black background, letting him get increasingly drunk on Pernod as they intersperse their questions with covertly obtained photographs and tape recordings.

Wundkanal - Hinrichtung für vier Stimmen

Thomas Harlan, FRG/France1984, 107 min

Gunshot wound is the trajectory of a projectile -- how it enters and exits the body. Thomas Harlan hired as an actor Alfred Filbert, a high-ranking SS officer who in 1962 had been sentenced to life in prison. Harlan implicated him in an interrogation as if he had been kidnapped by a group of political activists. As the film draws connections between the staged suicide of French prisoners in second world war and the notorious deaths in the Stammheim high-security prison in 1977, reality appears in the guise of a fiction of fiction.

Tod und Teufel

Peter Nestler, Germany 2009, Beta Sp, 56 min

“Death and Devil” examines the legacy of the director’s grandfather, Count Eric von Rosen, a Swedish aristocrat, ethnologist, explorer, hunter and adventurer whose racism and Nazi sympathies (he was brother-in-law to Hermann Göring) were counterbalanced by a personal fascination for Africa, evidenced by his travels to the former Belgian Congo in the aftermath of colonial genocide.

All films OV with English subtitles