Nekromantik 2

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The 1991 German horror/splatter film Nekromantik 2 was directed by Jörg Buttgereit and is a sequel to his 1987 film Nekromantik. Nekromantik 2, a film about necrophilia, was quite controversial and was seized by authorities in Munich 12 days after its release,[1] an action that had no precedent in Germany since the Nazi era.[2] Today, it is regarded as a cult classic.


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[edit] Synopsis

The film opens with the sexualized suicide of Rob (Daktari Lorenz), a.k.a. Robert, whose corpse Monika (Monika M.) retrieves from a church’s graveyard after the opening credits. Monika apparently evades notice while carrying Rob’s corpse into her apartment, where she unwraps him from his body bag. Meanwhile, Mark (Mark Reeder) heads to his as of yet unspecified job, and the film then cuts back to a scene of Monika undressing Rob. Mark’s job is thereupon revealed to be dubbing porn films, and this scene foreshadows the next, in which Monika has sex with Rob’s corpse. A fourth character, Betty (Beatrice Manowski), is then briefly introduced as she discovers, to her disappointment, that Rob’s grave has already been robbed.

Once Monika has cleaned Rob's corpse, she takes photos with him using her camera’s self-timer. Mark, meanwhile, makes plans to meet a friend (Simone Spörl) at the movies. Mark’s friend, however, is late, and Mark offers his ticket instead to Monika, who happens to be passing by. Monika and Mark hit it off and soon go on a carnival date, after which point Monika decides to break up with Rob, by sawing him into pieces and putting him into garbage bags, saving just his head and genitals. When Mark spends the night at Monika’s, though, Mark discovers Rob’s genitals in Monika’s refrigerator, and this discovery, combined with Monika’s desire to photograph Mark in positions that make him appear dead, plants doubts in his mind about the relationship. Consequently, Mark consults first his perennially tardy friend and then a drunk in a bar regarding his relationship with the “perverse” Monika.

Soon thereafter, Monika and her fellow necrophiliac friends have a movie night – the film depicts the dissection of a seal – at Monika’s apartment when Mark comes over with a porn video to watch with Monika (whose friends take an immediate dislike to Mark and leave). When Mark insistently asks what Monika and her friends had been doing, she reluctantly shows him the seal video, which disgusts Mark, who says it’s “perverse” to watch such a thing for fun, leading to a quarrel. The couple later speaks on the phone and makes plans to meet at Monika’s and discuss the matter. In the meantime, Monika makes a trip to the ocean, where she contemplates what course of action to take. When Mark arrives the next day, they have make-up sex, during which Monika severs Mark’s head and replaces it with Rob’s decapitated head. In addition, Monika is finally shown climaxing, which suggests that she has chosen the correct lover. Finally, in the last scene, a doctor congratulates Monika on her pregnancy.

[edit] Soundtrack

The soundtrack, by Hermann Kopp, Daktari Lorenz, John Boy Walton, and Peter Kowalski, is neither ironic nor campy, but rather is intended to generate genuine emotional response. The serious intent of the film in general is made clear in an interview in which Buttgereit discusses an audition in which actors performed the love scene with Rob's corpse: "Though they were all quite willing, none of them took it as seriously as we did[3]."

Furthermore, although he is commenting on the soundtrack to the original Nekromantik, Christian Keßler's observations about that film's soundtrack resonate in the context of the second film as well: "The excellent soundtrack by Lorenz, Hermann Kopp, and John Boy Walton accentuates this [Rob's unusual, charnel domestic circumstances] with a romantic leitmotif composed for a single piano that makes the gruesome environment seem like a protective case, shielding Robert from the reality that so torments him[4]."

[edit] Critical Response

"Jörg Buttgereit is the only person in Germany who manages to dedicate himself to these darkest of subjects with this much charm," writes critic Christian Keßler.[5] Though some accuse the Nekromantik films of being "little more than 'disappointingly witless' and 'morbidly titillating' attempts 'to disgust the most jaded conceivable audience,'[6] these movies are not only more thematically complex and technically sophisticated than is popularly supposed, but share a set of artistic and ideological concerns more usually associated with the canonic authors of the Young German Cinema and the New German Cinema of the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s."[7]

Though speaking of the first Nekromantik, in which a "beer-guzzling, oompah-listening fat-man" accidentally kills a man picking apples, Linnie Blake's comments are also relevant to Nekromantik 2 when she writes, "As Buttgereit makes clear, then, it is neither Rob nor Betty [the protagonists of the first Nekromantik] who has transformed the young apple-picker into a corpse. This has been accomplished by an ostensibly morally upstanding member of society who subsequently disappears from view, unpunished for his crimes. Buttgereit's mission, it seems, is to embrace that corpse, and in so doing to raise the question originally posed by Alexander Mitscherlich, Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, as to why the collapse of the Third Reich had not provoked the reaction of conscience-stricken remorse one might logically expect; why, in Thomas Elsaesser's words, 'instead of confronting this past, Germans preferred to bury it[8].'"[9]

[edit] Confiscation

In June 1991, Munich police confiscated the film, leading an interviewer to ask Buttgereit, "How does it feel to be Germany's most wanted filmmaker?"[10] Buttgereit responded, "I'm not sure how to feel. At the moment I'm afraid of a police raid. But I'm not really proud of it if that's what you mean." The reason for the film's seizure was that it purportedly glorified violence. According to Buttgereit, "The thing that people find offensive about Nekromantik 2 is that it doesn't accuse Monika." At a different point in the interview, Buttgereit states, "It was very important to me that the audience is on Monika's side, even with her doing these terrible things." In 1993, however, the film was officially deemed "art," thanks to an exhaustive expert opinion by film scholar Knut Hickethier.[11] However, Buttgereit says, "the big shops are still afraid to sell my DVDs[12]."

[edit] External Links

Jörg Buttgereit's MySpace Page (German and English)

IMDB Page for Nekromantik 2 (English)

Jelinski & Buttgereit Online (German and English)

Jörg Buttgereit interview in Girls and Corpses (English)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Kerekes, David. Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit. Manchester: Headpress, 1998.
  2. ^ Blake, Linnie. Things To Do In Germany, With The Dead.
  3. ^ Kerekes, David. Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit. Manchester: Headpress, 1998.
  4. ^ Keßler, Christian. Last Rites - Ways of Approaching Jörg Buttgereit
  5. ^ Keßler, Christian. Last Rites - Ways of Approaching Jörg Buttgereit
  6. ^ AboutCultFilm.com
  7. ^ Blake, Linnie. Things To Do In Germany, With The Dead.
  8. ^ Elsaesser, T. (1989) New German Cinema: A History. London: Bfi/Macmillan. p. 242.
  9. ^ Blake, Linnie. Things To Do In Germany, With The Dead.
  10. ^ Kerekes, David. Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit. Manchester: Headpress, 1998.
  11. ^ MySpace.com - joerg buttgereit (official!) - Berlin, DE - www.myspace.com/joergbuttgereitofficial
  12. ^ Interview in Girls and Corpses. http://www.girlsandcorpses.com/issue12_nekromantik.html
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