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This penetrating documentary about the politically committed playwright Heiner Müller (1929) from the former DDR assumes that the viewer has some knowledge of his life and work. Dominik Barbier has made a magnificent construction in which written text, music, interviews, fragments from plays, spoken texts and images are all equally important. Various levels are created by combination and mixing. Providing information is just one of these levels. Berlin as the place where Müller lives and as the political heart (conflicts) is however central, but the video start with images of a house, the sounds of marching soldiers, a loud banging at the door and spoken text in which Muller describes how his father was arrested by the nazis in 1939 ('Der Vater', 1958). In his plays from the fifties and sixties, 'Germania Tod in Berlin' (1956/71), 'Philoktete' (1958/64), and in the Heracles, Oedipus and Prometheus adaptions as well, the build up of the DDR is central and Müller can express new experiences in classical mythology. Müller maintains that the fact that Philoctetes can bee seen as Trotsky and Odysseus as Stalin was not deliberate. Above all, his pieces involve conflict between the individual and power structures and in the seventies and eighties, the tone became more gruesome and cynical. Müller: "You feel guilty in a rigid social structure, without knowing what you are guilty of". The title of the documentary is in part a reference to the piece 'Die Hamletmaschine' from 1977. A piece that, for two years, could not be performed in the DDR. Parts of this work appear on the screen in French: "I was Hamlet. I stood on the coast and spoke to the breakers BLABLA, the ruins of Europe behind me. The bells tolled the knell of the state, murderer and widow as a couple goose-stepping behind the coffin of the exalted cadaver of the councillors, lamenting in poorly paid mourning."
The measured tone, the staccato rhythm and the collage like construction of this piece are mirrored in Barbier's work. Hamlet and Ophelia; the latter as the furious and self destructive resistance. "I am Ophelia. Who could not stop the flood. The woman in the noose. The woman with the slashed wrists The woman with the overdose ON MY LIPS SNOW The woman with her head in the gas oven. Yesterday I stopped killing myself."
She construction and destruction of the Wall, 16 million German prisoners, the self-selected death of Müller's wife in 1966, his activities in the Berliner Ensemble: information is sometimes shown in images, sometimes transformed to a parable or poem in which Arvo Pärt's music plays an important role. The documentary ends as it started, with the nazis. Muller tries to put his finger on the open wound in German history. He sees Auschwitz as the result of opinions which have existed for some time in European culture: the selection concept and the superiority complex.
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Ingrid van Santen
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Camera, sound: Dominik Barbier, Jon Evans, Leonard Faulon, Cathy Vogan, Editing, sound mixing: Cathy Vogan, Music: Arvo Pärt, With: Heiner Müller, Jean Jourdhevil, Jon Evans, Solveig Dommartin, Juliette Leusinc, Production: Caroline Radford Weiss, Pascal Sottovia, Fearless, Arcanal, CICV Montbéliard Belfort
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