– “What would you do if you had only ten days to live”?
– “Just get very stoned.”

DANDY (1988 )- a Voltaire-inspired anti-fairytale by Peter Sempel – Featuring Blixa Bargeld, Nick Cave, Kazuo Ohno & Nina Hagen.

“Peter Sempel’s Dandy is an intellectually pretentious, though never boring, meditation on decadence and anomie in the post-industrial world. Employing the logic of an extended MTV, Dandy is an underground movie of extremely limited appeal. Though not containing the stuff of a typical cult movie, Sempel’s purely imagistic and sensory work can best be appreciated as a midnight movie-experience.

Sempel claims Voltaire’s Candide as its literary source and inspiration, but in actuality his movie exhibits the anarchic and nihilistic philosophy of Wim Wenders (Until the End of the World), only without the latter’s humor and irony. Pic’s title derives from the song “Death is a Dandy on a Horse”, which Blixa Bargeld sings with angst and gusto at the film’s beginning and end.

Indeed, the whole film is obsessed with alienation and the end of the world. When Gudrun Gut, a famous German punk, is asked “What would you do if you had only ten days to live” she first poses her own existential query, “Do I have to die alone or will all the people die with me” then answers, “I would go to Tibet.” But Gudrun also says that if she had only ten minutes to live, she would “just get very stoned.” Following this interview, the camera pans along a vast desert, where a lonely coyote is running around.

Dealing with self-estrangement and, yes, lack of communication and love, Dandy is pregnant with heavy symbolism and simplistic allegories. Its recurrent metaphors consist of close-ups of a dead fish and a butterfly captured in a wine goblet. Drawing all too obvious analogies between the animalistic and human worlds, the image of the real butterfly is crosscut with a human butterfly, veteran Japanese performer Kazuo Ohno, who dances a Pas de Deux with his son Yoshito to the exquisite rendition of “City Called Heaven” by opera singer Jessye Norman.

Unfortunately, the continuous flow of inventive images and sounds is too often interrupted by a superfluous and unnecessary narration about nuclear, violence and torture. And as could be expected of such a film, there are brief philosophical assertions about the meaning of life and death and the dialectical relationship between art and life.

Dandy features some of Germany’s most eccentric underground figures, such as Nick Cave, singing the moody blues “You Better Run to the City of Refuge,” and Nina Hagen making faces at the camera. True to its post-modern, global, and inter-cultural sensibility, the film contains stunning shots of Berlin, London, Cairo, Himalaya, Marrakech, and other exotic places. In one of the film’s visual delights, a sole punkish figure is dwarfed against the magnitude of the Pyramids and the desert. The film’s Kaleidoscopic nature–West meets East–is also reflected in the blend of music and style.

Production values are only moderate, perhaps due to the fact that the film was initially shot in 16 mm and later blown up to 35 mm.

Though plotless and disjointed, Dandy is not shapeless. What unifies the film and gives it some coherence is the use of the same characters and the lively soundtrack, which is the picture’s best aspect. Made in l988 and thus a bit dated, Dandy is an experiential movie that displays a distinctly German sensibility, one that cannot be found in avant-garde American movies, past or present.

Credits
A Pandora film production. Produced by Niko Brucher and Peter Sempel. Directed by Sempel. Camera (b&w and color), Frank Blasberg, Jonas Scholz, Norimichi Kasamatsu, and Sempel; editor, Wolf Ingo Romer; music, Yello, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Einsturzende Neubauten, Birthday Party, and others; sound, Drago Hari, Takashi Endo, Kai Wessel, and others.

Dandy.1988.x264.AC3.2.0-ARTiST.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 28 min
Size: 	2.21 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	704x538 ~> 807x538
Aspect ratio:  	3:2
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 314 kb/s
BPP: 	0.350
Audio
#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/FA52C17ADFE9B34/Dandy.1988.x264.AC3.2.0-ARTiST.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)

The post Peter Sempel – Dandy (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Wim Wenders muses on love, death and his perennial bugbear, the ‘Crisis of the Image’ in The Palermo Shooting, a metaphysical thriller cum philosophical essay that marks another step on the downwards slope for this once-vital film-maker. Unwisely cast, leadenly written and ultimately farcical in its earnestness, The Palermo Shooting is a glossy travelogue-thriller with metaphysical pretentions, and one of the low points of this year’s Cannes Competition. Unlikely to fare well in the market, the film may also find festivals preferring to tactfully take a rain check.

An overbearingly-glossy first half centres on the travails of Finn, played by German rocker and moody scowler Campino. Finn is a successful photographer with a major reputation in the art world, but has a sideline working on slick fashion shoots with the likes of actor-model Milla Jovovich – seen here very pregnant and playing herself. Fascinated by digital photography and its possibilities for visual manipulation, Finn is accused by a high-minded student of betraying ‘real’ images. Meanwhile, he suffers from elaborate, vaguely Cocteau-esque nightmares involving his dead mother and a mysterious bald cloaked figure (Hopper), whose true identity isn’t too hard to guess.

After a close shave in his sports car, Finn wakes up in a tree, has a whimsical conversation with an amateur shepherd, then decides to visit Palermo, ostensibly to take more photos of Jovovich in a ‘real’ setting, but really to pursue his own metaphysical quest.

The second section sees Finn catching the sights of Sicily, dodging CGI arrows from a mysterious assailant, and getting to know Flavia (Mezzogiorno), a comely art restorer. Eventually, Finn comes face to face with his shiny-pated nemesis, a Grim Reaper in the tradition of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal – a jovially creepy spectre who turns out to have his own opinions about the implications of digital photography.

Vaporous, tendentious and inescapably silly, the film livens up briefly when Dennis Hopper takes centre stage: he at least knows how to savour the script’s more ludicrous resonances. When Hopper’s Death complains, “Why do I always have to play the bad guy?” he gives the film its only merited laugh, among many accidental ones (one of them provided by the cameo appearance of a spectral, hologram-like Lou Reed).

Wenders has often tended towards fashion victimhood, and the film’s first half sees him caught in an awkward quandary. Out to expose Finn’s world of false consciousness, he lards the film with glitzy hi-tech glamour, all the better to denounce it. But whether it’s Finn’s glacially modernist HQ, or the section featuring a smugly preening Jovovich, Wenders looks inescapably besotted with the textures he supposedly mistrusts. Yet the Sicily section, where the images are supposedly more ‘real’ (focusing on old stonework, Renaissance murals and grizzled market traders), comes across as hackneyed touristic colour. It doesn’t help to have locals dispense crackerbarrel banalities: “The soul of my city is death… The soul of my city is life.”

Campino is a glumly narcissistic presence, his discomfort more than matched by the coyly wooden Mezzogiorno. An end title dedicates the film to ‘Ingmar and Michelangelo’; nearly as sad as their passing is the fact that Wenders’s once-considerable talent now seems virtually a lost cause. But he can still pick a decent jukebox-style soundtrack, and some redeeming interest is provided by the modish alt.rock likes of Beirut, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Calexico in heavy rotation.

Jonathan Romney in Cannes / 24 May 2008

Palermo.Shooting.2008.BDRIP.576p.x264.EAC3.AFKI.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 48 min
Size: 	3.23 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 800 kb/s
BPP: 	0.279
Audio
#1:  	5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 448 kb/s (Surround)

https://nitro.download/view/04BDB546DF52491/Palermo.Shooting.2008.BDRIP.576p.x264.EAC3.AFKI.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Wim Wenders – Palermo Shooting (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.