While Luchino Visconti’s “Ludwig” (1972) is regarded as a classic, it is little-known that Helmut Berger appeared a second time as Bavaria’s troubled king. “Ludwig 1881” (1993) by Donatello and Fosco Dubini focuses on Ludwig’s journey through Switzerland in summer 1881. Munich court actor Josef Kainz was hired to recite Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell” in front of the alleged historical locations, to transport the King into a world of poetry and imagination. After a few days the trip had turned into a nightmare for Kainz, who was soon exhausted from the King’s eccentric demands and antics. Once again, the desire for the ideal was marred by the all-too-human.

Interspersed are scenes of Ludwig consulting and commanding artists, architects and engineers in order to get his grandiose plans fulfilled. He is shown as being strongly interested in technical inventions, such as electricity and sound recordings. In some odd way, he appears almost as one of the first film actor-director-producers, who restlessly tried to transform reality into a romantic, artificial vision, “à rebours” like Huysman’s Des Esseintes, and indeed he may be seen as a visionary predecessor of the new art form that was to emerge from the inventions of Marey, Edison and Lumière only a few years after his death.

Being vaguely aware that after 1871 he was no more than a dated museum king, he scorned politics and instead squandered Bavaria’s money to build his architectonial extravaganzas, which at least pay off today as tourist attractions. Back then, basically no one lived in his gigantic castles. Ironically, almost all subsequent films about his life were shot on location. So Ludwig created his own film sets for all the films about him to come in the following century.

Ludwig 1881 (Donatello and Fosco Dubini 1993).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 26mn
Size: 	1.06 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	698x572 ~> 992x572
Aspect ratio:  	1.736
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 467 Kbps
BPP: 	0.147
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch MP2 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/9D970A8A412F08E/Ludwig_1881_(Donatello_and_Fosco_Dubini_1993).mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Donatello Dubini & Fosco Dubini – Ludwig 1881 (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.