A simple film for Schwankmeier, in which the notorious motto “Bread and circuses” is deconstructed. The spectacle in this case is a football match, which is actually a cruotic spectacle. Combining animated plans of sophisticated plasticine torture with documentary footage receiving a cathartic discharge of fans in the stands, the director draws the formula of a media circus in which, as in the ancient circus, gladiators deprive themselves of lives for the amusement of the public. Yes, the viewer is subconsciously waiting for death, it is the main visual and virtual dish. In general, Schwankmeier manifests completely relevant contexts of the virtual, demonstrates violence as the background and partly the motivation for the existence of mass cultural phenomena as phenomena of post- and quasi-mythological.
But there is a second equally important image series. This is the behavior of a TV viewer who observes an obvious perfectionist philistine ritual, absorbing a decent amount of alcohol and snacks to it. This is, of course, an irony over the concept of time being wasted. Filling every second of his existence with a visual and gastronomic feast, the layman makes his being as if total and, in turn, justified by this totality. But it is clear that before us consciousness has fallen into a heavy dependence on external, media stimuli, let them into their own being (the metaphor of football players transferring their match to the apartment of the viewer does not require decoding) and thus themselves increasingly depersonalizing. If we replace the TV as a “window to the world” with a monitor screen as a “window from the world”, we will certainly see a number of differences that have accumulated over the past quarter of a century, but the main thesis remains unchanged: only after becoming dependent, the modern person recognizes his life as “true”, remaining in the unproblemized position of a voyeurist. But so much has been said and written about this, that perhaps it is time to move on to the elliptical default.