The Egomaniacs of Necrocreationism Somewhere in the outskirts of Western Europe, melting in the thick whitish fog of elusive time, far from the bustle of the bustle of the big world, there is not a golden city at all under the infinitely blue sky, but an Island that once punished itself with a dream of reason and a total mute soul. Here, cold winds saturated with sea salt daily invade the homes of the few inhabitants of the island, depriving them of the right to smolder in their contemplative and dreary solitude, and the darkness of the nights is so black that sometimes with their inevitable onset it is better not to leave either their homes or the very borders of this land with the roots of understanding and humanity uprooted. But even here, strangely enough, there were two, William and Sylvia, whose purity of thought and soul was a curse for themselves, but so desirable a salvation for the whole Island.
Schlingenzief, perhaps the most radical from the point of view of his chosen form of cinematic exposition, the director of the German New Wave, in his murderous straightforwardness clearly inherited Alexander Kluge, preferring a scattering of metaphors and symbolic ligature mainly bloody surgical tools of acute social humiliation, speaking directly about the problems of German society in the post-war period and the period of division in such paintings as “German Chainsaw Massacre”, “The Arbitter” or “Menu total”. However, there were exceptions in his film work, in which the director appeared to be a real film artist, prone to the inexhaustible simplicity of his reflection.
“Egomania is an island without hope” (1986) is a film parable of Christoph Schlingenzief about the crisis of man as a self-sufficient person in the twentieth century, a gloomy and misanthropic author’s reflection on incommunicability, dating back to the notorious biblical Tower of Babel, the type of statement whose cinematic language is cleared of all premeditated historical discourses, while remaining pure cinema about the dirty intestine of the ordinary man, plebe. The name of this island of the damned can easily be deciphered as “self-obsession”, that is, the highest degree of human egoism and egocentrism, which in the context of the rather common idea that each person is a separate island among exactly the same, gives a philosophical sound to the idea that the man possessed by the world within himself is an island where all human beings died, and the end of everything here on the island itself is perceived as a blessing. Moreover, it should be noted that almost all the characters of the film, with the exception of the characters of Tilda Swinton and Uwe Fellencik, postulate their inauthentic existence the idea of Schopenhauer that “he who does not like loneliness does not love freedom.” The heroes of the tape are corrupted by this freedom, created in conditions of general imprisonment. The notorious libertine Marquis de Sade, while in the Bastille, wrote his “120 days of Sodom”, a manifesto of total rejection of the shackles of morality; the head of the community in Schlingenzief’s painting did not go far in his appeals to the triumph of chaos from the venerable dead marquis, in fact he has every right to be called a real egomaniac, a necrocreationist demiurge, who is not quite Satan, because the latter appears only where God is always. There is no God on the Island, and there are no real people there either, so that the Devil can use them: there are only certain masks, schemes, sketches of people.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the owner of the island begins to confront the hero with no less specific picture of the world and redrawn gender. What, in other directorial hands, would give birth to the inevitable grotesque effect, in the cinematic reality of Schlingenzief is seen as the undoubted norm, while contrasting the utopian purity of Sylvia and her beloved inert reality with the self-styled fighter for the liberation of the island from grave loneliness and destructive permissiveness. Not so much a messiah as a man who has come into the world, who is thrown into the abyss of his own elusive existence, beyond temporal and social boundaries, for creation, although he himself is a type of disappointed wanderer, and not as a formerly enchanted poet and rebel. He came not to save, but to return to Caesar what was Caesar's. The plot dichotomy of the film - with the story of Sylvia and William and the struggle of the self-styled trap messiah with the infernal managers of the Island - illustrates two ways of healing from an apocalyptic existence: either overcoming the total lack of language in the birth of a new person, homo novus, or provocation, challenge, search for the rational in the too irrational space of this land 2.0, which you will not find on the geographical map, because it is on the map of the human heart.