The aesthetic of disgusting Creativity and the very personality of the German master of necrorealism Jörg Buttgerait still cause radically opposite assessments. For the great but blind majority, Mr. Jörg is hardly associated with high-intellectual art, rather referring to the breed of exploiters and marginalized, while for a relatively narrow circle of connoisseurs of bold author's cinema, all the few filmmaking of Buttgerright is a reflection of the ideas of the German rebels of the 60-70s: Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Margaret von Trott, but especially Christoph Schlingenzief, who most acutely experienced the postwar tragedy of divided Germany. Buttgerright was no less aware that German society was on the eve of big changes, that the fall of the Berlin Wall was simply inevitable, but the alarm was in the air, and this alarm was transmitted by one of the founders of the entire German underground not only in the scandalous dilogy Necromantic, not only in the King of Death or Shramma, but also in his short experiments, a full-fledged two-part compilation called Sex, Violence and Good Mood, which was released on then a slightly freer German TV in 1989 and 1991, respectively.
It is noteworthy that even the title of this anthology Buttgerright echoes the propaganda TV movie of 1980 "Salt and Bread, and Good Mood" directed by Hans Werner, which does not seem so accidental. Having changed the radical components of the above-mentioned pathetic film and issued a beautiful sum of his work in this almanac, including one that perpetuated the aesthetics of the disgusting and the ethics of the disgusting, in which sex and violence, death and love intertwined in a single viscous web, Jörg Buttgerright in this almanac of short stories touched on almost all the topics that concern him, starting from the terrible life of people living under the yoke of their own loneliness and strangeness (such are the stories of Alice in Dallas, Schulz, the spirit of the zombies, who always finishes with the horns, the influence of the criminal Agrohlionist, but the usual). Sometimes this ideological triumvirate intersects with each other in a number of short stories, but sometimes it does not find common ground when the director carries like Ostap along the waves of reflection and transgression.
“Sex, violence and good mood”, as well as other short samples of the pen of Jörg Buttgerright (“My Dad”, “Excesses in Hitler’s bunker”, etc.) certainly do not pull on full-fledged cinematic statements due to the fact that this project created for television is primarily introductory and, in part, acquittal, because for several years, when Buttgerright gave birth to his Necromantics, he was not a rebel, but the most natural psychopath, marginal and generally the main dead man. And this two-part project, a real applicative underground idle with ideas melting in exclusively experimental film forms, compared to the same Necromantics, only sought to show that Buttgerright as a director is not only inclined to trade in death, that in his work there is not only psychoticism and condensed macabreness, but also bold humor and social satire. This set of short films essentially whitewashed Buttgerright’s name, while for his work “Sex, Violence and Good Mood” nothing significant was noted. Perhaps because artistic and philosophical integrity were minimal in these films, naturalism and grotesque were replaced by comatose illusions, pseudo-underground as such. However, as a departure from the main wave, Sex, Violence and Good Mood are perceived more than successfully, largely due to the ease with which the director tries to introduce an ordinary, unspoiled and unsophisticated audience at the time into his eerie worlds, opening the doors only for a moment, for in each of the almanac stories, lightened versions of the most important full-length creations of the German singer Violence and Sex are played out. These two films are, one might say, something akin to Bes’s dialogue with the Angels, whom this very red Bes lures with darkness, pain, madness, seduces with total freedom, a dialogue that has essentially ended only now, when Buttgerright, inspired by the festival successes of 2015’s German Fear, has become the very vanguard of the world of horrors he previously avoided. The revolt has come to an end, and now the same "Necromantic" is no longer so frightening or disgusting, since sex, violence and good mood have long been the cornerstones of creativity for most and without which postmodernism as such is impossible.