Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König

The greatest movie i will probably never want to watch again.

Syberberg's ambitiousness, with this work of flagrantly inaccessible experimental tableaux being just the first in a very hefty trilogy, is pretty breathtaking and a perfect fit with that Richard Wagner soundtrack. Whatever contemporary comparisons I can think of hardly seem relevant to him; he is laser-focused on re-customizing the medium to his own strange format, in which he delivers a thoroughly mythologized version of fairly modern history, full of excursuses and deliberate anachronisms.

Few directors have managed to do so much with so little as Syberberg. Armed with a small acting troupe, limited props, a rear projection screen and a fog machine, he makes most other film makers who attempt to grapple with history seem like mental midgets by comparison. Ludwig II is presented as a complex figure whose madness/neurosis was deeply rooted in Germanic culture itself, and it's meticulously expressed in Syberberg's stunning signature style of theatrical tableux and glorious artifice.

The first of Syberberg's trilogy of Brechtian/Wagernian cinematic genealogies of the German psyche, German spectres, and German nightmares. In this case, the central figure is Ludwig II, and Syberberg seems to be saying that what would inevitably wash away Ludwig's dreamworld was not only the mechanical age but the age of mechanical reproducibility, which would produce not only Hitler but the American way of life. Syberberg tries as hard as anyone has to fashion a cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk.

An extraordinary and total aesthetic statement, possessing a richness and evolving complexity that could not possibly be rendered in any other format. Totally fascinating model for being 'cinematic'.