The Cave of Hercules

The Cave of Hercules

1990 · 45 min · ★ 9.0 · Documentary

Despite seeing his film project HERCULES rejected by DEFA Studios in 1983-84, Dammbeck remained fascinated by the Hercules story. He started experimenting with different media combinations, using overpainting, photography, film clips, collage, painting, and movement. These experiments resulted in groundbreaking multimedia collaborations, as well as the film THE CAVE OF HERCULES, in which Dammbeck explores a series of questions inspired by this classical figure. Who was the legendary hero Hercules? Is there a new Hercules today? How are heroes created in a totalitarian society? What are the virtues of heroes? This multi-layered experimental film combines projections of collected film clips, quotations from “The Willful Child” by the Brothers Grimm, and “Hercules 2 or the Hydra” by Heiner Müller, as well as dance scenes with Eva Schmale that were performed – at Kampnagel in Hamburg – specifically for the film.

Directed by Lutz Dammbeck · Written by Lutz Dammbeck

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Dammbeck, himself an alumnus of the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Design, presents the origins of the new German realism developed by the so-called Leipzig School, which took place in the context of socialist-realist dogma in the GDR before the Wall was built in 1961. After the Wall came down in 1989, what happened to the major Leipzig School painters Werner Tübke and Bernhard Heisig, who had been called “Dürer’s red heirs” by West German journalists in the 1970s? In the film, Tübke, Heisig, and former GDR officials who were involved with the cultural scene in Leipzig at the time talk about modernism, conformism, political pressure, party discipline, personal claims, and fading memory. The documentary paints an insightful, often critical picture of early East German art history.

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Einmart

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The Tailor of Ulm · 1980

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MovieDocumentary

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