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STAGING DEATH

Jan Soldat
Austria/Germany, 2022
8 min

Spoiler alert: Udo Kier dies a thousand deaths in Jan Soldat’s latest offering – a meditation on fictionality & cinematic conventions, and on the intrinsic links between life, death and film, spanning across all five decades of the German actor’s career.

Staging Death might seem as an unusual entry in the oeuvre of Jan Soldat, chiefly preoccupied with explorations of kink and sexual perversity: but if we were to lend credence to Freud’s pleasure principle, then we’d know all too well that Eros and Thanatos are deeply intertwined. It is indeed pleasurable to watch Udo Kier’s countless filmic deaths – ranging from muted to dramatic to outright ridiculous – across a body of work criss-crossing high-brow & low-brow and, arguably, film history itself: as he gets shot, catches fire, disperses into thin air, falls to his death or simply expires, Kier’s body becomes a field onto violence is sublimated, then deconstructed through montage. (Flavia Dima)

Date and Location

29th of September, 18:30, Cinema Elvire Popesco

Tickets

Premii și festivaluri

Jan Soldat

Jan Soldat was born in 1984 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), in the former GDR. Between 2008-2014 he studied film and television directing at the Academy of Film and Television Konrad Wolf. In 2015 he started working as well as an editor and dramaturgical consultant. His over 90 mostly documentary works to date deal with the depiction of diverse sexual practices and preferences.

  • Technical sheet
  • CINEMATOGRAPHY: found footage
  • CAST: Udo Kier
  • EDITING: Jan Soldat

State (of) Terror

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STAGING DEATH

Jan Soldat | Duration 8 min

Spoiler alert: Udo Kier dies a thousand deaths in Jan Soldat’s latest offering – a meditation on fictionality & cinematic conventions, and on the intrinsic links between life, death and film, spanning across all five decades of the German actor’s career.

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