A tear for humanity

The bar is set high right at the beginning. A voiceover recites Bertolt Brecht's poem to the black screen To those born after from the time of National Socialism, then a hundred heavily armed policemen march to the sounds of Bach's St. Matthew Passion through the picture. The drop height is appropriate: one cut and we are at Zurich Central, where we fought with the police in 1968 - left-wing nostalgia in black and white. For Christian Labhart, this was the initial political spark. His film is the typical autobiography of a Swiss leftist who read Marx and Adorno fifty years ago and, despite serious doubts, still clings to the utopia of the "right life in the wrong" today. But the circumstances are not like that. Baader-Meinhof dead end, Chernobyl, 9/11, financial crisis, robots, Syria, globalization, broken environment: a tear-off calendar of horror, a permanent dystopia, prepared with paradoxically beautiful images from the senseless world of things. If people appear as individuals, then it is the author himself and his surroundings, otherwise they are an anonymous mass - the curse of thinking in abstract categories of humanity. The unconditional yes to life that characterizes people's everyday lives in Africa, for example, is alien to this film essay, which is permeated by suffering in the world.

As a balm for the wounded soul, excerpts from the St. Matthew Passion with Philippe Herreweghe and his Collegium Vocale Gent. Here, people are engaged in a meaningful activity, a stark contrast to the images of a broken world. But Labhart seems to have made a misunderstanding with Bach. The secular recoding of the Passion turns the high pathos of religious suffering into profane self-pity, and instead of Christ, Ulrike Meinhof is mourned. "What remains?" is the final intertitle. Bach's final music provides the answer: "We sit down with tears." It could have been a little more.

Passion. Between revolt and resignation, a film by Christian Labhart. LookNow film distribution.
In theaters from April 18