Wolfgang Rihm

The documentary Hölderlin's Echo approaches the life and work of the well-known poet in an unusual way: In the real film parts, artists are observed and interviewed who interpret the numerous settings of Hölderlin's poems by well-known composers. Animated sequences interpret biographical sections of Hölderlin's moving life in poetic associative form. In the combination of both art forms, a complete work is created that consciously moves away from more conventional forms of geographical chronology and thus also tries to do justice to associative poetry.

On the one hand, the beyond-Tropicália surreal, wild, ecstatic universe of Khavn de la Cruz, the Philippines’ internationally most venerated underground filmmaker. On the other, the Frankfurt School dialectics of Alexander Kluge, self-proclaimed arrière-guard eternal of 1960s modernist moviedom, Gandalf of all essay cinema. For Happy Lamento, Kluge mixed some of his weirder TV skits on electricity, the circus, revolution and early cinema (featuring Fassbinder-regular Peter Berling, theatre genius Heiner Müller, and DaDaism’s last man standing, Helge Schneider, among others) with some of the more outrageous scenes from Khavn’s 2016 Ang Napakaigsing Buhay Ng Alipato. Some 2017 G20 shots of Merkel and Trump et al inject the already heady brew with current affairs urgency.