MIFF 2008 (Otto; Or Up with Dead People)

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE, Bruce La Bruce, 2008

I think that La Bruce’s feature The Raspberry Reich represents a certain apotheosis in contemporary avant-garde filmmaking because it merges the faultlessly playful and the fiercely intelligent. In bringing critical theory closer to queer and towards pleasure, it makes for a polemical film text that it actually fun to watch. Reich queered both sexuality and socialism into a crazy radical anarchist orgy. While many of the techniques and themes that made Reich so interesting, including the orgiastic, are carried over into Otto, the film seemed far less vital.

The plot revolves around a plague of homosexual zombies that descend on humankind, the ‘purple peril’, and their sympathetic documentary chronicler/ narrator Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus). Seems simple enough, until it is intercut with the ambling progress of the lead Otto (Jey Krisfar), a self styled zombie hero.

The film presents a multiplicity of voices and narratives, an excess of material and approaches that at times seems rich and at times seems confusing. It is an approach that works to great effect in Reich but left me flat in Otto, I was particularly off put by the loss of the possible subversive power of the zombie plague by relegating Otto’s zombie like state to an outcome of personal psychosis.

That said, Otto was visually evolved, presenting shots and scenes that were styled in a more artistic manner, which made the text often quite beautiful to watch. I particularly liked the rambling shots of Otto in the open spaces of the road and the forest, the prerequisite meaty carnage was completely disarming and the reappearance of Susanne Sachsse (the anarchist leader Gudrun from Reich) as silent screen necro-lesbian lover Hella Bent was particularly inspired.