Dream City (1973)

 

Director: Johannes Schaaf

Screenplay: Rosemarie Fendel, Alfred Kubin and Russell Parker

Cast: Per Oscarsson as Florian Sand; Rosemarie Fendel as Anna Sand; Olimpia as The Girl; Eva Maria Meineke as Mrs. Lampenbogen; Heinrich Schweiger as Mr. Gautsch; Rony Williams as Hercules Bell; Alexander May as Dr. Lampenbogen; Louis Waldon as Louis

An Abstract Candidate

 

Delving into an obscure German film, Dream City begins with an artist named Florian (Per Oscarsson) who has been stalked by a man for three days waiting outside his apartment. He offers good tidings for Florian from his old college friend Klaus Patera, who in a Middle Eastern desert has raised an entire city, the titular one, free from need for commerce, a place where all you need to do is dream, offering an artist in an artistic crisis hope. Currently having to work in photography, the ability to live in Dream City and escape the sprawl of urban German life is too tempting for Florian to ignore. However, it becomes clear this, as a 1973 film, will reflect what Hunter S. Thompson dubbed "when the tide went down" in the late sixties ideal, that moment when all the optimism keeled over as this presents the concept of the utopia which was never going to sustain itself.

Florian and his wife Anna (Rosemarie Fendel) go to Dream City, and for what is meant to be a place of no money and seemingly no rules, the issue is entirely that the place is a mess, a throwback to the 17th/18th centuries in costumes, in dress and attitude down to even horse drawn carriages, where people are aimless and where the removal of commerce leave public clerks bored, demanding complicated forms to the complete to make their lives worthwhile. Everything is unfocused, and this is not that this comes off as a damnation of the utopia, dismissing it as a fairytale concept, but that they never got to the basics written down by Thomas More in his 1516 satire on how to create one. It is instead a place where very little makes sense, Franz Kafka's The Castle (1926) and his spectre even evoked as Florian at one point, even to try to meet Klaus, has to go through former clerks requiring immense amount of identification to get an "audience card" with him, Klaus Patera a vague phantom hidden in a world where people have drifted aimlessly. There is a sense of degradation felt, and whilst using a brothel as a metaphor for this at one point has aged the film, as we thankfully have taken pro-sex worker views over the decades after this film, the time it is brought it is with a group of men trying to drag Florian to one where it is clear the ideals have gone to the dogs. It is replaced in favour of base level pleasures without the ability of even them, to booze and fornicate, to have a greater sense of worth than to pass the time but just to kill time. The intellectuals just hang out in a pub to just pontificate with no sense of real life influence, just procrastination. 

Dream City from Johannes Schaaf, who would go on to direct for theatre and opera in his home land in Germany, is part of the "surreal" side of cinema but a large portion of its tone, as a few from the sixties and seventies, is very grounded drama with realistic production values. The plot is still a focus, depicting the city as a realistic town where, despite the artificiality of the costumes, feels like a commune of a different world people can hide in. Most of this is about Florian's greater frustrations and Anna's growing anxieties, whilst the eccentricities are from the side characters for half the film, who indulge in their many curiosities in behaviour, like the female singer with many cats who wants to seduce Florian. Many of these are one-scene characters too but they all stand out, such as the man who likes randomly bricking up other peoples' windows, to the other man pontificating to an almost entirely empty library but speaking in a public orator voice to an imaginary audience.

To those expecting a "surreal" film of decades later, where every scene is a bizarre image or deliberately arch, Dream City surprises for how subdued it is for all its eccentric scenes. The more overtly strange side finally comes to the surface but after the build up, as the layers of the titular city are exposed to Florian and tragedy eventually comes to his life, [Spoiler] the ritualised death of Anna whilst she is still alive [Spoilers End], involving people being wrapped up in cloth cocoons and hung in a tree in the outskirts to perish when no longer needed. Outright weirdness comes from the theatre ship when we are introduced to it, a place of public expression which has images which may shock - random minstrel black face and a man in Nazi regalia being mocked crucified - as well as being a cacophony performance of primal indulgences, singing American football and baseball players, random nudity and skeletons, chefs and a singing knight with a stuffed goose under his arm. This is the kind of scene even I, a fan of this era of experimental cinema, will point to as the stereotype of surrealism in seventies cinema even if the resulting scene is memorable, as well as appropriate for the film's ideas. It can be argued to be a very conservative message in moments like this by accident, how the ideals of artistic and personal freedom have collapsed here into random nonsense, but it also comes with a sense of ennui in context of the time period this film was made within, where the ideals to escape the encroaching modernity of 24-7 working life in the West did not help despite the political strife that took place, not long before this film was made, that were to help them forwards.

Ultimately, it becomes the blatant tale of how this utopia is founded on unstable forms, under a figurehead who is elusive, may merely wander the streets up to no good feeling women up, and/or is literally hollow, with the world built around him inevitably going to collapse. The biggest opponent to Klaus Patera, who will help undermine the system, is a black man who expected revolutionary help to change the world only to be ignored by the indulgences practiced instead, the one who calls out the Emperor for being naked. Everyone is mindless without a figure to follow, and eventually a military force comes in to destroy the city, and their abrupt inclusion may be seen as a fault but befits the metaphor of the outside world kicking the doors down. Even Florian is not a guiltless bystander eventually, obsessed the moment he entered the city by the perfect female subject for a painting, one who he eventually is able to meet but whose actions to her in the final scene are distressing. The horror she will fall into as a victim by the end credits roll, a victim to his lusts without seeing the outcome, ends Dream City on a disturbing note, and it feels appropriate as an ending.

The pace and tone will catch people, as it fully belongs to an era of surrealist/experimental world cinema of still following dramatic character pieces where the drama is drawn out. This has a virtue, in being this slow burn, as when the layers are peeled away from the titular setting, all that was left of these utopian ideals is followed into inane artistic pretensions and expression, without any goal to actually create art that will last, no ideals to stand. In any other context this would seem a dismissive view of art in general, of hippie communes and lofty ideals, but one cannot help but feel reflection of the time period it was made in greatly in a cynical distress.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None