video: Der Krieger und die Kaiserin/The Princess and the Warrior (same movie, prefer the original title, but not everyone can read German)
audio: Mary Black - "Columbus"
link: depositfiles [53.3 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: February 2005
This video was done for the "Live In '05" contest advertised on the animemusicvideos.org forums in early 2005, and was kicked together in blithe disregard of the expectations of the contest. I had been into this movie for a while, and it meshed very well with the song, saving me from having to buy Last Exile to do a video with this. Among very slow romance videos based on sources where the protagonists show extremely little physical intimacy, I think it came out pretty well.
About the music: Mary Black is an Irish pop singer; I found this track scouring the net from some blog that also turned me on to Bamboo Soul and Les fatales Picards.
About the movie: Tom Twyker made German cinema history with Lola rennt (Run Lola Run in English): for the first time since the arrival of New German Cinema in the 1970s, a German film was fast, experimentally composed, and quick-cut. It was heralded as a fresh start for German movies. Then Twyker turned around and made this film, which is a classic NGC piece clocking in at a smooth and weighty 150 minutes. It still has many of Twyker's stylistic quirks, including carefully plotted and symbolic color schemes and highly dynamic camera motions, but its captivating power is slow and deep rather than the gripping speedfreak edge of Lola rennt.
Miscellaneous: The title of this video is a convoluted word-play that will only make sense to those with a fair degree of fluency in the German language. It roughly means "I will distance myself with you/I am distancing myself with you", and the case which is meant is unclear, dependent on the omitted first word or phrase, which would be something like "Jetzt" [Now] or "Zuletzt" [At last]. If this sentence element is not there, the title isn't grammatically legal. Beyond that, "entfernen", to distance, doesn't take a "mit" (with) prepositional phrase. It requires a "von" (from) phrase, which only makes sense: nothing can distance itself if it has nothing to distance itself from. Both prepositions are in the same grammatical group, keeping the sounds and sentence flow consistent, but the inversion of the relationship (uniting instead of dividing) and the reduction to not specifically moving away from anything, but simply distancing oneself in general really address themselves to the central themes of the video.
A potentially interesting but of course ultimately fruitless thought exercise might be to speculate whether, if the title is intended as a spoken line, Sissi or Bodo is the speaker.
Is this pretentious tripe? Of course. But a pretentious title is better than an unoriginal crap title, and almost as good as no title at all.
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