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Dark Spring

Retrospective 2024
© Deutsche Kinemathek / Engström
Shortly after her divorce, a doctor from Munich sets out on a trip. With a mute lover at the wheel of an old Mercedes 180, she visits female friends and talks to them about their circumstances and their idea of ideal love. Documentary filmmaker Katrin Seybold talks about couples relationships, actor Edda Köchl about living in a group, and Marxist educator Illona Schult about raising children in a commune. Ingemo Engström said, “Their assertions are authentic even when they are part of a staged scene”. This graduation film for the Munich film school HFF, shot on leftover 35 mm stock from Bavaria studios, is a work of cinematic self-empowerment, in which men have nothing to say. The articulation of feminist positions expressed in the narratives taken from real life lead to a reading from the “SCUM Manifesto”, a rant arguing for the elimination of men written by Valerie Solanas, who later tried to assassinate Andy Warhol. In 1976, Engström said “for a long time I wasn’t sure how the film should end, with what kind of death. Suicide, murder, an attempt to kill. But it had to be violent, a gesture of resistance”.
by Ingemo Engström
with Edda Köchl, Ilona Schult, Irene Wittek, Klara Zet, Gerhard Theuring, Ingemo Engström, Katrin Seybold, Federal Republic of Germany 1970 German 89’ Colour DCP: Deutsche Kinemathek Rating R 18

With

  • Edda Köchl
  • Ilona Schult
  • Irene Wittek
  • Klara Zet
  • Gerhard Theuring
  • Ingemo Engström
  • Katrin Seybold

Crew

Director Ingemo Engström
Screenplay Ingemo Engström
Cinematography Bernd Fiedler
Editing Gerhard Theuring, Ingemo Engström
Sound Gerhard Theuring

Additional information

DCP: Deutsche Kinemathek