Leuchtkraft der Ziege – Eine Naturerscheinung

A young, recreational filmmaker takes his home camera to rural Thuringia to capture on narrow-gauge film an amateur film group as they shoot their most recent village murder mystery. Amid sets populated by a stoic land surveyor, a trackman for the East German railroad and a crowd of singing children, they shoot action scenes and animal shots. After the finished film premieres in the village cinema, there is an awards ceremony. The first prize – the “Golden Earnest” – goes to the lead actress, a goat… “The film means a lot to me, because it creates an entirely new reality.” Those words by the director of the film-within-a-film might well jibe perfectly with the credo of director Jochen Krausser. The Goat’s Intensity is a surrealist satire that seems to have fallen off the back of a 1988 East German reality truck. Krausser plays ironically and subversively with the conventions of cinema and the visual arts, for instance by having the director in the film speak directly to the camera when giving direction, or having painter and sculptor Horst present the “first bicycle in the world”, made of bits and bobs found at the junkyard.