Pym Films

An experimental German film

After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

The ‘Casa do Povo’ cultural centre in São Paulo, an icon of the secular Jewish workers’ movement: a crumbling theatre flanked by staircases, entryways and corridors. Construction noise drones away in the background, clinking crockery, a broom sweeping over tiled floors, an expressive façade of countless adjustable panes of glass covered by a patina. It’s October 2016 and a group of young people are preparing a preview of Bickels [Socialism]. The venue is to form a prologue to the completed film, which tours 22 buildings in Israel designed by Samuel Bickels, most of which for kibbutzim. Dining halls, children’s houses, agricultural buildings, bright structures inserted into the Mediterranean landscape with great ingenuity. An architecture with a sell-by date: That many are now empty or have been repurposed at best is linked to the decline of the socialist ideals they embody.

Forty-two of Heinz Emigholz's illustratred notebooks from 1974 to 1983, a notebook of Heinrich Emigholz dated 1941, a sketchbook from the 70s, twenty-four photographs from 100 Hudson Street, 240 President Street, 325 West 11th Street, Kleine Reichenstrasse 2, 36 Sherman Street, 236 Elizabeth Street, 29 John Street and Zippelhaus 6. In addition, there are eighty drawings from the series ›Die Basis des Make-Up‹ as positives and negatives.

The film shows thirty-eight of Heinz Emigholz's notebooks and sketchbooks from 1996 to 2004: cinematic studies of marble inlays on the memorial slabs in the Johannes Cathedral in Valetta, Malta in 2004; of Skull Rock in Joshua Tree Desert in California, which gave the series its title; of Cerro Castellan in Big Bend National Park in Texas; of a rock shop in Quartzsite, Arizona that sells remnants from the glass factory in Henryetta as "gems from Mexico"; scenes from Bartlesville in Oklahoma; a tree covered with shoes on Highway 62 in California in 2002; and, in Gabriele D'Annunzio's Villa Cargnacco in Gardone, Italy in 1997, the mask merchant's room, the reliquary room, the workshop, the globe room, the Apollinian veranda, the room of the Cheli, and the Zambracca.

Emigholz presents the buildings of the great American architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924). “In everything that men do they leave an indelible imprint of their minds. If this suggestion be followed out, it will become surprisingly clear how each and every building reveals itself naked to the eye; how its every aspect, to the smallest detail, to the lightest move of the hand, reveals the workings of the mind of the man who made it, and who is responsible to us for it.”

Sixty-nine of Heinz Emigholz's illustrated notebooks from 1983 to 1996, three sketch books from the 80s and 90s, and cinematic studies of his exhibition "Der Untergang der Bismarck" at the Zwinger Gallery, Berlin 1988, a castle moat in Riva, Italy 1997, a casting of Aguste Rodin's "The Gates of Hell" in front of the Kunsthaus in Zürich 1988, an olive grove near Norma in Italy 1995, a magnolia tree in Basle 1996, burnt meat at Cabo de Creus in the Pyrennees 1988, an intersection in Owatonna, Minnesota 1995, and a house underpass in Giesshübelstrasse, Zurich 1996. In addition, there are 184 drawings from the series "Die Basis des Make-Up" as positives and negatives.

A dash of nostalgia, then a shrug and self-irony: The portraits of Berlin subway stations in Berlin [Underground] begin in Schöneberg’s Regenbogenkiez only to evaporate towards Dahlem, the location of the Freie Universität. The western underground academically frittered away. The trees in Argentina are more exciting. And over and over, the unfathomable notebooks of Heinz Emigholz.