Typee-Film

The story is set against the background of a bloody civil war in the Roman Empire. Sulla is in the countryside outside Rome and prepares to move into the city, that is in the hands of his enemies. He waits and turns to reflections. And to his lust.

A dozen narrative poems by Durs Grünbein, interpreted in sounds and images. Wyborny treats the texts as sounding boards for his own casual observations about the places Grünbein discusses, at times presenting what the writer saw and at others moving in a completely different direction.

Wyborny’s latest flicker film concentrates on factories, industrial wastelands, waterways, cityscapes, and the bits in between, and has an uncanny emotional resonance. It is “serene, in the manner of ants”—to quote the title of the second section—but it is also elegiac and melancholy. Like two other old cranks (Godard and Straub), the director stays true to ideas about filmic composition gestated over many years and thereby provides a glimpse of a utopian cinema.