Berlinale Bloggers 2021
The sweet life of tenacious vampire intellectuals
A further Berlinale jewel is the film Bloodsuckers (German title: Blutsauger) by German director Julian Radlmaier. In this new work, he continues with healthy self-irony his search for the place of the intellectual in the field of tension between capitalism and the working class.
By Egor Moskvitin
It is 1928 and a young noblewoman (Lilith Stangenberg) is languishing at her pompous court in an unnamed Baltic country. The heiress of immeasurable riches has been abandoned by everyone except her faithful servant Jakob (Alexander Herbst). The latter is so hopelessly in love with his mistress that he allows her to drink his blood at night. However, the peace of the vampiress and her slave is suddenly disturbed by an uninvited guest: the Russian baron Lyovushka (Alexandre Koberidze), who is on the run.The latter wears a tailcoat and despises the revolution, but in the end turns out not to be an aristocrat but an impostor. He is in fact an actor, but in Soviet Russia, due to political reasons, he was prevented from playing the role of Leon Trotsky in a film by Sergei Eisenstein. As a result, Lyovushka has to flee the country just like his role model. And now he is in need of the necessary means to make it to America and, at the same time, to shoot a film that could be his calling card for Hollywood. The result in Bloodsuckers is a bizarre triangular relationship in which each side is economically dependent on the other. Meanwhile, in the adjacent fields, workers, peasants and farmers gather to read Marx's Capital out loud and show each other the strange bite marks on their necks. They explain the epidemic to themselves as an invasion of Chinese fleas – a humorous allusion to the Coronavirus. The film is bursting with jokes everywhere.
what is the ideal society?
1927, a year before the events in Bloodsuckers, saw the release of the great German film Metropolis – a contemplation on the ideal structure of a society; utopia and anti-utopia in equal measure. It stipulated that “the mediator between brain and hands must be the heart”. To this day, the role of the heart in societal issues is readily attributed to an artistic intelligentsia, but this status is as enviable as it is unenviable. After all on the one hand, the life of creative artists is more unfettered than that of the proletariat. On the other, neither the higher nor the lower classes believe in intelligence. And every time they take heart to speak out or propose something, the creative artists groan under impostor syndrome. Who gave them the right to direct others? Is one even able to sympathise with workers when one has so many privileges? And do those who are doing well really want change? Indeed, the heart, stylised as the mediator between head and hands, does at times suffer from arrhythmias. And although in his previous films, the conscientious director Julian Radlmaier still tried to give this heart an adrenaline injection, in Bloodsuckers he comes to the conclusion that the sick person can only be helped with an aspen stake.Despite the ominous title and the vampires, the film is not ghoulish for even a second. At most, fright is evoked by the balance to be drawn: however art may rebel against social structures – society is and remains its greatest blood-drain. And any frustration and reflection in this respect is no more than vampiristic coyness. This is why the film places irony above pathos – and why aristocrats, capitalists, directors, workers, peasants laugh fondly at themselves and each other for a whole two hours. At one point, a comical Sergei Eisenstein bursts into the picture, with the sympathetic film critics Vladimir Lyashenko and Stasya Korotkov hot on his heels.