2011-10-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

Exhibition and screening of Pablo Marte

"Pretty Woman"

Wednesday, Jan 25 till Feb 19th

Pretty Woman und andere Geschichten, ein Film mit Alexander Kluge (Pretty Woman and other stories, a film with Alexander Kluge)

64’ 15’’ - Color / B&N / Sound - 2011

German, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian

with Spanish subtitles

“A comedy in six parts full of excitement, suspense, logic, cruelty and madness like the fairy tales we tell children to help them through life until death”

“When I was a little girl my mama used to lock me in the attic when I was bad, which was pretty often. And I would pretend I was a princess trapped in a tower by a wicked queen.

And then suddenly this knight on a white horse with these colors flying would come charging up and draw his sword.

And I would wave.

And he would climb up the tower and rescue me.

But never in all the time that I had this dream did the knight say to me:

“Come on, baby, I’ll put you up in a great condo”.

(From the screenplay of Pretty Woman, by J.F. Lawton)

The film start from a premise of fiction: how would “Pretty Woman” (the famous movie with Julia Roberts) be, if it had been made by the German filmmaker Alexander Kluge?: Surely it would have been darker, and more ironic, chaotic and fragmented, than the original. But also a way to think about what was wrong before, between and after the Reunification of Germany.

In a conversation with Heiner Müller, Alexander Kluge asked him to say what kind of thing, animal, job, whatever... could Deutschland be. Heiner Müller answered: “just a pretty woman”.

Maybe it´s such a small world, just a coincidence, or maybe not. The first Pretty Woman was released in 1990, between the fall of the Berlin Wall - November 1989- and German Reunification, on October 3rd 1990. So, the main character, the pretty woman, who is played by Julia Roberts, has here an allegorical function and can be read in several ways. She can refer to a country, according the words of Heiner Müller, or also to the working-class, (she is a worker, a prostitute, undertaking the kind of work that the Left has excluded from their remit). Her circumstances represent the decadence of the class struggle and the entrance of the entire working class to consumerist society with its consumer worries and consumer happiness. Therefore, as historical context, in the film, the 90’s play the role of a black, broken mirror, in which the reflections provide the link with the consumer dimension of human relations... In this allegorical sense, she could be also a building - a Hotel, a 100 unit housing project, apartment blocks in soviet style, maybe a skyscraper or a great condo- but, definitely, a building... slated for demolition.

Although, of course, that was also the end of the 20^th Century.

Matador Projekt raum