Oliver Herrmann

In Dichterliebe (2000), a film by Oliver Herrmann based on Robert Schumann’s song-cycle of the same name, the boundaries between song recital and reality blur. The chosen setting – a night club in the centre of Berlin – creates the intimate, dark salon atmosphere in which the songs might also have been performed at the time they were written. Returning to origins in this way, the film departs from the concert atmosphere in which song-recitals are normally performed nowadays.

In the film One Night. One Life, based on the cycle Pierrot Lunaire, Arnold Schönberg’s opus 21, director Oliver Herrmann has created a surreal, at times grotesque dream world set in a modern city, through which Pierrot moves like a spirit. In each new number she passes through different scenes and levels of the world around us: such as an abattoir, a peep-show, a station or a supermarket.

God, depicted as a black woman in her kitchen, creates new life and experiments: Dr. Bardot, a brain surgeon overwhelmed by chaos; Esther, mourning her husband; and Lucia, a young girl seeking revenge. Her hands place them in a city, where a solar eclipse transports them to a tropical island. There, Santeria guardian angels guide them to a house by the ocean, where they are prepared for a healing ritual by black albinos, dwarfs, and nuns. The ritual, led by a Babalao, involves sacrifices. God observes the experiment from her kitchen window.