If you’re interested in a genre-heavy lineage of women behind the camera, I Spit on Your Celluloid is a rich, wide-ranging resource. It spans from silent cinema to today, covering international, art, and micro-budget horror, with a range that eclipses many genre surveys. A few layout quirks aside, it’s an excellent guide for discovering new films and forgotten pioneers. I plan on working through the filmography I haven’t seen.
I should note that I have a non-UPC copy, so other editions may be edited and designed differently than the regular copy.
Michael Lentz’s Shattenfroh is a challenging, 1,001-page experimental German novel about Nobody, who sits imprisoned at a table by his father, wearing something like a plague mask. His name is a nod to the Latin nemo and the Cyclops episode in The Odyssey. I’m barely gesturing toward the amount of wordplay here, much of which I likely missed. The story unfolds through Nobody’s “brain fluid,” producing prose that echoes Samuel Beckett, while incorporating touches of Franz Kafka’s magical existentialism, among other flavors.
Nobody becomes and interacts with various beings in art history. There are glorious appearances by Hieronymus Bosch’s hybrids. Episodes occur inside other famous paintings as Lentz explores German and religious history and the many ways states and groups have inflicted torture, particularly through crucifixion. There’s a wild, cruel humor reminiscent of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, a story that includes a giant urinating and flooding a town.
The title Shattenfroh plays with several German words, especially Schadenfreude—pleasure in others’ suffering. Much of the novel grapples with witnessing and complicity. One striking section reproduces Nobody’s handwritten list of people who died during Allied bombings of Düren. When faced with a list of the dead, do you read the names? What does that act mean? If you ignore them, are you erasing them again? This recalls Pasolini’s Salo, which also turns the viewer into witness and accomplice—but Lentz’s version, for me, cuts even deeper. The novel has a bizarre balance of humor and horror, like watching Michael Haneke and Terry Gilliam films at the same time. Maybe Mad God is a better comparison.
For all its density, Shattenfroh is continuously engaging and, in one sense, easy to read. It’s episodic, and the individual set pieces (1,001 pages/nights/events) are easier to comprehend than grasping the larger narratives and themes on first read. In the end, this maximalist work feels like an infernal history of Germany, perhaps even civilization itself, and an unflinching meditation on what it means to see, to suffer, and to bear witness. Nobody in a Purgatory reliving history as a kind of Inferno. But I imagine, with another reading, Nobody will reveal something else.
Stephen McClurg 