Siegfried's Death

Jan Soldat's films function as archives of moments of sex and of death: his videos document fetish and cruising situations, his found footage montages show scenes of dying in fictional films. And then there are transactions that intensify sex and death: arrangements let men find each other, and ideological investments turn Udo Kier's or Lance Henriksen's deaths, as well as all the corpses of women in crime TV into outright money shots.

And now there is Siegfried's Death, a rigid one shot movie with four shots fired from a pistol which time and again rules over the frame from the foreground, taking the camera's place. Naked, lit by atable lamp and his laptop, Siegfried sits on his Berlin sofa. Soldat talks to him, jokingliy, also rudely. He directs him by pistol, tells him to drink his booze instead of babbling. 

Siegfried's Death – Germany's past, imaginary, mysterious, like the pictures on the wall (ancestors?) in the dark behind the sofa. All is lost: Siegfried laments his age which, in spite of the lucky number 69, seems to have hardly any sex to offer, no online dates to fuck. What remains is the sight of the "hot Indian guys" from the delivery that brought his booze. Dates of a German past: His father, he tells us, "tormented" him and beat his mother on a First of May. So, at age fourteen, Siegfried knew: "I'll hate him till I die". Blind loyalty to a oath, like the proverbial Nibelungen-Treue, fidelity, that surrounds the mythical Siegfried. Both namesakes are marked by family violence, sexual transactions and vulnerable nudity.

German history: The pistol-packing executioner of the naked old man wears a balaclava. His name really is Soldat. He worries: To those who see this film in a cinema he will appear as a "pig" and Siegfried as an "Asi", asocial. But in the end, social transaction reigns: Having courageously died by four symbolic headshots (two executions, suicide, deathblow), Siegfried blows us kisses. Victory and then peace, as in his name Sieg-Fried. (Drehli Robnik)