Kurzfilmprogramm: Der Kontinent Reni Mertens & Walter Marti

F Watchlist

The landscape of Mertens & Marti charted through their short films: Jour de pêche could be called an idyll, if only the word didn’t have such a negative connotation today: images of a fisherman, the wind making the water curl, but further out also factories – quite simply everyday life, yet a complex juxtaposition of rural and urban work. Krippenspiel II has a fundamentally different form: deaf children (led by the special needs teacher Mimi Scheiblauer) perform the nativity according to Luke. It is all very strict, very theatrical, and harbours pure cinema of immeasurable beauty. Even Im Schatten des Wohlstandes is about children, but their illnesses – if that’s what we want to call them – are civilisational in nature: their parents have to abandon them to keep up with their jobs; frustration is the core of capitalism. Gebet für die Linke was the last short film by Mertens & Marti, which fits well into a series of works that look like they belong together: on the one hand images from Zurich’s Oerlikon district, which houses both immigrant workers and the arms industry. On the other hand, there are the words of the Archbishop of Olinda e Recife and world-famous liberation theologian Dom Hélder Câmara, who after a lecture at the Züspa Hall said a prayer for the Left, at the request of Walter Marti. At the time, the film was an afterword to the Bührle affair – today it is a prime example of religious and political cinema.