Abendland: A film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
by Travis Jeppesen on October 27, 2011
The visibility is good today but there’s no one out there. Security camera is like a video game. He manipulates his own footage within the frame of the film, Security Man in a Van. In a vacant field. Europa, my friend, you seem so lonely by nightfall.
Here, we have news of the displacement. The bulldozers come tomorrow, don’t forget. You will go with yr family into the mountains. Next night’s ruins can already be smelt.
Civilization is a destitute place these years. The underweight baby holds on for dear life. How dear life is, some might opine. We see the nurse handling that redness, the dearness of life is her job, she carries out her duties with a sullen grace that still allows her to speak gently. Monolithic waterfalls. Parliament is empty.
In Parliament, a swirl of languages, all sounding similar, spoken simultaneously, rocks us half-dead babies to sleep.
In Bavaria, Lederhosen, roast chicken, and Robbie Williams round out the drunken Oktoberfestivities. Now they celebrate Europe. But she has been carried out of the Biergarten on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance. That’s my girlfriend! someone shouts.
Lederhosen in the emergency room. Fat drunken brain damage vomiting into a bin.
More monitors. This is for your protection, people. I see you watching. Man watching has bags under his eyes from all that endless seeing. Zeroes in on a suspicious-looking nigger…Make no mistake, it is people, not scenes, they are watching.
Oh look, it’s the pope.
Burberry and refugees. We can send the adults back, but not the children. The catwalk at London Fashion Week.
Dark ones do the nightshift at the post office: the future of Europe is non-European.
France. Germany. Spain. Singapore. Return to sender. Montenegro. Italy. Germany. Norway. Belgium. Return to sender.
Dutch suicide hotline clock reads 12:41. Sometimes they just need a voice on the other end. But I cannot provide you safety from this distance…You are afraid of Papa and Mama. Don’t worry. The police will shoot them. Our society takes care of its victims. It’s the least we can do for producing them.
Copper in the green room just got shot. Wild west whore saloon. Look, it’s someone else’s fantasy. Now a medieval dungeon, kitsch. Hidden cameras capture the fucking (desperate fat cellulite.) The whore is ready to get the slob off of her. She holds up a sign: Call me, I speak English. It’s always what some people want. There’s no reason to be ashamed.
Old orderly has mod prim earring. He cleans the rails so perfunctorily. This ward is near empty. Frau Richter not dead yet. I would like to change her sleeping position.
Airplane near the Deutsche Bahn. Train arrives under it in perfect synchronicity, crash like waves. Protests all over the rails. Cops don’t dance to techno. Drugged-out occupiers pushed away by self-appointed protectors of the night. Cops stand in line waiting to remove them from the forest. The next day, forest itself will be removed. Train with its chemicals is allowed to proceed.
Ninety-nine percent of all refugees applying for asylum are turned down. You can’t live in denial of the realities of the rest of the world. The people who run this one wish to believe otherwise.
Europa in the twenty-first century.
Empty terminal middle of the night. The people who get to clean it’re all white. German voice designates smoking area. A whole bunch of wooden caskets to choose from.
Europe is a muslim atheist country. Future. The corpses are all reduced to ashes. Thousands of sweaty kids on bad drugs in a stadium. They’re the only ones to acknowledge the camera.
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