The Electric Paradise / Das Elektrische Paradies

SHORT SYNOPSIS

THE ELECTRIC PARADISE is an aleatoric film in six parts, a sprawling, personal film cosmos, an autobiographical fiction about the founder of the hollow world theory Cyrus Reed Teed with the help of staged, quoted, documentary and materialistically painted pictures.

Six individual films revolve around the theme of autobiography and self-encounter. Currently filmed material meets film material from the years 1988-89, the years of reunification.
A film about ageing, a film as a fountain of youth.

the six film parts:

NIGHT & DREAMS / NACHT & TRÄUME (10:28’)

16mm, Super8 and video VHS

actors: Inga Busch, Zebu Kluth, Eva Heldrich, Werner Türk, Simone Müller
cinematography: Michael Busch and Marcus Winterbauer

The film, named after a Schubert song, is a homage to 16mm film editing. It brings together several feature-length self-encounter scenarios and a text by Marcel Proust.

NIGHT NOW (13:16’)

HD video

Text landscape, words and sentences rush by. Self-encounter with a cat. Reduction of the film from images to words.

Night Now quotes the end of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce in the form of a text landscape. For 10 minutes the texts, monologues and dialogues from the other parts of the film rush by, some of them readable, some of them only comprehensible as a landscape of letters and words, all in all a rhythmic collage of the text corpus of the whole film

HALLUCINATION / BERLIN / ALBUM (23:24’)

Super8, Video VHS, Video DV

cinematography: Michael Busch and Marcus Winterbauer

A West Berlin Wall film, a documentary picture album containing footage from 1989 to 2009, a personal West Berlin story between wall painting, punk, rise and fall of the Love Parade and hallucinated city drifting into the night. The film adds a precise location to the other parts and embeds them in a subjective historiography.

TIME OUT / GARDEN FILM
AUSZEIT / GARTENFILM (26:05’)

HD Video

actors: Alexandra, Charlotte and Romy Engel, Karla Schieferstein
cinematography: Michael Busch and Marcus Winterbauer

retreat to the garden house, tendencies of dissolution, narrative, documentary
In the style of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Vampyr”

A film with a story. The protagonist withdraws into a garden house, loses his materiality and haunts the property as a transparent ghost. It is the evening in November 2008 when Barack Obama is confirmed as the presidential candidate. The ghost climbs into a shaft, filled with water, only to reappear at the other end 20 years younger. A prostitute and his family come to visit.

THOUGHTS / LANDSCAPES
GEDANKEN /LANDSCHAFTEN (60:07’)

16mm, Super8, Video Hi8 and HD

actors: Simone Müller, Peter Hein, Klaus Lohmeier, Lars Löllmann
cinematography: Michael Busch and Ernst Kubitza

The crisis reaches the cities, an underground movie theatre, the flood comes over Europe, in CERN under Geneva strange matter is created, the water is infected.

Gedanken/Landschaften is a film shot mainly in analogue. 16mm material, palimpsest-like painted Super 8 film images meet associative texts, which are based on an environmental disaster scenario. In the course of the bank crisis in 2008, electricity fails in Frankfurt a.M., people flee the city to underground “platonic” cinemas. Then, triggered by the accident at CERN under Geneva, which in September 2008 led to the shutdown of the LHC – the Large Hadron Collider – after only 36 hours of operation, a deluge sweeps over Europe, water contaminated with “strange matter” makes people lose their memory. Expeditions are sent to the devastated coastal regions, but never return.

THE WORLD CAVE /
DIE WELT HÖHLE (71:11’)

16mm, Super8, Video Hi8 and HD

actors: Cordula Daus, Alex Engel, Ursula Hellmuth, Agnes Treblin, Birgit Wentsch, Bernhard Dropmann, Volker Deutschmann, Ralf Stier
cinematography: Michael Busch and Marcus Winterbauer

A biographical fiction with Super 8 family films, a film about ageing and remembering.

At the end of the 19th century, Dr Teed, who was enthusiastic about natural science, experimented with electric shocks as a medical healing method. Soon, consciousless in an electric coma, he had the vision that humanity did not live on the outer skin of the globe, but in its INSIDE. In a finite space inside a sphere, the whole universe is enclosed.
Our solar system, the stars, the Milky Way, all galaxies do not take up more space than fits into a sphere with a diameter of 12700 km. Our world is therefore not infinite, but rather a limited space.

Later he called himself Koreesh and gathered a few hundred followers around him to build an earthly paradise in the swamps of Florida, with the help of modern technology – among other things, a generator donated by Thomas Alva Edison supplied the settlement with electricity and electric light as one of the first in all of America. Many of their communist utopian ideas cause problems with the surrounding communities. Teed dies in riots. His followers refuse to bury him for weeks, believing in his rebirth.