Ever since spending 2 plus years in prison (1965-67), during which time I concluded that America - and any culture - could at any time institute systems equivalent to the KZ (extermination camp) system of Nazi Germany, I have pondered this blunt truth. It is merely a matter of giving the order - cultures do not lack for organizational mechanisms or for persons willing and often eager to carry out abuses against other humans - they need only the authorization from their governmental bodies to commence. The prison camps at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, and the unknown ones operated by the CIA in other compliant client States more than adequately demonstrate that my thoughts in prison were correct: America has now institutionalized its own Red White and Blue Gulag, for which all Americans are now morally responsible.
Vergessensfuge is the result of this long pondering. It offers no answers, no solutions. It meditates on the corpus and asks the viewer to do the same. As such it perhaps is emblematic of the failure of art in the face of human reality: of course I knew when making it that almost no one would ever see it, and that it was hence politically impotent and useless at birth.
Vergessensfuge originated when I saw the photos by George Rodger used in the film of captured female KZ guards at Bergen-Belsen, and I was struck by how aged and worn they looked, as well as the seeming sudden comprehension they had of what they had done. Subsequently I asked actress Geno Lechner, whom I had met in London while she was in a play directed by Harold Pinter, to come to the Zentrum fur Kunst und Media (located in a former WW2 slave-labor armaments factory) in Karlsruhe, Germany, to play the part. I had written the text hastily, and she learned and translated in the brief 2 day period during which the work was recorded. Shooting was with multiple cameras in a green screen room in a period of but a handful of hours. Editing took vastly longer.
The work is intended to work as a musical fugue, introducing a motif, and returning to it shifted and altered, layering meaning on meaning. Being formally so distant from conventional cinema, perhaps more akin to theater, I'd suggest trying to set aside expectations and simply sit, be patient, and let it work into you slowly but surely.
The music used is Bach's Art of the Fugue, radically altered through digital manipulations.
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