#Manfred Purzer

[yessferatu]

Das Netz (1975) | dir. Manfred Purzer

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/29/2020: FEMMINE CARNIVORE aka DIE WEIBCHEN aka THE FEMALES

Before I begin, I have to give credit where it is due. I was guided to this film by Dr. Kate Robertson's excellent lecture for the indispensable Miskatonic Institute: "Man-Eater: Cannibal Women in Film". Her talk, which is to be the basis of a book I can't wait to read, focused on the taboo that plagues women's relationship to food, and what happens when that taboo is exploded by visions of women as self-serving consumers, rather than providers and calorie-counters. As a glutton for cannibal media and portraits of psychotic women myself, I found myself frantically scribbling down titles in the dark as Dr. Robertson unspooled a list of films I hadn't seen, some of which I hadn't even heard of. Of the long list I came up with, the movie that most jumped off the page at me was FEMMINE CARNIVORE aka DIE WEIBCHEN aka simply THE FEMALES. Its plot, about a luxury health clinic run by a feminist murder cult, set my expectations quite high, although I was still very surprised by what it is actually like.

Prolific czech director Zbynek Brynych and writer Manfred Purzer, about whom I wish I could tell you more, cooked up this blackly comic allegory for the women's liberation movement in 1970. The french-italian-west german-czech production plays like an especially eccentric giallo, with outrageous mod fashions, swingin' sounds, and freaky freudian insinuations whose ultimate message never becomes entirely clear. Whatever you make of it, it is highly entertaining. Our heroine Eve (Uschi Glas), a secretary suffering from nervous exhaustion, arrives at the exclusive health resort Van Maren--a sprawling estate full of space age furniture and neurotic babes. The domineering Dr. Barbara (Gisela Fischer) throws Eve right in the stirrups and asks her if she's been ground down by her boss's advances. Eve has a rough first night, immersed in the interpersonal drama of patients with various gender issues: desperation for motherhood, addiction to porn, obsession with intellectual masturbation--like the sneering Astrid (Françoise Fabian), who is always toting around a copy of Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto. Eve ducks out on the night's festivities, which spin into a veritable orgy between the women and a group of horny guys who have been conveniently stranded at Van Maren by a car crash; but later, on a nocturnal stroll, she stumbles upon one of the men with a knife in his back. The clinic's leather mamma chauffeur ferries Eve to the police station, where she encounters the Commissar (the wonderfully funny Hans Korte)--a useless authority figure who spends his days getting wasted and building dirty playing card castles. He casually dismisses Eve's concerns with the remark that Van Maren generates "an average of three murders a day," meaning her discovery will have to wait.

Eve digs deeper into the mystery of Van Maren on her own, leading to dangerous encounters with Adam the gardener (ahem), a disfigured ogre with one mysterious beastly, clawed mitt. Although she's sure Adam (the monumental Fred Coplan) has something to do with the progressive disappearance of the stranded men, she happens upon the clinic's most shocking secret while sneaking around behind him. In Van Maren's cactus garden, she discovers a collection of praying mantises, and witnesses their macabre mating rite. Eve pieces together the horrifying fact that the clinic is a recruitment center for Dr. Barbara's feminist cult, in which arrogant men are murdered and consumed; the table scraps are either turned into cat food, or included in a "museum of stupid men"--an anatomical catalog of select pieces of the victims. Eve tries to convince the surviving males of what's to happen to them, but they refuse to listen, as Dr. Barbara has convinced them of something men tend to believe anyway: that troublesome women are simply traumatized by bad sexual experiences, which need to be replaced by good ones at the hands of a competent lover. Fed up (as it were), Eve joins the cult, and leaves the future victims to their gruesome fates.

FEMMINE CARNIVORE is enormously satisfying as a fashion piece, coming as close to looking like a live action Guido Crepax comic as anything I've ever seen--moreso even than perfectly serviceable adaptations like VALENTINA and BABA YAGA. The text is a little more complicated, vacillating between vilification and vindication of its bloodthirsty femmes. In an especially baffling sequence, some of the ladies take time out to watch a bra-burning demonstration. The broadly comic scene (ahem) features hysterical women, clucking nuns, heckling men, and the cynical ladies of Van Maren who remark that this gesture of sexual liberation "wouldn't even frighten the animals." After all, they've discovered a superior means of establishing their freedom from men. But does the movie judge them for it? The answer may depend on the viewer. Eve is twice accused of being twisted by her experiences with men--by Dr. Barbara, who suggests that she's exhausted from the pressure to screw her boss, and then by the men who believe the doctor's story about Eve losing her virginity to rape--and in both cases, an intense introspection crosses her face, but she refuses to give a clear answer about the reality of these allegations. From here, we're unable to condemn Eve as a head case with “typical” female neuroses, and it remains possible--if not conclusive--that her eventual abandonment of the men who refuse to listen to women and save themselves is simply a rational conclusion.

Whatever you think FEMMINE CARNIVORE is ultimately getting at, you simply have to agree that it is an absolute party, proving that not all heady works of psychoanalytic horror have to be a test of the viewer's intellectual endurance. You can, in fact, opt to just have a great time, without yoking yourself to the task of making meaning of it all. Enjoy FEMMINE CARNIVORE today! Or become cat food tomorrow.

PS ???

[dolorescalo]

Das Netz - L'undicesimo comandamento (1975, Manfred Purzer)

[genevieveetguy]

We said goodnight right there and then How I would love be with you again With you, Lili Marlene

Lili Marleen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1981)

[vhs-ninja]

Randale (1983) by Manfred Purzer. 

Too Young to Put in Prison. Too Bad to Leave in School.

[videomaniacs-blog]

TOO YOUNG TO PUT IN PRISON. TOO BAD TO LEAVE IN SCHOOL.