Alfred Edel's Attack on Himself

It must have been his drive to remain alien to any form of categorization that motivated the Lower-Bavarian acting eccentric Alfred Edel (1932-1993). Alexander Kluge first discovered him for Abschied von gestern (1966). He subsequently rose to become a sought-after actor in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s and 80s, playing curious supporting roles in films by Herzog, Klick, Syberberg, Treut, Achternbusch, Straub/Huillet and Schlingensief. Whereby playing is not apt for what Edel did in front of the camera: He always assumed a persona he must have invented for himself very early on – if it wasn't identical to who he was to begin with: Edel was Edel, no matter what the context in which he appeared. 

Jan Soldat was only nine years old when the brilliant dilettante died of a heart attack: With Alfred Edel's Attack on Himself, Soldat has created an archival composition from countless performance fragments, to shape Edel's mock-biographical journey. In the opening moments of Soldat's film, Edel remains unusually silent: We see him rushing through an airport, the film cuts to Edel drawing his signature on a chalkboard, and silently sitting at a table. At this juncture, Edel first begins to talk – and to find himself, to find his strident tone, his smugly grinning emphatic form of speech as he makes a series of proclamations bordering on choleric hysteria. Edel's persona simultaneously epitomizes and critiques a specifically German history, ironizing bourgeois narrow-mindedness and championing the bizarre. Outsiderism, philistinism and total excess converge in Edel. Soldat sees nonsense and depth: He has removed the color from the Edel film fragments as if to demonstrate that the splendor of a colorful personality is not extrinsic, it is of their very essence. He presents turmoil, sexuality and death, including images of Edel's actual funeral, from which the resurrection of the self-promoter logically follows. (Stefan Grissemann)

Translation: Eve Heller