GOLDEN GRAHAMS

THIS MONTH Angst

Editor-at-Large Jamie Graham unearths underrated classics…

Pop quiz: can you name a movie that was an influence on the shock cinema of celebrated European filmmakers Gaspar Noé, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier – not to mention a reference point for one of the most controversial American movies of the 80s, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – that few people have ever heard of? The answer is Angst (1983), the only film by Austrian writer/ director Gerald Kargl.

Banned all over Europe at time of release, Angst is based on the crimes of real-life Austrian serial killer Werner Kniesek, who emerged from an eight-and-a-half-year prison sentence for shooting a 73-year-old woman, and immediately broke into a family home to torture and kill the three occupants. Basing a movie on such heinous crimes always raises questions of taste, decency and responsibility, but Kargl’s film does not set out to thrill or titillate. It is a serious drama, a work of art, and few films so successfully burrow into the psychotic brain.

Largely devoid of dialogue but featuring a first-person narration that presents the history and violent reveries of a character credited as K., the Psychopath, Angst follows K. as he is released from prison, considers strangling a taxi driver with his shoelace but panics and flees the cab, then breaks into a secluded home to bind, torture and kill a mother and her adult son and daughter. He bundles the bodies into the trunk of his car (‘The thought that I could have the corpses with me all the time excited me tremendously’) and drives off, stopping to eat a sausage at a café, where he is arrested. And that’s your lot.

What makes Angst astonishing, apart from Erwin Leder’s skittish performance as the killer, is the way in which it is shot by Zbigniew Rybczynski. Acinematographer, director, animator and experimental artist, Rybczynski shoots much of the film from a few feet above K., at a 45-degree angle, with the camera seemingly levitating as K. runs through woodland or charges around the house. It even circles K. as he is on the move, and itself tilts and pirouettes as it floats magically through the air – effortless gymnastics that will likely put cinephiles in mind of Mikhail Kalatozov’s celebrated documentary IAm Cuba, or Emmanuel Lubezki’s lensing for Terrence Malick, or, yes, the darkly delirious films of Gaspar Noé, untethered and unhinged.

See this if you liked…

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE 1971 Another dangerous man talking directly to the audience, albeit with a good deal more glee.

HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER 1986 Loosely based on the murders of Henry Lucas, this flat, grubby masterpiece is the anti-Silence of the Lambs.

FUNNY GAMES 1997

Michael Haneke’s deeply upsetting home-invasion film is hard to watch. ‘So why do you want to?’ it asks.

I STAND ALONE 1998

The brutal debut of Gaspar Noé owes much to Angst, as the Argentinian auteur admits on the US disc of Kargl’s film.

How was it done? For some shots, Rybczynski made a homemade SnorriCam (a camera rigged to an actor’s body, like in Aronofsky’s Pi) consisting of a metal hoop so the camera could rotate 360 degrees; in others, Rybczynski canted the camera with rods as it glided along wires. The entire movie was filmed without ever looking through a viewfinder to establish the frame, and was, almost inconceivably, shot in a mirror tilted down at a 45-degree angle. This was the only way to realise certain shots, but it cost too much to flip numerous scenes, so they shot the whole film like that and flipped the final positive.

Far from ‘showing off’, the experiential camerawork, like the narration (which was lifted from the psychological evaluations of Kniesek and those of another serial killer, Peter Kürten aka The Vampire of Düsseldorf), helps viewers to see inside the skull of a psychotic killer.

It is, as it should be, a nauseating experience, but essential for those who can stomach it.

JAMIE WILL RETURN NEXT ISSUE… FOR MORE RECOMMENDATIONS, FOLLOW @JAMIE_GRAHAM9 ON TWITTER/X