Becoming one of the driving forces of popular culture, the multiverse evokes the dream as much as it disgusts, especially since the exploitation who may have made the audience sick. Far from the conformism of Hollywood super productions, Die Theory von allem (of his German title) takes an approach between the closed and the black novel, for a strangely contemporary stamp as much as a distant memory of the great classics of cinema of the last century. Awarded to The Strange Festival by the Grand Prix of the public, the film seduced us at the FEFFS! At the end of the article, find our interview with Timm Kröger and Olivia Ross where we cross the history of the film of the Enlightenment brothers in Méliès!
Review of Universal Theory
Worried strangeness
After a brief introduction to a television set from the 1970s where physicist Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow) comes to promote his new book on theory at all, action swings ten years earlier. On the way to a scientific congress of an Iranian researcher who will never come, the passengers of the train exchange on the project of the thesis of the young man. His mentor and tutor, Dr Julius Strahten, a paternalistic and authoritarian figure par excellence, sweeps away the doctor's research from the back of his hand.
Precipitous in this masculine universe and where knowledge confronts rivalries and hunts kept from fiercely competing schools, Johannes seems enthralled by Karin (Olivia Ross), one of the few women met at the hotel. He is then confronted with a series of phenomena that could be described as paranormal, starting with this curious agglomerate of clouds that occupy the sky between the snowy peaks of these Swiss montages. Perched at high altitude, the hotel almost recalls the Overlook of The Shining. Like the limits of our cranial cavity that encircles the dream, the unity of place of this rock circus also gives a mystical character to the whole. Suddenly, barbaric murders disrupt alpine tranquillity.
Johannes in the Swiss
An apparent conspiracy is emerging in which Johannes' rare tutelary figures are systematically placed on the tile, starting with Professor Bloomberg, a comic character who would almost make us forget his past as a collaborator by his bonhommie (though misogyne) and his spirit inclined to psychotropic. Designed to 99% black and white except the introductory scene, Die Theory von allem shines – in addition to its writing qualities – by its elegant plastic. Roland Stuprich, director of photography, worked intuitively, explains Timm Kröger:
« When it comes to light, we have been guided by memories, so the film is rather a mix of many films that we only remember half and that persist in our minds. »
Hard to say otherwise, since the session left a taste of already seen, an impression all the more beautiful as it coincides perfectly with the subject of the film and the concept of Shrödinger's cat, spun throughout the film on the background as the form. In this sense, Die Theory von allem is as much a witness yesterday as today. We read behind the images a whole part of the history of the cinema dOrson Welles to David Lynch through the New Wave, as the director himself acknowledges. Frightening sensation while the film oscillates at leisure between registers according to the scenario co-written with Roderick Warich.
Johannes is as much the romantic figure of an adventure by Jules Vernes as a pastiche in its own right, that of an ordinary character as we write more. With an unspeakable energy that drives him to penetrate the mystery of this old hotel, Johannes occupies a central place in the story. Sometimes almost parodic in form, sometimes tragic, Die Theory von allem likes to play with registers (and the viewer) to maintain his mystery.
It is also the meaning to be given to its OST called « utility music ». Omnipresent, the music, liquid, changes states according to the emotions that pass through the narrative, pathetic, funny and then naive. The image of a filmHitchcock, this excessive situational music announces rebounds and moments of tension. Each character has its own leitmotiv. It also contributes to irony and this same feeling of already mentioned above. Yet despite these obvious tributes, the film never falls into the pitfall of references to the spectator's face. Far from the permanent wink, Die Theory von allem cultivates its own identity, as if the film took its place in our imagination. Whether we want it or not.
Think of a summer night
Like his hero Johannes, who admits that he discovered his theory in a dream, Timm Kröger too would have drawn on a part of his unconscious. Like vapors of the day before after a cottony sleep, one evolves almost literally in a dream. The mystery is assimilated to it as an ordinary element, even if historical facts betray the vigor of the real, like the spectre of the fallen Nazi Germany and its dissipation at the origin of a new world order divided into antagonistic blocks. Everything is a matter of detail, like this child who suddenly makes the Nazi salvation as by automaticism or reflux of a repressed past but to the very real persistence. Or the ban of Jewish researchers by Bloomberg.
While the story is always told from the perspective of Johannes, the film allows as many readings as characters. Who is truly master of reality? It is all about reference and all these protagonists, without exception, are both dead and alive. As Timm Kröger explains, « in its own way, the film tells several versions of a single story. »
« This film is supposed to feel like a dream; an image [...] that evokes the cinema of Dantan. Or rather a mix of memories of the Dantan cinema. Kind of as if Hitchcock and Lynch... made love on the carpet of an old hotel hall! »
The End of the Worlds
Confronted with the clinical observation of an era caught up in postmodernity, the director explains what led to the multiverse, these worm holes and quantum theories that make knots in our still smoking brains at the end of the session. After the Revolution Matrix (read our critical acerbic of the last part that divided) having marked an entire generation whose own, the public discovers the farce of progress promised by modernity.
This is all the teaching of the film, namely « that there is no escape from the system in which our time and energy are slowly exploited by a higher race of entities » Tells Timm Kröger. This is the critical thought devoured by Capitalist hydra, it itself dissected by Marx could be said. At the dawn of the 21st century, the Wachowskis sounded the end of hope in popular culture.
« As Mark Fisher said [...], today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. »
Faced with another possible political impasse, « our shelters remain cinema, television series and especially video games » answers Timm Kröger. The futuristic tracks emerging with virtual reality go in this direction even if one could object to all these proto-market variants like the metaverse. While the virtual worlds already there and still to be built are unfolding on a daily basis, Art resists even if the large market seems insatiable, determined to gangrene the smallest plots of freedom. Powerfully lyrical, Die Theory von allem is the vestige of another time as much as a witness to the present, an escape from the asepticated Disney multiverse and the proof that can still be created with a material that was thought to be exhaustable. Fascinating.
Quantum interview with Timm Kröger and Olivia Ross!
Timm Kröger, director of Universal Theory
Filmography
- 2023: Die Theory von Allem
- 2020: Making Unorthodox (short film)
- 2020 : The Trouble with Being Born
- 2017 : 2557
- 2016 : The Impossible Picture
- 2013 : The Language of the Unknown: A Film About the Wayne Shorter Quartet
- 2013: Palast
- 2012: Das leicht beunruhigende Schaukeln bei der Fahrt ins Tal
- 2011: Seniorenland
- 2011 : Tilman im Paradies (short film)
- 2010 : Brot kost
Trailer of Universal Theory
I find out just now at the GIFF, I reserve the reading of the article as after-session 😉
Oh, good, I'm starting the interview trade tomorrow, I think. ^^^