Dayglo nightmares

German animator Mariola Brillowska’s sexedup
surrealism works best in short bursts

POP PERVERSITY:
From Katarina & Witt, Fiction and Reality

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

For the Goethe-Institut’s Carte Blanche à Marie Brassard series, the local actor, screenwriter and theatrical director has rounded up an inspired mix of distinctively “Berlin” films. It’s odd that among them are three shorts and a full-length work by Mariola Brillowska, a Polish-born painter and animator who lives and creates not in Germany’s biggest burg and born-again capital, but in Hamburg. Then again, given the tone of Brillowska’s work—indelicate, even blunt in its sexual preoccupations, gutter cosmopolitanism, dour civic sensibility and aggressive art-world agitation—one could easily mistake her for a Berliner born and bred.

Sadly, her hilarious pop-art sex frenzy short Porno Karaoke International didn’t make the cut, but four recent shorts did. Among them are 10567, a six-minute fever dream of surrealist, pseudo-Soviet domestic fantasy, and Matki Wandalki, a murky mix of flat animation and cut-and-paste live action stuff—squirming naked infants, mostly, part and parcel of the film’s hospital-horror motif. Both boast a score by Felix Kubin, an avant-weird art-pop musician familiar to attendees of Montreal’s various electronic music fests, and both bear massive dark streaks in direct contrast to Brillowska’s recurring colour scheme, a lurid blast of tones favouring fluorescent green and hot pink.

Many of these shorts’ elements, from Brillowska’s chromatic palette to her maniacal mutations of the body, grim dissections of social systems and harsh eroticism, were already present in 1997’s Katarina & Witt, Fiction and Reality, a co-creation with fellow Hamburg artist Charles Kissing. Very loosely, it follows a pair of Interpol agents investigating an art theft from the only exhibition in the world following some undefined global “catastrophe.” A bomb-throwing attack on the cynicism of the art world, it echoes William S. Burroughs in its unhinged iconography, irrational narrative flow and nightmarish near-futurism.

An obstreperous phantasmagoria it may be, but at over an hour and a half, Brillowska and Kissing’s clumsy, halting pace and the jagged crudeness of the design, not to mention the unrelenting misanthropy, work to quickly turn the film into something of an endurance test. Next to this often gruelling haul, Brillowska’s shorts are, relatively speaking, sweet.

MARIOLA BRILLOWSKA’S SHORT FILMS
SHOW AT THE GOETHE-INSTITUT THIS
THURSDAY, JAN. 29 AND FRIDAY,
JAN. 30 AT 7 P.M.