The black-and-white film Deep Gold (2013/14) by Julian Rosefeldt transports viewers back to 1920’s Berlin. The protagonist is a young man dressed in an elegant tuxedo who throws himself out of a window with suicidal intentions. Instead of waking up in heaven, however, he comes to in a milieu inhabited by people who seem to have abandoned all moral codes.
Deep Gold was created as an exploration of the classic film L'Âge d'Or (1930) by Luis Buñuel, to which the artist duo M+M had invited. Six artists were each asked to reinterpret a sequence from the surrealist masterpiece on film for the exhibition Der Stachel des Skorpions (The Sting of the Scorpion, 2014) at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich.
Rosefeldt chose the death of Buñuel’s hero Gaston Modot, whom he, in a twist, resurrects in Deep Gold. L'Âge d'Or was considered a scandalous film, with which the surrealists wanted to provoke bourgeois society. However, it also criticized the illusionist products of the Hollywood dream factory. Like Buñuel, Rosefeldt eludes the narrative flow and deconstructs cinematic illusion, an approach practiced in many of his works.
Deep Gold
- Year 2013
- Edition a.p. 1 (Edition 6 + 2 a.p.)
- Material/Technique 1-channel film projection (b/w, sound)
- Length 18' 12'' loop
- Category Media Art
- Collection Sammlung Goetz, München