Wednesday | November 15, 2000 9:45 pm

Ludwig Requiem for a Virgin King
(Ludwig–Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König)

Screening on Film

Directed by Hans Jürgen Syberberg.
With Harry Baer, Peter Kern, Ingrid Caven.
West Germany, 1972, 16mm, color, 134 min.
German with English subtitles.

In this wildly eclectic meditation on Ludwig the Second of Bavaria—mad visionary and aesthetic recluse—inconoclastic filmmaker and stage director Syberberg (Our Hitler, Parsifal) fuses a panoply of Germanic cultural and political allusions into a visually arresting, intellectually challenging film work. Constructed in twenty-eight tableaux, the film melds modern German history with Wagnerian stagecraft, high German art with Nazi kitsch, into a hybrid style that is Syberberg’s hallmark.