There is little to no nature in German artist and film-maker Julian Rosefeldt’s newest work, Euphoria, although there are plenty of animals. Sheep, white stallions, a moose, a camel and finally, voiced seductively by Cate Blanchett, a massive tiger stalking the aisles of an abandoned supermarket. Are they talismans or mute witnesses; mocking us or looking on with horror as we destroy the world?
Unlike Godfrey Reggio’s experimental documentary film Koyaanisqatsi, which pitted humanity’s ever increasing growth against the monumental power of nature, Rosefeldt depicts a world already unhinged from the natural, already in its death spiral to oblivion. And where Reggio allowed his images – tied unforgettably to Philip Glass’s pixellated tonal soundscapes – to do the work, Rosefeldt leans heavily, often exhaustingly, on the spoken word.
Characters proselytise and lecture, pontificate and philosophise, berate, cajole, expostulate and theorise, all on the subject of money – humankind’s avaricious need for it, its dehumanising effect on communities, the corrupting viral tendency of our financial systems to swallow the world.
Cobbled from various sources, from Shakespeare to Warren Buffett, Ayn Rand to Snoop Dogg, the script has the epigrammatic feel of a book of quotes, aphorisms for getting through the death of capitalism. At its best, as with a group of young adults grappling with potentiality and the future of work, it can be bracing and inspired. At its worst, it can be banal and reductive.
The piece is at least physically impressive, with a giant screen at one end of the Melbourne town hall where most of the action takes place, and five smaller screens depicting solo drummers at their kits, providing Euphoria’s driving, pulsating beat. Beneath these screens runs the work’s Greek chorus, a choir of young people (the Brooklyn Youth Chorus) lined up like a living skirting board, facing us with hope and sometimes what feels suspiciously like derision. Aurally, it’s magnificent.
Visually, it’s often beautiful too, without ever quite reaching the heights of euphoria promised by that title. Christoph Krauss’s cinematography is captivating, the intense clarity of the image never at the sacrifice of texture and tone. There are neat little nods to cinematic visionaries from Fellini to Busby Berkeley, and tracking shots for days – although drones have quickly diminished the technical prestige of those admittedly majestic aerial shots. Rosefeldt seems to make a joke of this at one point, as a woman gathers drones around her like birds.
There’s a jokiness to much of Euphoria, most notably in a sequence inside a bank where tellers and customers alike wax lyrical on the power of money, its seductiveness and sensuality – before launching themselves into aerial acrobatics and full-blown Broadway choreography. But cutesy dance routines and winking cultural references don’t just undercut the work’s serious intent, something Rosefeldt clearly wants; they also undermine his central argument, something he presumably doesn’t.
Euphoria is grappling with a key tension in modern western democracies: how can we stop desiring the thing that will bring about our own destruction, namely endless economic growth in an increasingly automated world? One character, working in a factory that deliberately evokes Amazon, calls for rebellion, and the homeless men who gather around a bin seem to be sniffing at the edges of actual revolution. But Rosefeldt constantly reverts to evasive surrealist flourishes, or painfully obvious visual metaphors, just as his work threatens to become truly angry, truly about something.
Elements of the work suggest a quasi-religious, ritualistic purpose – and whenever the music is allowed to swell, we get tantalising hints of it – but Euphoria never quite succumbs to its own impulses. Rosefeldt is influenced by the ancient Greeks, but maybe he should have taken a closer look at Ovid and his retelling of the myth of Phaeton.
The son of Helios (the actual sun), Phaeton steals his dad’s chariot and crashes it, obliterating the Earth in the process. Ovid’s account is rapturous with destruction’s power and beauty, an ecstasy in Armageddon Shakespeare would also channel in his “forgeries of jealousy” speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hubris, overreach, ego and desire, and an earth screaming for it all to stop. It’s the euphoria of end days that Rosefeldt’s fascinating and visually beautiful work can’t quite bring itself to imagine.
Euphoria will be shown in Melbourne town hall until 18 June, as part of Rising festival. Free tickets are available on Fridays until allocation exhausted
