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Julian Rosefeldt

Deep Gold

Eloge auf Eros, Emanzipation und Ekstase

The black-and-white film “Deep Gold” pays homage to a scene in Luis Buñuel’s Surrealist classic “L’Âge d’Or” (1930). Julian Rosefeldt (b. Munich, 1965; lives and works in Berlin) has transplanted the action to a nightclub in 1920s Berlin, a metropolitan setting in which different parallel worlds interact. In that sense, his film elaborates on what the Spanish filmmaker’s unsparing social critique already adumbrated: the challenge to repressive sexual morals, the disintegration of the prevailing order of the sexes, and the appeal to an emancipation that never represses the power of female sexuality. Rosefeldt highlights parallels between the economic climate of the 1920s and the current situation and scrutinizes the cultural repercussions of the sexual revolution. Cutting back and forth between different times and spaces, his film always also reveals something about basic human sentiments. People’s longings are a staple of Hollywood movies; Rosefeldt translates them into the categories of the beholder’s engagement with visual art. The book, which documents the film with numerous still photographs, is rounded out by essays by Dorothée Brill and Angela Stief.