Diskusia
This film seems to be one of Nick Zedd’s better works, compared to his earlier pieces (see Steal This Video). A little more refined in some way, and there seems to be more of a plot than his other films, possibly because it’s loosely based on or in someway follows the Nietzsche book of the same title. There is no audio dialog, but rather ‘silent-film’ style text, and the only sound is the very fitting music of Fear of Dolls, The Zyklon Beatles, Amniotic Miasma & Strangewalls. This review is of the unreleased, approx. 45-minute version, as opposed to the final 18-minute version. Having not seen the shorter version, which has been showing in various film festivals and such in the U.S., it’s difficult to say what has been cut. The setting and atmosphere, and even the characters are very dark and minimal, isolated and desolate, even paranoid, somewhat reminiscent of Eraserhead. In the book, Zarathustra hasn't left a spot on a mountain for years, where he talks to the sun. He finally leaves the mountain and is stopped by a hermit. He continues on to finally reach civilization where he preaches to unappreciative townspeople. A tightrope walker falls, and talks to him before dying at his feet. Having not read the book (apparently based on the bleak assertion that all human action is motivated by the desire for power), and in fact knowing little to nothing about the author at all, I can’t say exactly what this represents, but there seems to be an interesting premise for all kinds of philosophical fodder. In the film, Nick (Zarathustra) spends his days in his NY apartment, talking to and confiding in a pin-up on his wall, and on this occasion his delusional dialog with the porn idol results in his declaration that he must ‘descend’, as if being reluctantly chosen for some important or divine mission. On his way out, a neighbor, a hermit, who seems to want to distract him, unaware of his mission, stops him. He continues on to the street where he finds a group of kids, and tries to preach his message; something about Superman (another photographic icon from which he obviously draws inspiration in his isolation)…something about having lost his hope for humanity, hoping to get someone to come to the same conclusion he has, maybe that humanity’s only hope is to realize and confront it’s own worthlessness. He is of course completely put down, insulted and basically ignored. And then there’s the beautiful doll scene. Representing the dying tightrope walker in the original story, a doll is first mildly tortured by the group of street kids, and thrown out the window, into Zarathustra’s path. One scene that was apparently cut and does not appear in the released version is a particularly affective sequence with Nick wandering through the snowing streets, feeling somewhat failed in his mission, but finally returning to his apartment, almost as if nothing has happened, or that is was not all that important in the first place…just another normal day. While this was not necessarily meant as an updated version of the book, you can almost get a sense from the way the film was made, the characters, setting and even the situation, that this could happen in New York City…just another normal day.