FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Possession 

I still haven't gotten used to seeing Zulawski's former "Video Nasty" in full length and to being able to give out Bildstörung in the film art bar Fitzcarraldo as a decorative edition of the great label (the youtube link serves the onlookers to get an impression). You can SEE the film on DVD in full beauty!). I am honestly thrilled! I used to go to the Videodrom because of the movie, but the answer was negative every time. Possession didn't exist on VHS. The reason: Isabelle Adjani's art. The bravest performance ever on celluloid: Adjani at Tempelhof subway station, possessive, hysterical, grandiose! Possession dares to bring us, the audience, into a state of trance. Everything begins with the end of a marriage. Anna (Isabelle Adjani) opens Mark (Sam Neill) that she will leave him. She has to, but doesn't understand exactly why. Anna is disturbed, meets with a secret lover and expresses her newly won freedom through acts of violence. Mark stumbles through the phone and bends himself alone in bed like a fetus. Soon the fight begins. They fight in a street cafe, Anna mutilates herself with an electric kitchen knife. The second surreal act begins with the true nature of Anna's secret rendezvous. In a degenerate apartment in Kreuzberg (by the way in the Sebastianstrasse corner Luckauer in 36. Here the link, as it looks like there today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnleWl52m5s). It is inhabited by a slimy monster hungry for blood and sex, in which Anna finds her new partner, whom she approaches. Mark experiences his most terrible trauma when he has to watch his wife have sex with the worm (Carlo Rambaldi created the creature.) Possession doesn't seem to be a movie where you expect real events as inspiration - and yet that's exactly the case: Zulawski wrote the script after the separation from his first wife (who played the leading role in his early Polish movies). Possession, a film about raging male jealousy, but also about the risk of personal freedom. Zulawski staged his film in 1980 in divided Berlin and makes conspicuous use of wide angles and depth of field. The first shot shows the Berlin Wall, in the background the guards from East Berlin. A memorial of reality full of violence and tensions between East and West (which Zulawski knows only too well since he himself had to leave his homeland Poland). The separation of Anna and Mark is mirrored in the film. Possession is a work of fear and deep sadness. Something thoroughly evil seizes Anna's body (is it diabolical?). This culminates in the scene in the subway station, since Anna gives birth to something that Zulawski doesn't dare to define either. A misunderstanding to misunderstand Zulawski's cinema as mere pyrotechnics. A deep preoccupation with the secrets of the human soul, torn apart by its brutal contradictions - that is his intention. Zulaswki is an extremely romantic director, a passionate explorer of what is torn within us. Possession is supposed to help us overcome this state despite our dark desires. Deep down, Zulawski's work is a film about the search for grace.