American Soldier

The New York Times ran a story last week about the new "Pictures Generation" exhibit at the Met. The first image displayed is an enamel on aluminum sculpture by Robert Longo called "The American Soldier." What it doesn't tell you is that this image is a still from the climactic scene of the 1970 Rainer Werner Fassbinder film of the same name. It's also the image used on the cover of my beat-up VHS version, in which Ricky's posture looks more like a dance move than a totentanz.

Reviewer Jim describes the scene:

For a full five minutes, in a picture which runs only 80 minutes, we have a static camera in long shot showing us Ricky's brother humping his brother's corpse, while their mother in a funereal black dress and the detectives who hired Ricky look on in unmoving silence.

Sounds interesting, no? The rest of the movie is good fun -- full of satirical posturing and a great soundtrack that I wish was commercially available. But it's the end of the film that's the most striking. I'd also read someone's remark that Ricky, the main character, is seemingly more alive after being shot than he was in the entire rest of the film. The song that accompanies the scene, "So Much Tenderness," adds quite a bit of ambience as well.