6 Red Sun

[swo17]

Red Sun



Thomas (Marquard Bohm, Kings of the Road) gets a ride to Munich where he finds his ex-girlfriend Peggy (counter culture activist and model Uschi Obermaier) who takes him in. In her flat he finds Peggy and her roommates have a commune-like lifestyle where they kill the men in their lives after five days, but will Thomas realise in time? A pop fantasy focused on the post-'68 and women's liberation movements, Red Sun was compared to a comic strip by Wim Wenders and is a beautiful art-genre collision that is both brilliantly bizarre and provocative. Director Rudolf Thome was an emerging talent in the New German Cinema alongside Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog, but received little international distribution and fell into international obscurity despite a consistent career covering six decades. Radiance Films is proud to present Red Sun to English-speaking audiences for the first time in a restoration overseen by Thome.

Limited Edition Special Features:

• High Definition digital transfer overseen by director Rudolf Thome
• Select scene commentary with Thome and Rainer Langhans, Obermaier's boyfriend and Kommune 1 member who served as inspiration for the film and was on set for the shoot
• New interviews and visual essays to be confirmed
• Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original artwork
• Limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by critic Samm Deighan, newly translated archival letters by Wim Wenders, screenwriter Klaus Badekerl, critic Enno Patalas and the German Film Evaluation Office on the film's official submission, newly translated archival interview with Rudolf Thome and contemporary reviews by Wenders, Patalas and others
• Limited edition of 2000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

[What A Disgrace]

I placed an order with every announced title on day 1, and this title wound up delaying the package, as it was set to be released on June 19. Despite this, my order has shipped, including this item.

[L.A.]

Beaver.

[therewillbeblus]

This is a wonderful little film that feels both sick and sane; an encapsulation of the foggy sociopolitical unrest plaguing the transition into the 70s after May '68, and completely lucid in its understanding of the zeitgeist. It exists somewhere between the stagnant yet empathic alienation of Wenders' road movies in the near future, and Godard's deliberative yet poetic chaos of the recent past. If someone had told me this was Wenders' emulation of Pierrot le fou, only focusing on one elided narrative point expanded into a feature-length spread, I'd've believed it.

There's something self-consciously funny and subtly tragic about how these women create rules for themselves to impose order on.. not so much an objectively disordered world, but an insecure sense of place - a psychosocially-bent schema of the world.

Spoiler

The finale is a bit on-the-nose with the shootout occurring amidst the beautiful flowers and nature, ignored in pursuit of a trivial goal by the woman and torpid self-preservation by the man, but the entire film functions as a fantasy-crime film dreamt up by characters too lost and vapid to exist meaningfully in the narrative they're in. So when it ends like Week End's death of cinema/civilization, only less populated by kooky characters or lavishly-conceived events, it's sadder. Who should care about the flowers or the popping primary colors or oneself when the energy is so isolated and bleak? Even Godard could find some reason to live there. All we get in the end is a pretty red sunset, but nothing corporeal worth shining on.