In her work entitled CHILDREN OF THE DEVIL, the provokingly feminist animated filmmaker, poetess, performance artist and professor, Mariola Brillowska, addresses the concept of the family and unites different literary texts to this end. As the “Future President of the United Universe”, Brillowska takes her courageous audience on a bizarre journey from Lodz in Poland trough Israel, Finland, Ukraina, African Spain back to Germany.She presents stories of prematurely awakened sexuality, violence and ambivalent forms of lust. As always, the filmmaker defends her unconventional style heavily armed: with blazing, shrill colouration techniques, bewildering hybrid mutants, a flood of messages in both image and sound, breaking the moral barriers between reality and delusion. This daring experiment of perception by an unconventional artist is bound to stir up controversy.
“The model of the family is outdated in Old Europe” states Mariola Brillowska during her provocative literary trip throughout Europe while researching family structures and the future of the family in the 21st century. Numerous short cartoons tell stories in which the mother, father or both parents tragically die, usually killed by their oun children. The children act deliberately to end the misfortune they have suffered. Each episode takes place in a different European country or its periphery. They are based on texts by contemporary European authors like Manuela Gretkowska (Poland), Orly Castel-Bloom (Israel), Eduard Limonow (Ukraina), Fernando Arrabal (Spain), Sibylle Berg (Germany). The interludes between the episodes are presented by Mariola Brillowska, acting as the Future President of the United Universe.
The artist worked on this project for over ten years, transcribing various literary sources into drawings and combining them in a true tour de force into a film. The episode style is nevertheless retained and an animated map outlines the stops on the trip. The individual stories are politically and sexually explicit and provoking. They tell of rapidly emerging sexuality, humiliation, force, death and differently art of pleasure. The drawing style’s aggressiveness is unrivalled. It is bold and comic-like, kept in shrill, loud colours and shows irritating hybrids consisting of humans, animals and aliens. The boundaries between taboo, reality and wishful fantasies, blur uncontrollably in this cosmos of extremes. Puzzling dream symbols, signs of political power from NS symbols to Communist insignias, satanic elements and components of pop culture merge together in a brutally direct imagery filled with references.
The film’s levels of image and sound are just as compact as they are controversial and they supply an abundance of information. One cannot and does not want to follow everything, but for anyone brave enough to take this trip, CHILDREN OF THE DEVIL offers bewilderment and enlightenment and a long-lasting experience. Whereby the film does not necessarily need to be viewed in a traditional cinema, it is suitable for open screening situations, for example, such as galleries provide.
FILMKUNST DER ENTGRENZTEN EXZESSE
Die provokativ-feministische Animationsfilmerin, Dichterin, Performancekünstlerin und Professorin Mariola Brillowska widmet sich in ihrer Arbeit DES TEUFELS KINDER dem Konzept der Familie und führt hierzu sechs literarische Texte zusammen.
