A beautiful, brutal, distressingly simple, terribly romantic, ghastly pellucid and inevitably tragic showcase of the profundity and intricacies of humanity in a dehumanised world filtrated through brillant handheld camerawork from one of the best cinematographers in modern Europe and some most skillful focus-pulling I’ve ever seen. Viewed as an individual piece of cinema Degeneration’s six-hour length could easily be summarised as a lack of better structuring, yet as a fragment of the larger DAU œuvre it carries a great amount of rich, detailed observations on its fascinating characters, which when placed together with other works of the series depict startling and often horrifying changes that transcend decades’ worth of time - above all, it is hard to believe that the film could pull off such unexpected shock in the last 20 minutes.
Not only does Degeneration have the most striking ending scenes I’ve seen for a long time, it is also easily one of the best ensemble cast films ever made in our century. DAU is a notorious project - one can simply tell from the abundance of graphic violence in its films - but extremity can as well be a blessing in an age overflowing with mediocre media content. Not only do we, as viewers, need the experience of shock to reactivate our physical senses and artistic sensibilities, we also need it to remind us of the facts that we are constantly being told to overlook: the surge of nationalism and the gradual return of totalitarianism, among many other global crises in the present world. It now seems more alarming than ever that we are never too far from what’s already gone. Like Faulkner said, “the past is not dead, it is not even past.”
