Metamorphosen is an avant-garde music feature by internationally acclaimed director, stage designer and painter Achim Freyer, which marks his debut as a film-maker. Bizarre characters set in Mediterranean landscapes, set to music by Oliver Messiaen and Erik Satie. It is a moving feast, beautiful and grotesque, accompanied by Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Satie's Gnossiennes, and stretches of silence to match Freyer's big seas and skies. Tangled knots of limbs tumble down stone steps cut into rocky shorelines. Giant dolls with misshapen blue eyes flash their skirts with profane casualness. Brueghel figures pace through manicured forests. Freyers highly rhythmic visual pacing, more tightly structured than the outlandish images at first lead you to believe, compels with it's illogical coherence. And the spare script, read in slow, rich tones, is ever evocative: "I am spilled like water... The world he had wanted to make his own demanded an enormous rent... oh it is marvelous that you are there... It was in the evening that I entered his room."
