The Suit

Heinz Emigholz’s new film could be considered a sequel to his 2020 feature THE LOBBY, in that we once again find ourselves in the rambling, dyspeptic company of “Old White Male” (John Erdman). But THE SUIT is no conventional sequel and ultimately every new Emigholz film could be seen as a quasi-sequel to all those that came before. After all, Emigholz’s films have always included lateral allusions to his entire body of work, and this latest one is no exception. The overt premise of THE SUIT is that Erdman’s character receives a call from himself in the future, prompting a disquisition on that latter-day world and how it differs from our own. But the film also contains numerous formalist callbacks to the filmmaker’s early meta-fictions, such as DEMON and DER ZYNISCHE KÖRPER, as well as individual pages of the Basis of Make-Up project, a series of drawings that offers a radical new way to adapt books for the cinema. THE SUIT maintains Emigholz’s penchant for canted angles, and once again employs an uncanny form of montage, one equally informed by physical space and verbal punctuation. The result is seductive and mindboggling, an unlikely collision of Beckett and Eisenstein. (Michael Sicinski)

In the presence of Heinz Emigholz.

Heinz Emigholz: NORMALSATZ (1982), DER ZYNISCHE KÖRPER (1991), D’ANNUNZIOS HÖHLE (2005), SCHINDLERS HÄUSER (2007), LOOS ORNAMENTAL (2008), SENSE OF ARCHITECTURE (2009), PARABETON – PIER LUIGI NERVI UND RÖMISCHER BETON (2012), AIRSTRIP – AUFBRUCH DER MODERNE, TEIL III (2014), 2+2=22: THE ALPHABET (2017), STREETSCAPES (2017), DIE LETZTE STADT (2020), THE LOBBY (2020), SLAUGHTERHOUSES OF MODERNITY (2022)