Director Daniel Moshel choreographs sheer nonsense. The wit of his MeTube series lies in the seeming delusions of grandeur with which he lets utterly senseless fantasies arising from fictious amateur video skills run riot, while at the same time, implementing them in an amazingly systematic and precise way. The series' three current episodes, as music videos, are especially paradox constructions: handmade indie-productions in blockbuster style. The trilogy revolves around the Swiss tenor August Schram, who in each video intonates a dancefloor, technicism-transposed aria of opera literature. Constantly at, if not on his side is a little old lady (Elfriede Wunsch), whose chronic bad mood peaks dramatically in part three. Each time the duo unexpectedly falls into a surreal scene from the BDSM biotope, in a world of fetish, leather, and latex attire. Whereas part one, which was released in early 2013, mutates "Habanera" from Bizet's Carmen in four short minutes, in MeTube 2 (2016), Moshel & Schram take on Carl Orff's "Carmina burana."
Part three, two-and-a-half times as long as the first, now follows the logic of expansion: located in an opera house during a running performance of Donizetti's humorous melodrama L'elisir d'amore and furnished with a memorable cast of characters, MeTube3 flips abruptly from amateur video images to high-tech action film and into baroque, Fellini-style notions: the conductor wears a latex mask and ball gag. A mini thriller develops with a finely adjusted desire for destruction and clear allusions to the Mission Impossible, RoboCop and Terminator films, techno gadgets whizz through the spaces and telekinesis is often a familiar practice. MeTube3, which was released as August sings Una furtiva lagrima, considers itself an Opera buffa, fabricated from cinema's twenty-first-century methods of manipulation, and also a laconically served satire of central European high-culture industry's anything goes.
(Stefan Grissemann)
