On 14 March, 7 pm, Kaunas Artists’ House presents the screening of “ Deadlock” (1970). This event marks the fourth instalment in the series of independent film screenings initiated by “The Other Cinema” educational platform.
The movie starts in a desert, where Charles Dump, one of its’ main characters, finds an unconscious and wounded young boy with a gun and a suitcase. After checking out the suitcase, Dump finds a 45-inch vinyl record and a pile of money. As the young man regains his consciousness just before Dump rans away, Dump invites him to his abandoned home in a former mining town where he lives with a mad woman and his mute daughter. While Dump aims to steal all the money from the young man, his competitor appears, thus forming a criminal triangle. The level of paranoia and violence rises throughout the film, and this greed-driven fight will end with only one winner.
“The Deadlock” by German director Roland Klick has been created following the best traditions of “Spaghetti” Westerns and classic American criminal films. Although this film is full of cinematic archetypes and iconography, the cowboys’ horses that are inseparable from Westerns are replaced by steel machines. Overall, “The Deadlock” is characterized by its unique atmosphere – the film depicts a remote desert environment and is filled with intense sunlight and extreme close ups, with a soundtrack created by the legendary krautrock band “Can”. During the shooting in Negev desert, the tension was fuelled by the Six-Day War and armed Israeli and Jordanian soldiers.
Although this film was offered to the Cannes Film Festival program, the offer was opposed by German film directors and critics, who feared that “Deadlock” would undermine the new wave of German cinema. For these reasons, the film was only presented in a special screening, which, due to unexpected rainfall, was only visited by a few viewers. Although after a few years the film was forgotten, it has since gained a cult status.
The film was restored by the non-profit organisation “American Film Archive”.
The film will be screened in English.
The visitors are welcome to decide the donation they’d like to contribute. The recommended amount is 3 EUR. Your contributions will be used to obtain screening licenses for upcoming films.
“The Other Cinema” is an educational platform that introduces and overviews obscure films and their stories and personalities. The goal of this platform is to rescue unwittingly abandoned films from obscurity and review the most interesting manifestations of contemporary independent cinema, as well as to promote people’s interest in alternative cinema history and allow them to develop not only good but also bad taste.