Central (Zentrale)2002

Astral bodies engaging in group sex: Dietmar Brehm's Zentrale is a meditation on the human body's outer limits and the material nature of the skin. The first image shows a naked light bulb, its rays barely able to illuminate a dark room. This is followed by a supine naked body stretched out like in Courbet's famous painting depicting the origin of the world. But the figure's genitals remain invisible, outside the visual fields exposed in Zentrale. Even if men and women busy themselves with each other, stimulating one another's anuses with sticks or penises with their mouths, this can only be suspected, or assumed. In Zentrale skin is given a pulsing white quality that makes it flow out of the darkness into which this film's world has been plunged. The more visible the figures become, the more comical their actions; they go at each other in a manner suggesting mollusk-like beings which are no longer equipped with sex organs, having become sex organs themselves. Sexuality is transformed into a symbiotic process opposed solely by the negativity of the blackness, which the bodies at times seem to cover before it dominates the scene again. The supine woman, who caresses her own breasts and then spreads her arms again, is one of those typical Brehm leitmotifs which behave paradoxically in light of the film's "story."
The genital fixation, the central idea in all cum-shot staging, is altered to create a setting in which lust again coincides with reproduction on the level of the film material: The cell division typical of pornographic films can be observed in Zentrale.
(Bert Rebhandl)
Translation: Steve Wilder