Resumen de "The artwork on exhibit runs about": Brigitte Maria Mayer's filmic adaptation of Heiner Müller's "Anatomie Titus fall of Rome"
This article explores Brigitte Maria Mayer's 2009 filmic adaptation of Heiner Müller's 1985 play, "Anatomie Tiutus Fall of Rome ein Shakespearekommentar" ["Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome a Shakespeare commentary"], itself an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus". Müller (1929-1995), who was the most prominent playwright of the former German Democratic Republic, and arguably the most important German playwright in the twentieth century after Berrolt Brecht, adapted three plays by Shakespeare: "Macbeth", "Hamlet" and "Titus Andronicus". Mayerr focused on Müller's additions to "Titus Andronicus" in order to craft a contemporary discourse on cultural conflict and on the relationship between violence and aesthetics. Müller's dramatization of the ambivalent bond between art and violence in his commentary on "Titus Andronicus" is taken up by Mayer and developed artistically. I will be considering this aspect of the film in greater detail. Special attention is given to the characterization of the raped and mutilated Lavinia as a living work of body art, on exhibit for a voyeuristic audience to contemplate. A self-reflexive discourse on artistic forms and themes, especially in the context of a Baroque aesthetics, thus becomes an integral part of both play and filmic realisation, in a constant questioning of the uneasy relationship between poetics and politics.
