Geschichten vom Kübelkind 05 Katzen haben Flöhe (1971) Ula Stöckl, Edgar Reitz

In form and content possibly the most original German avant-garde work on the seventies, this film now runs over three hours and consists of 26 stories about Kübelkind (garbage-can child, a Viennese oath), each from one to thirty minutes in length and strung together very loosely. An eventual ten hour film is envisaged. Kübelkind – a nubile young lady emerging fully-grown from a garbage can into which an unwanted baby had just been thrown – is an eternal misfit who effectively disrupts bourgeois society. Chapter headings convey the film’s flavor. “When Kübelkind wants it, some men drop their pants quickly.” “Something about the ability of society to forgive, to forget, and to revenge.” “Kübelkind experiences an educational attempt at the hands of a priest.” “Kübelkind becomes acquainted with a lord and is hanged.” “Kübelkind believes in installment buying and must therefore jump from a four-story building while singing a sad song.” In one scene, she succeeds in persuading her lover to eat various parts of his body to prove his love; in another, she is sadistically killed by a “Hurenmörder” (Whore-murderer), played with full commitment and gusto by Werner Herzog, the director of Fata Morgana and Even Dwarfs Started Small. The film is a bawdy, cruel, sardonic work which manages to spoof practically every genre of filmmaking – gangster, sex, vampire, science fiction, and family films. A woman screams, a newborn baby cries. A nurse leaves the hospital and dumps a bucketfull of slimy afterbirth into a later, Kubelkind (“Dumpster-kid“, an Austrian insult) emerges fully grown from the slime. “Frau Dr. Welfare“, a cold, upper middle-class do-gooder discovers Kubelkind in the dustbin and plans to “save“ her. But such “polymorphous-perverse, infantile monsters“ have no place in normal society.... “Tales Of Kubelkind“ was a bizarre series of short films made between 1969 and 1971 by Ula Stoeckl and Karel Reisz. Envisaged as sequence of 64 episodes running for 10 hours, the project was abandoned in 1971 due to lack of funds. Each episode, made collaboratively with the actors and technicians, has a different adventure for Kubelkind, many of them parodying conventional film genres, i.e. a cannibalistic Heimatfilm spoof or a hilarious shoplifting sequence set in a supermarket which suddenly turns into a satire on inane commercials. The directors solved the problems associated with distributing such an unconventional film by opening the Kneipenkino, a “movie-pub“ where patrons could drink and select episodes from a menu, jukebox-style. Customers were also encouraged to submit ideas for future episodes and,probably more importantly, to suggest schemes for funding. “Tales Of Kubelkind“ was rarely screened due to its confrontational nature. The FSK (German censor board) report makes hilarious reading: ““The story of the Dumpster Kid, an outsider of society, is confusing and defective for young people. The film is full of unsavory turns of phrase. The disparagement, in the form of parody, of religious values is highly detrimental to young people. In addition the portrayal of sexuality appears in a form which must confuse and disgust young people“. Stoeckl and Reisz seem to have caught the late 60s zeitgeist, especially the burgeoning feminist movement.