A complex and original film based on two texts by the former East-German playwright Heiner Müller, adapted musically by Heiner Goebbels. Janßen used the piece of music as sound track and ‘composed a picture track’ to accompany it. The result is, in Janßen’s words, a film-opera or film-musical.The text makes use of the mythological figures Hercules and Prometheus to evoke a intricate picture of the dilemmas which surround the 20th-century history of Germany. The classical Prometheus, who was chained to a rock and visited every day by an eagle which preyed on his liver which in turn regenerated itself at night, was eventually freed by Hercules. Müller’s modern Prometheus is an common office clerk on his way in a lift to see his boss for an important interview. When the lift suddenly breaks down, the man is trapped.
