The Holy Bunch

Roy, an editor, is dead. His friends – a writer, a translator, a photographer, a draughtsman and an architect – are reading their way through his notebooks trying to reconstruct his life. This leads some of them to Cologne Cathedral and the Sagrada Familia; others to confrontations with their own projections (literally in the case of Carl, the writer, haunted by his creation, Rob).
The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama – beyond-Antonioni in its images; decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality – the body’s pathos, sex’ fleeting beauty and the soothing calm of pop songs and hymns. Within Emigholz’s œuvre, The Holy Bunch is something like a Great Nave, connecting his 1970s essays in neo-/post-/straight-forward classical feature filmmaking with Photography and Beyond‘s narratives of space and time, meditations on the eternal in the only too finite. One of German cinema’s few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.