As a way to combat lockdown ennui, German documentarian Jan Soldat started researching death scenes in cinema, and actors with a particularly high amount of them. Based on this research, he put together short montages featuring Keanu Reeves, Lance Henriksen, Udo Kier and Christopher Lee and even Nicolas Cage “That one’s a bit boring”, the director concedes.
The Kier short, Staging Death, premiered at the Quinzaine in Cannes in May 2022, while the Lee film, Faces of Death, is part of the Imagina lineup at Karlovy Vary film festival this week. Amusingly, despite the topic, Soldat doesn’t have a favorite Christopher Lee death scene, or even a favorite film starring the late British horror icon. “I loved doing the research, as a documentarian I’m very nerdy about compiling lists and whatnot, but I’m not really a fan of Lee’s roles”, he tells TFV. Still, it made sense for him to explore the subject via the erstwhile portrayer of Dracula, Count Dooku and Saruman. “There’s a sense of film history through the evolution of his career, and his death scenes, same as with Udo Kier who’s had a similarly rich filmography.” As suggested by the title, the short is more about Lee’s performance rather than the death scene itself, as opposed to the Kier version. “Yes, indeed”, says Soldat, adding “It’s also a reference to the amount of monsters and villains he played.”
The two films follow a similar structure, in that the scenes are not edited chronologically, but according to themes. In Lee’s case, that means multiple scenes in a row where he gets burned, for example, followed by others where he’s stabbed. There’s also another reasoning behind this, explains the director: “I wanted to separate the black-and-white films from the ones in color, and there was a time when he alternated between them.”
The major difference in methodology? Soldat didn’t watch all the films all the way through this time. “I did it for the other actors, and with Udo Kier, who has more than 200 films on his CV, it took an entire year, because for some of his work I had to travel to Düsseldorf or Amsterdam for private viewings, and one film he made is only viewable on a VHS copy in Toronto, and I couldn’t afford to fly to Canada just for that. So with Lee, even though I had all the films quite easily, either on Blu-Ray or via legal digital platforms, I fast-forwarded a lot, because I no longer had the time to sit through all of it.”
Feedback from viewers suggests the two shorts are both hilarious – especially Staging Death, given Kier’s penchant for elaborate, over-the-top on-screen demises. They are also, in their own way, strangely moving. This also connects to Soldat’s structuring decisions, which differ from his usual methods: “With my documentaries, even though it is obviously my subjective viewpoint, my aim is to never force or manipulate emotion. With these films I realized that was not possible, because by manipulating those specific images and rearranging them in a certain sequence there is an emotional component attached to it.” And what’s next? Could there be a similar series through a different prism? “Possibly, but I don’t plan these projects in advance, so it will all depend on whether a certain angle will pop up in my mind that I find interesting.”
