San Domingo (1970)

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San Domingo (1970)

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San Domingo is a 1970 West German drama film directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. It tells the story of a man who joins a rock music hippie commune. When the commune members learn that his family is wealthy, they tell his parents that he has been kidnapped and demand a ransom. The film is loosely based on the story Betrothal in St. Domingo by Heinrich von Kleist. The actors are primarily non-professionals. The film received the 1971 Deutscher Filmpreis for Best Cinematography and Best Music.

Modern adaptation of a tragic love story written by Heinrich von Kleist: a young man is in Munich where he mixes with the underworld left-wing group following the steps of the girl he has fallen for, who is herself coloured but Europe-born.

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San Domingo (1970)

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"This surrealistic experimental film finds the son of a young nobleman staying with hash-smoking hippies in a seamy section of Munich. He falls for a hippie girl who is involved in shaking down the young man's parents for money. She falls in love with the young man but the group continues to extract money from the parents in return for their wayward son. When he discovers the shakedown, his rage leads to tragedy for the star-crossed lovers."
by Dan Pavlides

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San Domingo (1970)

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Eric L. Santner wrote:
Excerpt from "Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany"
By Eric L. Santner:

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San Domingo (1970)

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"Syberberg's second feature film, San Domingo, an experiment in German neorealism made by and large with amateur actors, is interesting not only as an adaptation of Kleist but also as a first step in a typically Syberbergian probe into the psychic roots of terrorism in recent Germany history (the film transports the action of the novella to the Munich youth underground). The film ends with a quotation from Eldridge Cleaver containing the warning "'to watch out and not to forget or underestimate or scorn these youths, or there will be catastrophes of vast proportions, revolutions or anarchy in which they'll smash everything to pieces.'" But despite the presence of so many seminal motifs, themes, formal techniques, narrative strategies, and compositional principles that are more fully developed in later works, San Domingo marks the end of one creative period for Syberberg; a distinct new period of creativity follows: "After this film [San Domingo] there remained only the possibility of a radical new beginning."

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San Domingo (1970)

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San Domingo (1970)

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San Domingo (1970)

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