Walter Samuel
Abridged analytical notes on the film music of Klaus Harmony.
Hamburg, 1997
Mother Thrust, 1971

Friedrich Wohlfäht seized the opportunity in 1971's Die Grosse Brustwarze Karnival to turn away from conventional male perspectives and employed a marked use of irony in depicting contemporary women, making use of split screen techniques to highlight two disparate female paradigms - the new emancipated woman, comfortable with and in command of her own sexual motivations; the other, an outmoded vision of domesticity with accelerated footage of a housewife baking and chopping vegetables. The exquisite ironic twist is that even the representation of woman as domestic servant is realized largely in the nude. Klaus Harmony's approach here is to underscore the conventional sex action with an intense, languorous backdrop. The housebound scenes are accompanied by frenzied rhythmic passages which build to such ferocity that the sole means of introducing new material is to come to a full stop.