Synopsis
A two-part mask story is told in a film-like sequence of photographs:(The first part of the story)
A group of young people decide to play a masquerade at an unusual time in the middle of summer and experience a day of very strange transformations.
The day begins light-heartedly and cheerfully with all kinds of mischief around the street corners and fountains in the center of Aachen. People parade through the area wearing colorful masks, shop at the market, baffle the peaceful citizens, bathe in the lake or jump exuberantly through the parks.
It seems as if you can forget the everyday faces behind the mask. In the middle of the day, the sun shines warmly and invitingly, and an exuberant summer party is celebrated at the edge of the forest.
(The second part of the story)
People dance and feast and indulge themselves on the fragrant, infinitely green meadow. But suddenly the light-footed play is interrupted:
The phantom-like appearance of a black horse's head abruptly changes the scenery; a girl dances on, ecstatically dancing to her death.
Seized by panic, the masks flee into the forest, where they are chased by a thousand images of fear. When they return to the summer meadow, they find the lifeless girl: a white horse's head crowns her body.
Black Death has transformed her and marked her with his mask. The masquerade has become a game of life and death.
With pale faces, the masks now descend from the high meadow to the evening fields and a great melancholy of grief fills their play. As a symbolic figure of silence, a girl with a white face carries the horse's head in front of the funeral cortege.
-CAPUT MORTUUM-
The play comes to an end in a mysterious celebration of the night.
Stages of the experienced story reappear in a different form. The masked figures of the nocturnal ceremony once again carry the white horse's head outside the town and burn it in the dark fields.
Out of the misty haze of the next morning, the girl figure of the night emerges for the last time and carries the “empty picture frame of the story” across the fields before she disappears into the gnarled head beech trees by the moat.
© KCR Okt. 2024
