Overview

Experimental film based on the radio play "Die Befreiung des Prometheus" (The Liberation of Prometheus) by Heiner Goebbels, based on texts by Heiner Müller: While Heracles circles the mountain to free Prometheus, who is chained and tormented by the eagle's beak, Prometheus is on his way to see his boss as a middle manager—in an elevator. An important appointment. But the elevator malfunctions and becomes his prison... Two texts by playwright Heiner Müller that ironically tell the story of two men. Composer Heiner Goebbels has interwoven these texts and adapted them musically into an audio play: "The Liberation of Prometheus." Theo Janßen composed the images to accompany it: documentary, staged, and journalistic images. Archive footage, photographs, drawings—not illustrative, but associative and contrapuntal. The result is a kind of "film opera" or "film musical."