Isolation and the Postmodern Condition: Review of TRAVELLING WARRIOR DIRECTOR'S CUT

Lonely is the modern man, lonelier yet the post-modern salesman, could be the tagline of Christian Schocher’s TRAVELLING WARRIOR DIRECTOR'S CUT (REISENDER KRIEGER DIRECTOR'S CUT - where the hero’s last name means “warrior” in German). The director's cut version of the 1981 film screened at the Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz within its European Eighties Tribute section. Yet, Traveling Warrior doesn’t depict the era as we like to remember it. First appearing as a TV film with a massive runtime of 195 minutes, the 2008 director’s cut shortens it to a digestible 142 minutes. Loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, the Swiss director described it as a “staged documentary”. Using amateur actors without written dialogue, the film utilises a minimalist-realist aesthetic grounded in a reality much less grandiose than pop culture presents it.

With little more than a case of perfume samples and a Citroen CX, Krieger (Willy Ziegler) sets out on a trip that will take him from remote corners of the Swiss Alps to claustrophobic, smoke-filled rooms teeming with vitality of urban nightlife. A middle-aged man, he leaves his wife and home to earn them a living selling perfume for a cosmetics company. He finds little success as he visits hair and beauty salons. A dishevelled demeanour and unconvinced delivery of the slogan “That’s how this winter smells in Switzerland” fails to entice buyers. Regardless of the day’s success, Kreiger likes to end it by drinking himself into a stupor while burning through cigarettes like lighting fire to a page. During his travels and leisurely forays, Kreiger appears firstly as an observer, a conduit through whose eyes a picture of early 1980s Switzerland is painted. But an array of wonderfully peculiar people that take to him throughout, pull Kreiger’s complex character from the depths, revealing an emotionally stunted man - both a symptom and symbol of his time. 

A leather-clad drummer he adopts as a son for a night, an old-fashioned farming family who host him high in the Alps, a recently widowed woman who makes sexual advances at a bar, a salon owner fed up with the “asshole-ness” of the world and its mistreatment of women; these are the kinds of people Krieger meets on his journey. Through these encounters Krieger’s character is revealed. He’s listless and lacks empathy, longing for connection but without the emotional tools to find it. Those he meets are products of a changing world: the drummer befits the youth culture of the time, and the salon owner expresses a  progressively feminist worldview. Krieger’s job is emblematic of change created by the fall of industrial sectors and the rise of consumerism and service jobs, an apt subject for Schocher’s post-modern style of filmmaking. 

Using black-and-white film, cinematographer Clemens Klopfenstein’s camera lingers on long shots of Krieger walking into the expanse of rural landscapes or hidden amongst the crowd of urban life. It moves slowly and the lens’ lingering eye tints both crowded and desolate scenes with melancholy. The staged documentary style relies on characters acting as themselves with little direction and the film feels particularly interested in capturing their more absurd moments. Crowded scenes suffer from outside noise masking the dialogue, and some scenes are noticeably dubbed as picture and sound don’t always sync up. However, technical issues do little to detract from its already rugged aesthetic and highly conceptual artistic vision.