Both hinge on irony.

In Angsst the young man ignores the

Subjectively, one could, for instance, read both films in a sexual context, as
Both films are set in a closed interior, evoking
exploring a fear of women.
a closed ego.
undressing woman (with connotations of ferf1TTty and procreaction) only to be
confronted with death on the other hand.
woman in the intimate space of the bedroom seems to present an unbearable
invasion of the man's privacy.
by killing her, he becomes again irrevocably possessed by her.
invaded by an enormous guilt, and "society" itself bears down on him in full
force in the form of the policemen who trample into his house and tauntingly
confront him with the body.
But the value of Pretorius' experiments lie not so much in what they say as in
exploring - successfully or unsuccessfully - an alternative way of saying it.

But precisely through trying to get rid of her
His privacy is

In Die Hoord the intrusion of the

Angsst - Same Time, Same Place
John van Zyl
If one wanted to be unkind, one could say that Anqsst could only have been made
To be as hung up on sex as the young hero is could only happen
in South Africa.
in a society in which certain sections have not even begun to experience the
permissive society in any form - visual, verbal or physically.
If I had known
how, this would have been the film I would have made in ~
chilhood in Kroonstad
in the Forties.
The sense of Woman being Other, if not The Other, reifies her visually into a
squirming wet dream, and verbally into what lawrence would certainly have
identified as "sex in the head".
Even the last glimpse of the woman as she sheds
her blouse and discreetly shows her naked rump to the camera as she disappears
around the door frame is the way out of any adolescent male's dreams - after the
lubricious offering of herself the female leaves before her offer can be tested.
Apart from a content then that is neither anarchic nor Expressionist, the actual
time sequence in the film gives the lie to any attempt to see the images in any
terms other than in the strictly realistic.
The cigarette that the young man lights and s~es,
he smokes in real time, both
the action and the causality contained within the visible expression of lighting
and smoking a cigarette remain obstinately undreamlike.
This makes the attempted
atemporality of the long takes impossible to .aintain.
The fact that Warhol's
experiments in perception (especially cinematic perception) involving the Empire
State Building and an ice-cream sundae have been invoked regarding Pretorius'
style is misleading.
Warhol's point is a cognitive one, Pretorius' is an artistic
one - a muddled artistic one.
In an Expressionist film like The Cabinet of D~ C~liQari, the mise-en-scene is
uniformly unreal, in AnQsst the mise-en-scene 15 1nconsis~ently 5ymbo11~ and
The man in the mask is neutralized by the actlons and react10ns of the
realistic.
the young man with the cigarette, ~e girl's auto-eroticism by the s~lf-censo~ship
of the director.
It is finally, nelther porno nor poem, thorough-goIng exper1ment
nor homage to Expressionism.

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