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"Seven Dumpsters and a Corpse" is a movie I saw on the Documentary Channel today. It was basically a home movie by a German guy (it has subtitles) showing how he and his brother filled up the seven dumpsters cleaning up their mother's apartment. He is some kind of a film maker, so there was editing to make it more interesting than plain old video.
The subtitles were funny because they blurred out the four-letter words in the text, but I soon figured out that shit and fuck sound the same in German as they do in English whether they appear in the subtitle or not. They didn't use those words a lot, in case you wonder. It's fun to listen for words in German that sound the same as words we know, such as UUFFF-Dah! that a person says when pitching a heavy item out the window towards the dumpster.
The photojournalist says that he is using the filming to distance himself from the loss of his mother, approaching it as an anthropologist does: "You can see it is the epitome of a wasted existence. But a highly colorful one!"
There were a lot of home movies and still photos of the two brothers growing up, which were fun to see, and it was interesting to be there when they learned more about their family history as they went through the photos and papers in the apartment.
For one thing they found out that maybe their mother's father was a German aristocrat instead of a German patent lawyer and engineer like they thought growing up, but they didn't find out what specific aristocrat it was, or if it was even true.
For another they found out their mother was getting ready to sue them for the difference between lost alimony from her bitter divorce and what the sons sent her out of their salaries to help support her after the father stopped paying.
"Each full dumpster is a triumph over chaos," he tells us.
There would have been more dumpsters but they burned a bunch of stuff in the apartment fireplace as they cleaned it out, actually damaging the chimney and the paint. He tells us that although burning the stuff is highly illegal because the smoke is toxic, "We're probably doing it to get a little revenge. The fire does us good, psychologically. It has comforting symbolic power."
When they toured through with the landlord later they told him they had no idea how it happened (and they edited in little flashbacks of all the stuff they burned to remind us that they did indeed know).
The corpse part was that the 70-year old mother died there in the apartment and it was some time before the body was discovered, so some of the movie was about finding a vendor who could clean up that part. Finally the pest control company Rentokill agrees to send someone over.
They said the reason she saved everything was that due to war shortages in Europe she was afraid to throw anything away because she might need it someday, and also the ecology movement had brainwashed her into thinking it was wasteful to throw stuff away.
She also had a vacation home in Greece that had more stuff, and many, many cats. So they had to go there and deal with that, and also sink the crock containing her ashes in the ocean. They said hotel employees told them to crate up the cats and let them out over by the hotels because the tourists would feed the cats and by the end of the season most of the cats would be gone because kindly tourist ladies would take them home. I was surprised that the sons actually thought it was a good idea and crated up the cats and took them over there.
As they completed cleaning out the first apartment and a couple storage units they heard rumors of an additional storage unit somewhere. They finally found it but the movie was over, so in the credits we got to see a whole bunch of Euro-style trash bags lined up on the curb, filled with that last bunch of stuff.
It wasn't as grim as it sounds; I enjoyed the looks back at the 1960s, there were lots of shots of stuff being thrown out the second floor window and smashing into the dumpster(s), and these guys had a good sense of dry humor.
