During the half-assed lockdown in the early days of COVID-19, when the theaters were shut down, and live performances were cancelled, I had the good fortune to be asked to make a short film for The Catastrophic Theatre.

I submitted a short screenplay I had written some ten years earlier, and further proposed that I’d direct, design, and star in it, like some low-rent, Gulf Coast Orson Welles.

Inspired by both black and white film comedies of the 1930s and a 14-line dramatic fragment by the late East German playwright Heiner Müller’s, HERZSTÜCK is what might be pulled from the wreckage were Müller to fatally collide with the Three Stooges.

The film follows a pair of doltish musicians as they attempt to perform a duet for violin and piano. A series of accidents, distractions and interruptions leads to slaps, pratfalls, eye-pokes, and gruesome do-it-yourself amateur surgery. A bleak, slapstick meditation on the futility of love and, indeed, all human endeavor, HERZSTÜCK suggests a Laurel and Hardy short written and directed by Lars von Trier.

Anyway, the full movie is available to watch for free on YouTube.