The Internet Serial "SPPD - The Pig is dead", produced by Studio Seidel, directed by Florian Seidel, shot by Torsten Lippstcok and colorcorrected by Scanwerk is winner of the New York Independent Film and Video Festival Award autumn 2009 in the cathegory "Best International Short Film".
The city, faces, darkness, roaming dogs, erotic women, cut naked women´s legs, clubs and bars, a pathology in which are diessected bodies and actions, the police department, smoking and red wine drinking protagonists, car rides, flashlights, communication instruments, creatures of the night, table dances, weapons, bridges, mirrors ans masks, the loss of the order establishing instances.
Fast edited aesthetic images, a montage bound to a stream of consciousness or the contemporary custom of a medial image consumption, in a reduced style of a short message film, seemingly haphazardly composed, connected by the consistently appearing faces of the two agents. One of the up to now 11 produced episodes of the web crime serial which wants to be more than only a persiflage of the numerous US investigation serials, takes only 2-3 minutes. Patrol car lights, crime scenes, the pathology, nightclubs appear as references to those, but the Kiez area of Hamburg becomes a fabulous bleakly poetic location of the night´s society and of crime. At the end of an aesthetic flood of images, a grotesk comic wave breaks in front of the spectator´s eyes and he finds himself in the centre of this reduced, racy house of absurdity, in which the nocturnal Hamburg is transforming.
In front of the Olivia-Jones-Club is found a dead pig, the crime scene is selt off, two agents of the Sankt Pauli Police Department (also called shortly SSPD, an akronym allusion to Hollywood) are caused to spring into action. The pig obviuosly is the vistim of a homicide, its fable-ous appearance alludes on the offender´s probable motive: the pig must have been a brothel owner in the Kiez milieu. Restlessness, car chases in Hamburg without neither any obvious pursuer nor any object of pursuit, confusion of the congruence of image runs and contents, images in shreds. Wigald Boning´s easy listening jazz music which recalls the sounds of old french gangster ballads accompanies the odyssey of the two agents across the night. Like insomnia caused by heavy dreams with all the absurd persons, heads and funny impossibilities. It reminds of David Lynch´s Twin Peaks above all apropos the activities of the agents getting into diverse abstruse situations and comic image strips while researching the offender, together with their Cheerleader protection force which moves dancing in locomotion in Hamburg´s "Inland Empire". Not the only erotic ingredient: Femmes fatales are everywhere, to be identified by their clothes.
Gags and light irony resonates in the exaggeration which produces atmospheric humor. Settling between Miami Vice, the charme of the Reeperbahn and film noir style, artistically animated by the great photography, Peter Deinas´ colorgrading with a sure taste for style,
a suspense-generating montage, the choreography of the dance sequenzes (dancer in chief Isabella Rapp was responsible for it), the variety of the guys and persons and last but not least the repeated quotations on film culture and history (the smoking agents with their dark expressions recall french noir cinema for instance), the internet seems perfect as platform. The agents go astray again and again. Maybe their adventures are less weird than those of Lynch but these are above all visually amazingly composed, grotesk, trashy and also comic. An interesting and well worth seeing salmagundi, which also inspires to think it over. There emerges absolutely questions about the consistence of the contemporary society. Hamburger Pulp Fiction, less gangster paradise than masquerade and loss of identity, a little action, aestheticized, far from a filmic realism being musical elements and dance choreographies, real tough guys in the seaport of Hamburg, original locations, much film noir with CSI pathology charme - style and genre eclecticism. Even if the internet hasn´t replaced the TV yet, SPPD offers a motivically almost conventional, but formally and audience-context relating revolutionary worth. The internet film has to adapt to the medial conditions and circumstances of its clicking audience. The web as Mecca of the absorption of all possible sorts of information, music, film, images and knowledge, also of economical and interhuman exchange, often without any further "hissing of the deep" and salvation of quality but uncompromisingly in compressed, fast and simultanoeus form belongs to the daily grind and to the perception of the watching and consuming homo modernus. It seems anyway very convenient to produce a serial that reflects the new way of looking only for the internet. Also an immanent critique on the fast moving consumption in its irony is imaginable. In front of the computer, the modern man with his mouse tool turns into the architect of a not more clear eclecticism of a infinite amount of material and shouldn´t wonder about a dead pig in a murder mystery story. The female committer by the way is found by the help of a psychic. The summoning of the zeitgeist? Wigald Boning composed his album "Jet Set Jazz", which provides the soundtrack to the serial, as music for long car rides and so his sounds serve as form and atmosphere connecting element in "SPPD", which seems to be made only for the instant inbetween. But its effect goes beyond that.
To be continued. Other episodes are planned.
You can get information and watch the episodes on 
www.sppd.tv.
SPPD "The pig is dead"
Production: Studio Seidel
DoP: Torsten Lippstock
Colorgrading: Peter Deinas
Distribution worldwide: ohmtv.com