Film Title: The Servant – 26 minutes
Screenplay, Director, Music, Lead Role & Editing: Edward Georg Konradin Köchling
Genre: Experimental Film, Art Film, Psychological Portrait
Country and Year of Production: Germany, Baden-Württemberg, 2013–2015

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A young artist and writer (24) becomes lost in the inner conflict of whether to tell stories based on reason or emotion. In analyzing this question, he invents abstract symbols and descends into megalomaniacal, paranoid, darkly romantic, and self-destructive fantasies of himself.

He believes that, in a moment of “spiritual rebirth” (through the dissolution of the ego), he must abandon all rational structure and surrender entirely to his emotional impulses in order to fulfill the meaning of existence. To do this, he throws himself into ecstatic emotional fantasies. He comes to believe that one must suffer as passionately as possible in life and die many symbolic deaths, through which one can rebuild a new identity and become a better person.

Through discovering these new facets of the self, he hopes to overcome boredom and construct complex systems of values. He writes a book intended as a guide to this symbolic rebirth of the soul. However, a friend of the artist—who still believes in the original reason-based approach—finds the book confusing and disturbing. He advises against its publication and recommends returning to a compromise between reason and emotion.

Despite the warnings, the artist publishes the book. But the readers do not experience the enlightenment that the friend had hoped for. Instead, the book incites suicides, and the artist is held responsible for them.

The film, like the book written by the protagonist, seeks to portray symbolic and expressive imagery to depict the process of spiritual rebirth.