“It’s in human nature to see the basest cruelty as a harmless game. You just close your eyes, or reach for the opera glasses... even art can have inhuman consequences.”-Joseph Roth

Mannheim was a film produced as the culmination of my postgraduate studies at the Glasgow School of Art. The film was created parallel to a research project into the surprisingly abundant connections between high fantasy and extremist politics.

From the strands of anti-semitism laced throughout the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, to the mythic aryan utopias dreamt up by Richard Wagner and adored by Adolph Hitler, to the hierarchical nomenclature of the Ku Klux Klan, filled with wizards, knights, dragons and goblins – What is it about fantasy that leads it to be so often co-opted by fascism? How do we untangle the complicated politics behind these stories?

Mannheim’s screenplay emerged from a text I wrote- one that sampled from the manifestos and confessional writings of Donald Rumsfeld, Arno Brekker, Cosima Wagner, Elliot Rodger, Yukio Mishima, Petrarch, and others. Mannheim is not meant to convey the results of my research, but rather act as a poetic and impressionistic means to explore what I think are some of the most pressing issues of our time.