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The
rigid face of a dead man and the bark of the living tree stand
at the beginning. A mother and her family unwrapping the death
mask of their son in his living-room, the film immerses to
a phantastic voyage through the realms of the mask.
Masks are always more than they appear to be: they show and
they hide. They are membranes. So the spectator takes part
of the permanent transformation of the mask: either it is
used for carnival-entertainment or to protect ourselves or
to conjure up gods or to scare people to death or describe
the phantasmas of our illnesses, demons and fears.
To
describe these multiple transformations was the basic concept
of "Maskerade".
An important part of the film is dedicated to the prohibitions
that north-american pueblo indians have imposed upon any kind
of recording their holy mask-rituals. This leads Hulverscheidt
to a cryptic editing of archive footage with geographic and
architectural visions of the pueblo regions in the Southwest
of the United States.
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