Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche is a pop science fiction lesbian fantasy feature set in the year 2700 in the fictional burnt-out city of Asche. It follows the tangled lives of three women: Spy, a comic book artist; Volley, a performance artist and oversexed pyromaniac; and Nun, an amoral alien with a predilection for reptiles.
It’s a story of love and revenge, and an anti-romantic plea for love in its many forms. It’s also a story laced with sex, violence and a pulsating soundtrack – a cyberdyke movie that stimulates both the body and the brain. “Shot in Super8 and exploded to 16mm, Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche is a German Blade Runner about a sexed-up pyromaniac, her red-plastic-clad mate, and a revengeful comix artist – characterized by a fierce, punky throb and gelatinous F/X. As sapphic thrillers go, it’s 20 times more fun than Basic Instinct” (“Interview”, June 1992).
From Super8 to 16mm to 4K: originally shot on Super8 in the early 1990s, the only material that remained of the film in 2019 was a two-band 16mm blow-up internegative and the optical sound negative. The internegative had shrunk by 1% and exhibited early stages of vinegar syndrome. These materials were the basis for the initial digitalisation. After extensive restoration work had already been done, the Kinemathek Hamburg provided a scarcely played 16mm print with magnetic sound – the Hamburg Film Fund’s specimen copy.
With this 16mm print as a reference, selected single frames were scanned using a multispectral film scanner from the University of Zürich. A digital style transfer was employed to render the digitalised film in a form that is as close as possible to the analogue original. This was a starting point for the final grading and restoration. Since the goal was to maintain the film’s rough, grainy quality, there were no interventions aside from image stabilisation and occasional manual lint removal. From mono to 5.1: The magnetic soundtrack of the 16mm copy was scanned by Cinévolution in Mons and the material was subtly transferred to a ‘mono’ multichannel version.

Karola Gramann