Last Words of Dutch Schultz

In 1935, the last words of the dying gangster Arthur Flegenheimer, alias Dutch Schultz, were registered by an FBI shorthand writer, in the hope that Schultz would identify the person who killed him. These texts are the basis for this animated documentary. Dutch Schultz, whose words are spoken as an English voice-over by Rutger Hauer, talks about all sorts of things – evasive, fragmentary and sometimes seemingly raving – but Dutch refuses to rat on anyone. His wordstream is illustrated by animation made up of traced and treated film images. Scratchy, monochrome pencil drawings without unnecessary details or backgrounds. These images, which suggest a glimpse inside dying Dutch Schultz’s head, comprise three categories: documentary images from Dutch Schultz’s time (roughly from 1927 to 1935), scenes from feature films about the period that were made later, and all-time cinema icons – from famous dictators of the twentieth century to familiar war pictures. Through these latter associations, Dutch Schultz becomes the universal dying man, a man of all times. The flow of images is repeatedly interrupted by a live-action reconstruction of the killing of Dutch Schultz in a restaurant. Each time, the reconstruction is filmed from someone else’s point-of-view, small differences emphasising the subjectivity of observation and memory.