Caspar David Friedrich, The Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Public domain.

Screenings in Berlin cinemas begin with about ten minutes of advertisements that come before the previews of upcoming feature films. These show-before-the-show-before-the-show mini-films and silly spots hawk all kinds of wares, from candy bars to high culture, from beer brands to Beethoven.

Normally, one casually tunes in and out of these marketing medleys, pays desultory bits of attention, maybe laughs at a few on-screen gags, but otherwise chats away with friends or concentrates on fighting through the packaging of the goodies bought at the concession counter.

But when Samuel L. Jackson suddenly appeared, pitching offshore wind farms before a screening of the North Sea island anti-idyll Amrum, I practically choked on my popcorn. The celebrated American actor’s laser eyes and melodious yet abrasive voice jolted me upright in my soft cinema seat. “Motherfuckin’ windfarms!” he seethed, spitting out his words like those bullets that whizzed by him in Pulp Fiction thirty years ago.

Before Jackson speaks, the ad shows a rocky coast lashed by waves. A lone figure strides towards the sea, his back to the viewers. His dark clothes are nearly the color of the slick, surf-sprayed shelf of stone he walks on, with a swath of green algae farther along the point. The palette of water and sky lightens towards the cirrus-strewn horizon notched by a dozen giant windmills.

The composition is poached from the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who often depicted solitary souls in silhouette from behind, staring out to sea, waiting. This masterful painter of many more shades of melancholy than fifty sometimes put ships on the swell, or a foundering fishing boat. But the masts of these schooners seemed fragile, easily overturned, like the human soul—not the forever-straight, inexorably at-work, storm-proof masts of today’s wind machines.

The task of admen painting their moving pictures across the cinema canvas is to find—and flog—the romance of three-armed industrial ogres set out in precise, regimental formation. It’s a tough sell. There’s no tougher seller than Samuel L. Still, the soundtrack will have to ride to the rescue.

Amrum tells the tale of a young boy in the last days of World War II. He begins to sense, if falteringly, the depravity of his perfect Aryan family’s faith in the Führer. The island has windswept dunes; wide mudflats alongside white beaches; abundant avian and aquatic life; rough fields ploughed by horses; and whitewashed, thatch-roofed houses that appear unchanged since Caspar David Friedrich’s day.

All this beauty and more is captured in gorgeous, often long-held shots from cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub’s camera. The gorgeous photography seems all the more impossible given the wartime horrors inflicted on the mainland so close across the water. I’d seen the movie preview already, ogling its sumptuous images that seemed folded into a widescreen travel brochure extolling the scenic wonders of the North Sea islands. Amrum’s current economy relies heavily on the tourist trade.

Off the low-lying land, there are no turbines to spoil the cinematic view, or to be dabbed out by CGI, as Friedrich used solvents. About 25 miles west of Amrum is a group of 80 turbines owned by the German multinational RAE, too distant to be seen.

Samuel L. Jackson is not working for RAE, but for the huge Swedish corporation Vattenfall. In 2023, the concern committed to building Germany’s largest offshore wind park 100 kilometers out to sea, changing the undertaking’s name from the unsexily techie “N 7.2” to the picturesque (one might even say C. D. Friedrich-ian) “Nordlicht I”—now to be joined by Nordlicht II (that is Northern Lights I and II). The rebrand, says project manager Matthias Buko, is meant to show how the “fossil-free electricity produced there [will be] symbolically in harmony with the generation of light.” By 2027, the wind park will supply energy for a million German households. As in Amrum the movie, the ghosts of the war need to be exorcized. Last month, Vattenfall proudly announced that it had cleared several unexploded Nazi mines from the seabed as construction on the project proceeded. Vattenfall is sonically sensitive: “To mitigate underwater acoustic impact, the company deployed a 90-metre bubble-curtain system via a dedicated vessel to reduce shockwave transmission and protect marine life.” (Wind turbines are getting quieter, but another, devastating, take on their output—and its acoustic, political, cultural impact—can be heard and seen at an engrossing, aggrieved, frightening yet still uplifting video and sound installation currently at the Munch Museum in Oslo, called Zifzafa by Lawrence Abu Hamdan.)

In the Vattenfall pre-movie spot, the opening distant view is brutally cut away from to a close-up of Jackson chucking something into his mouth and crunching it down, then raising a pair of binoculars to his scowling face. What he sees prompts those scalding alliterative Fs: “Motherfuckin’ windfarms.” Over the sound of the surf and the wind, he continues his litany of complaint: “Loud, ugly, harmful to nature.” But then he lowers the glasses and shakes his head at such idiotic notions. “Who said that?”

Above the gentle symphony of nature, the music starts in, a mini–Big Ben-like melody as from an off-screen, offshore wind chime. The environmental encomium gathers momentum. Jackson gestures towards the turbines with his bag of chips and assures us that “these giants are standing tall against fossils, rising up out of the ocean like a middle finger to CO₂.” The electro-acoustic melodies tumble and twirl benignly around his words. The synthesis begins to swell into a meta-human chorus raising a sacred hymn with Saint Samuel of Offshore Salvation: “Deep beneath the waves they can become artificial reefs creating habitats for sea life to grow.”

The seasoned huckster, with campaigns for Capital One, Adidas, and Apple on his richly remunerated résumé, turns to the camera, now brandishing his bag of “Vattenfall Windfarm Seaweed Snacks.” The music rises in benediction of all that megawattage as the celebrant holds out an algae-green wafer of absolution toward the cinema supplicants. We can’t take the holy snack from him, so he pops it into his own mouth, delighted. “Mmm! Mmm! Serious gourmet shit!”

Nourished by spiritual food and the turbines of redemption, he’s ready to repeat the antiphon: “So what’s it gonna be?” First, he delivers that opening liturgical line angrily—“Motherfuckin’ windfarms?!”—shouting it into the relentless breeze. Then he repeats it in a tone of beatific praise, turning his face toward the camera, repositioned so that the turbines spread out behind him like a field of revolving crosses: “Motherfuckin’ windfarms!” The choral intimations now cogenerate an ecstatic chop of percussion, like self-flagellating blades propelled by shimmering, synthesized harmony rising upwards toward forever, to that place where the lights are always on.

The initial pictorial composition is returned to. The lone figure strides back down the beach, presumably to his off-screen e-limo and thence to the airport for the long flight back to California’s distant, ever-narrowing shores.

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