Octavia, realising the love match, and hearing that Äls is now bedridden and dying, dresses up as him and rides by her gates every day to keep her spirits up—her bed is next to the window.
Äls has a dream in which she talks to her projection of Albrecht and concludes that she does not wish to take part in this union and accepts death.
Sacrifice and death are constant motifs in the movie — Äls even recounts how she had to put down her ill dog — and Albrecht's return to his wife is a reflection of a realization of the tragic side of life.
[5] This reflected a need to avoid temptation to adultery, when many families were separated, and Joseph Goebbels himself insisted that it must be the woman rather than the man who paid.
[7] The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, interested in ideologies in cinema, voted for Opfergang in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of the best films of all time.
Albrecht is paraded in front of a prestigious society of Hamburg and shows various artifacts collected from a long voyage at sea.
‘Too late’ is a theme that is central to Linda William’s, concept of Body Genres for melodrama, or that certain types of film are designed more for emotional connection and relation rather than as a purely artistic endeavor.