This highly stylized, critically acclaimed film from the 70's mixes silent film cards, a soundscape, color, opera music and atmosphere to explore the Freudian truths about men's fear of women that Wedekind powerfully exposed. A kinetic melodrama of the rise of a femme-fatale and her fate at the hands of Jack-the-Ripper. Rethinking Pabst's silent film and Alban Berg's opera.

In 1810, a flea narrates the goings-on it sees through the eyes of a young teenage girl whose life is controlled by a lusty priest in league with her unscrupulous uncle.