White Lily

The answer to the question is the film Berlin Alexanderplatz, originally broadcast in 1980. It is a 14-part television film adapted and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder from the Alfred Döblin novel of the same name. (Wikipedia has a decent article on it)

The film has made an impact on several well-known artists and critics. Susan Sontag wrote an appreciation in a September 1983 issue of Vanity Fair. Director John Waters, writing on fellow cult director Russ Meyer, opined that the latter's projected autobiographical magnum opus should be titled Berlin Alexandertitz. And actress/performance artist Ann Magnuson recounts being "really bummed out" by the film while watching it on PBS during a bad drug trip in her lyrics to "Folk Song" from the Bongwater album, The Power of Pussy. In the 1990s, film director Todd Haynes appropriated imagery from the film's notorious, phantasmagorical epilogue for a sequence in his Velvet Goldmine. The film has also been mentioned in the cult series The Critic.

Dating as far back as 1580 B.C., when images of lilies were discovered in a villa in Crete, these majestic flowers have long held a role in ancient mythology. Derived from the Greek word “leiron,” (generally assumed to refer to the white Madonna lily), the lily was so revered by the Greeks that they believed it sprouted from the milk of Hera, the queen of the gods. Lilies are known to be the May birth flower, and the 30th wedding anniversary flower. They are strongly associated with the purity of the Virgin Mary, especially in Roman Catholicism.

Meaning in the Song of Songs Some scholars, including Abraham Bin Ezra, assert that the word "shoshannah" in the biblical Song of Songs refers to the white lily, and not to a rose as is commonly thought. Thus, the narrator describes his love's exceptional beauty by saying, "As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters."

Meaning in the Victorian Era The Victorians assigned detailed meanings to all common flowers and used them to communicate with each other. In her book "The Language of Flowers", Kate Greenaway listed the white lily as representing purity, modesty, and sweetness.

Figurative language Because of the strong cultural link between the white lily and the qualities of purity and modesty, this flower pops up in figurative descriptions (sometimes including negative or sarcastic ones) of people as pure and innocent. "Lily-white" is the most common phrase used to describe people in this way.

As the flowers most often associated with funerals, lilies symbolize that the soul of the departed has received restored innocence after death.