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Foreigners Out! Schlingensief’s Container documents an experiment which provoked national political hysteria.
In the summer of 2000, the German performance artist Christoph Schlingensief placed 12 genuine refugees in a container, inside a wire cage of the steps of the Vienna Opera House. He then set up a website and invited Viennese to log on and vote one out each day, Big Brother style, for deportation. 800,000 Austrians did so.Read More »
Africa, … Land of the infinite sun, of curly hair and the smell of diesel oil. German soldiers on a mission from the United Nations. For General Werner Brenner (Udo Kier), a dream comes true: the new crematorium, the multicultural children’s playground and, above all, the old V2-Rocket from the Führer! Here, where people are still “crude and simple”, every German can display his abilities! But after a couple of days, Brenner’s unbreakable optimism starts to crumble…Read More »
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Between Broadway act, classical music and operetta – cinema never came that close to the good old mixtape!
In MY WIFE IN FIVE, Schlingensief composes tracks and takes to a shimmering cinematic music piece. The playlist changes constantly between the styles, as if this record had a jump – Irving Berlin’s This Is The Army, Mr. Jones, an Ave Maria Variation and Jacques Offenbach’s world-famous Infernal Galop can be heard. Equally to the music the pictures also have scratches.
The music film MY WIFE IN FIVE was created during a sound seminar by Christoph Schlingensief with students of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. It already contains all forms of cinematic means and alienation, which he later used in his theatre and opera productions.Read More »
This satire of post re-unification Germany follows a couple investigating the disappearance of a German social worker and the Polish family in his care. Their search takes them to the town of Rassau, where the remaining hostage takers are living undercover as a priest and a furniture wholesaler.Read More »
The survivors of the old Fassbinder crew gather one last time to shoot a remake of Pasolini’s Salò. Meanwhile, the producer sends an agent to Hollywood to meet Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad and others on a mission to raise money and get ex-Visconti superstar Helmut Berger to appear in the film.Read More »
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Mutters Maske aka Mother’s Mask is a free adaptation of the film Opfergang (1944) aka The Great Sacrifice of Veit Harlan.
Schlingensief exposes his source material’s dangerous proximity to kitsch and camp by reducing the genre conventions known from Harlan, Sirk, Fassbinder & Co to the level of a daily soap: set within a noble family from the German Ruhr, Schlingensief’s story revolving about Willy von Mühlenbeck’s tragic love to terminally ill neighbor girl Äls (Susanne Bredehöft) and the inheritance intrigues by his evil brother Martin von Mühlenbeck (Helge Schneider) creaks with melodramatic devices and self-conscious dialogues. Rather than being a mere spoof, “Mother’s Mask” is perhaps Schlingensief’s purest black comedy.Read More »
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Sounding like some cheap pastiche, The German Chainsaw Massacre comes as a surprisingly independent feature, able to stand on it’s own without the crutch of it’s predecessor. However, Tobe Hooper’s movie is not so much tipped and winked as screamed in the face of in this relentless madness and more specifically in a similarly edited chainsaw chase through a forest. Choosing to loosen Hooper’s tight bolts of ‘humour’, Schlingensief loses dramatic intensity but gains an awesome sense of the egregious: unemployed customs officials form appalling folk groups at the West/East border and a woman with a knife up her butt sits down…Read More »