United Trash (1996)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief and Oskar Roehler

Cast: Udo Kier as UNO-General Werner Brenner; Kitten Natividad as Martha Brenner; Thomas Nicolai/ Thomas Chibwe as Peter Panne; Joachim Tomaschewsky as Bischof Pierre; Jonny Pfeifer as Lund; Jones Muguse as Afrikanischer Diktator Hassan

An Abstract Film Candidate

 

It's not shit, its chocolate.

With United Trash, I introduced myself to German filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief. Making films since he was seven, the best way to read Schlingensief's career is either as a provocateur or the more brazen comment of a shit-stirrer, who viewed his home country and its society, including the middle class, in constant need to be attacked. Particularly once he transitioned from cinema to reality television and staged provocations, Schlingensief in his homeland of Germany went for the juggler. In that later period, after United Trash into the 2000s, he provocatively staged performances and becoming a media figure himself. This includes allowing members of the public to vote for whether asylum figures living in a Big Brother environment were allowed to stay or not in the notorious “Please Love Austria – First Austrian Coalition Week" stunt in 2000, after Austria gained a government including far right nationalists, whose outcry and success as a televised and public event, staged next the Vienna State Opera. A later work, originally a reality show on German television which became a 2004 documentary, was Freakstars 3000 which was a talent competition for people with disabilities.  

His lack of worldwide reputation for provocation is bizarre; especially when I get to United Trash and try to comprehend the barrage of transgressive lunacy I sat through, it is strange Schlingensief never really got his work a wider cult attention to my country knowing that the likes of Lars von Trier from Denmark were as capable of the same thing. For all I will bring up, United Trash is a well made film in terms of scale and its elaborateness, unexpectedly taking its influence from transgressive cult genre films for its goal to shock and awe the viewer. I will say, immediately, this is not a film for the sensitive. Shot in Zimbabwe, set in a mysterious African country with a dictator having been provided a German V2 rocket by a UNO general he intends to blow up the US president with, United Trash is going to offend someone, and that is not a lazy comment in this particular case.

It is the story of Peter Panne, son of a former sex worker and a UN German member. The UN member is UNO-General Werner Brenner as played by Udo Kier, the cult actor and a von Trier collaborator who worked extensively with Schlingensief, whilst his wife is Martha Brenner as played by Kitten Natividad, a cult and adult star whose early career includes later films of the cult director Russ Meyer. Already when you begin the film, chaos transpires. Surprisingly elaborate, even acquiring a helicopter for the opening, you already have a sense of the tone where everyone is shouting and nothing is sacred, including a side character called Bischof Pierre who is an excommunicated Austrian priest preaching to the locals an anti-Roman Catholic rhetoric, including wanting to drink the blood of the Pope, and Lund, Werner's bodyguard and lover. In the opening, Martha is ready to give birth to Peter abruptly, all set to what sounds similar to the Naked Gun theme.

United Trash, trying to figure out its purpose, is a complete burial of the United Nations and other groups with the ideal of trying to help in third world countries. You could lose sight of this in the film's willingness to throw itself into the truly bizarre, or that you have a barrage of multiple narrators and onscreen captions, male and female narrators and even Peter himself elaborating the tale, even subliminal messages onscreen the film warns of ahead of time. Alongside the distinct production style, with elaborate camera movements and time transitions shown through extras carrying signs stating them on handwritten signs, United Trash as a later film from Schlingensief is a rare transgressive film with a bit of a budget and benefits from Schlingensief's clear experience from his work since the eighties.

It is also a film, more so now, which is still shocking and at times in danger of just being politically incorrect with no real need to; eventually, due to a very unfortunate incident of getting a marble stuck up his nose as a baby, and his mother's attempt to remove it with a spike backfiring, Peter ends up with a huge gape in the top of his head, a slit which there is no way for me to circle around in description as it is called a "pussy" at points, which seemingly oozes squirty cheese. He is also meant to be a potential new Messiah, as if talked of in the prologue, one as a pawn for both Bischof Pierre for his anti-Catholic plan, who has seduced his mother, but also for the dictator who wants to drop the V2 into the president's bedroom. Your reaction to the film, barraging through its length in a quick pace, is entirely that it is not taking prisoners at all.

It has, when Peter gets the unfortunate injury, a scene of a doctor and his assistant in bloody surgery carving a prosthetic baby up like a turkey of fake blood, somehow managing to become an actor later than mere bloody offal. The film skirts homophobia, but only because Wrner's lover Lund is a degenerate, a comedic foil who is buff and has a fake tan, but for a joke also a pederast with a young infant Peter and marbles. A half-dead man, blown full of holes when a disgruntled local woman accidentally misses with a uzi, sits around Werner's sitcom home just wanting access to a public phone, and only in the country looking for sausages is a running joke for a large segment. This is a film where "pouring whiskey into his pussy" is an actual line. It also, bluntly, has a scene of Kier in black face (and blackened torso) wanking a banana off his banana skirt which would have not aged well even then, meant to be shocking in a scene where Kier in a UN military cap, black face and a banana skirt entertains the laughing locals on a stahe with Lund in a seventies tracksuit, all of which is beyond bafflement.

It is meant as satire, the UN and frankly Western involvement in general in the African continent viewed as inherently corrupt and misguided, let alone any specific African country, bringing their idiocies over to another land and making it worse. References to Yugoslavia, and the bloody collapse of that former country into multiple in the nineties clearly hinted at, are evoked as being one of the UN's achievements, and the film even to the point Martha and Werner's home is depicted in as a sitcom with canned laughter, burying its leads as misguided figures farcing around in another country. That the local extras are sidelined, mostly background figures with many performing songs and music nearby, can be seen as much as a mistake of the film alongside its provocations. Ironically, Christoph Schlingensief himself clearly must have realised the film as a satire of Western involvement in Africa did not work, or at least went further in a way that sooths the film's scattershot nature. He would go on to create the Operndorf Afrika (Opera Village Africa) in Burkina Faso in 2010, a cultural institution that would include a school, an opera house and a clinic¹.  

The film in truth is a mess, but I will openly admit to having been taken aback by the film, compelling in its own right for how far it goes in its humour. It is also a rare case for Udo Kier having a lead role, and it is amazing to see him act with the energy of 110% extra force than previously seen in films from him, a rewarding experience to see him unleash a level of energy I have never seen from an actor I have always admired. He is matched by a cast as equally willing to fling themselves into this twisted farce. Kitten Natividad in particular, factoring in her willingness to be naked on screen including covered in mud, has as much energy as the brash American figure among the cast, a distinct presence physically but matching it with a bravado as much too in her performance.

Tonally too, the film does come off as a completely alien and perplexing work. Neither is it just how transgressive the film is - in the fake blood, or playing to taboos or the nudity - but even in the little touches like a kazoo suddenly appearing in the score which disarms the viewer. Your willingness to adapt to the film is a factor, including how brazen the film is to drag the viewer along, pulling them back and forth with the constant narration or jumps forwards. It will feel too much for some viewers even before factoring its transgressive nature. Certainly where the film heads to even when described does not begin to spoil the experience of what is seen - the US White House depicted within Zimbabwe with the local cast, cameos by a fake Cicciollina and Jeff Koons, obliteration followed by a happy ending by way of incestuous marriage, and a strange blob creature infant from a Frank Henenlotter film as an ending shock from the later's films - and realising this is the European art house equivalent to a Basket Case (1982) or one of the cult American films, only with its idiosyncratic choice of location and higher production value, is an experience which catches one off-guard.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Transgressive/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) As talked of HERE.