Egomania: Island without Hope (1986)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief

Cast: Udo Kier as Baron Tante Teufel; Tilda Swinton as Sally; Uwe Fellensiek as William; Anna Fechter as Ria; Anastasia Kudelka as Annastasia; Sergej Gleitmann as Anatol; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as the Notary

An Abstract Candidate

 

I’m the devil’s aunt!

A Christoph Schlingensief film I am glad to catch up to, it is set on an isolated island where a few people speaking different languages live. One is Tilda Swinton, playing Sally, enforcing how the London born actress is one of cinema’s true travelers in terms of her filmography. Even when she is in mainstream blockbusters it raises an interest for me, and her obsession with collaborating with some of cinema’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers surpasses anyone else, whether it is Bela Tarr (The Man From London (2007)), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria (2021)) or even her long standing collaboration with Derek Jarman in her early career, all these figures alien to each other and representing different types of cinema in themselves she has yet travelled within like a space traveler. Among them, Christoph Schlingensief is another really idiosyncratic figure to have collaborated with too, and it also means we can be Swinton onscreen with Udo Kier, another of the great journey actors, opening with Swinton among other witch-like women carrying a man seemingly like Christ across icy tundra.

Considering its director, this will become his heightened cinema by the ending, but for a large part this is a distinct turn for him for having an oppressive mood early on like horror cinema, the sound design and music – the later by Tom Dokoupil, Ella Johnson, Christoph Schlingensief himself and Helge Schneider -  leaving one on edge before anything happens. Udo, playing Baron Tante Teufel, is a man caught between being a man of privilege and a demon, definitely with a satanic edge to himself which he fights and loses too, fixated on Sally who he had a previous relationship with. Driven insane by this force within him, Kier’s debonair figure with a push by an older woman named Ria, who just wanted him to kill her, decides to punish her for becoming pregnant from another man named William (Uwe Fellensiek). If it means taking his love from her and the child it will suffice.

It is a mood piece, part theatre in tone, and definitely becomes its director’s trademarks when Udo Kier, game as in his other collaborations with his fellow German collaborator movies, does dress up in women’s clothes like a Satanic female relative who has a book reading club, mad eyed and aiming beyond wall chewing. Egomania unlike the others, which could be deliberately offensive and manic, is however more subdued in tone, something of its own. Separated into multiple chapters, and with a very unexpected and inspired touch of old jazz standards scoring this throughout, Egomania feels like a bleak fairy tale in tone, with the Devil in Kier (with his servant Anatol (Sergej Gleitmann)) going out to punish Sally, from giving William forced forgetfulness, to stealing the child on behalf of a notary figure who argues crime is entirely justifiable. It is an interesting entry point for Schlingensief’s cinema, and arguably the best way to come to his work, even if there will be some uncomfortable with the ending, Kier menacing a fake baby in a boiler room-like space. Unlike other work which is more notably cult in tone, this is easier to get to then the really challenging films like United Trash (1996) which get into slapstick transgression, instead leaving one on edge.

It is a testament to Kier as an actor, absolutely on fire in his entire run with Christoph Schlingensief, and a reminder that his journey in b-movies contrasts a man who, always comfortable in any role, was working here or with Rainer Werner Fassbinder or with Lars von Trier among others; even Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974), the infamous Andy Warhol sponsored and Paul Morrissey directed horror films, where Kier is notably struggling with speaking in English, not his native language, was giving it his all regardless. The same is for Swinton, even if this might disappoint some for how small and subdued her role is next to others in her career, standing out as the one person speaking English in the cast, standing out for how the young Swinton, here and with the Derek Jarman films, is virtually different from the acclaimed veteran she became. She was always a chameleon in terms of acting, and the Jarman references feel apt for Egomania, less comparable to other Schlingensief films like The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) but one of Jarman’s like The Last of England (1987). One scene, merely interacting with the young child playing hers on the beach in what is out-of-character b-footage, but being used still in film, does feel like a Jarman-like touch from a director very notorious for how confrontation he would get in his career in his own trademarks, mo re a whimsical improvisation you normally do not get with Schlingensief.

Schlingensief himself is a director who does deserve an even bigger reputation, and I hope one day, as the brief access to his work on streaming and other methods give him more notability, we will eventually get the big physical media release of his work. His only aspect is that he was confrontational which will challenge a lot of people. Some was deliberately shocking for his political satire, such as attacking fascist politics and xenophobia in a 2000 staged project, Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, by envisioning a reality TV show scenario where the audience could vote asylum seekers out of the country per voting period. Other things, like United Trash having Udo Kier in black face which, even in a film condemning of the United Nations in post-colonial Africa and their influence over them, will not go over still even if Schlingensief is entirely there to attack the white foreigners. Aspects which will challenge viewers even in good taste would make his work more likely to win over cult film fans, but again, his work can be very unconventional even in this scenario, even with The German Chainsaw Massacre playing as a horror film but reflecting the post Iron Curtain when East and West Germany reconnected. His work though, blurring genre to art house, really compels me and this, one of the less grandstanding and confrontational, is still brimming with an intensity to admire.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

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

The German Chainsaw Massacre - The First Hour of the Reunification (1990)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief

Cast: Alfred Edel as Alfred; Karina Fallenstein as Klara; Artur Albrecht as Ihr Liebhaber; Susanne Bredehöft as Ihr Mann / Margit; Brigitte Kausch as Brigitte; Volker Spengler as Henk; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as Dietrich; Reinald Schnell as Kurti; Udo Kier as Jonny

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #266 / An Abstract Candidate

 

Kebab on the road!

That title is not a cash-in for Tobe Hooper's legendary The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). This is aware of that film, alongside the irony of West German/German laws that kept that film banned from the country, as with its sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). Its director Christoph Schlingensief became aware of them, likely through bootlegged versions due to their lack of availability, and wrote this film in mind of them only after watching the official celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate in 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down.

It is not an insult to the late Christoph Schlingensief, as much as a reinterpretation of Tobe Hooper's films as a provocateur looking at his homeland in this time of reunification, that he was as much being a shit-stirrer who suggests that, just after the reunification of West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that unification would not lead to the country instantly becoming a better place. This is not an empty concern to make either in context, as set during and shot after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this imagines the GDR (East Germans), when they are able to leave through the opened borders, being picked off by a family of West German cannibals within a wasteland of general chaos left from the mechanics of the country having been separated into two, or even as one in the early 20th Century.

This is emphasised by real footage of the celebration of the unification, with the TV coverage of the state ceremony for the re-unification of Germany at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and a speech by the then German president, Richard von Weizsäcker. His speech of reconnection is contrasted by the awkward pauses, apt in mind to a country that, for at least the 20th Century alone, has been a nation thrown into turbulence, and Christoph Schlingensief through his career both for cinema and controversial public performances has never escaped its own problems.

In this world, an East German woman Klara (Karina Fallenstein) kills her boyfriend and flees by car across the border to West German. Said border is a phantom world, shot in rundown industrial wasteland, of unemployed custom officers who have lost their minds, and many figures in the phantom zone including the cannibalistic family, picking off stray drivers to make into sausages, a more perverse choice rather than just meat knowing sausages are a cultural stereotype (and cultural product) for Germany. At first, The German Chainsaw Massacre as an explicit horror film in tone feels unique for Schlingensief. Set around a woman, who in her really violent and unexplained decision, moves for a new life, the limbo she enters is atmospheric. The rundown industrial environments and wasteland is contrasted with a tone creepy just from the soundtrack, and it is set up that the film is going to be extremely violent, such as foreshadowing a character being alive despite having no bottom half. His satirical tone, a grotesque one, I have become acclimatised to seeing his films for the first time looks like it is going to be filtered through this different mood.

The German Chainsaw Massacre however shifts quickly to his trademark, a hyper extreme and exaggerated tone which is in bad taste and very broad, meant to be very sickly humorous but in itself really serrated and confrontational as a result. His cinema, in hindsight, was always going to have an issue to sell to outside Germany because it is so ingrained in concerns about Germany's cultural and political aspects, with so many nuisances for all his chaotic mass of screaming caricature I myself would have no idea about¹. It is cinema, for a cult audience, that you can "sell" for how extreme and weird he can be, but his cinema really requires some context to get the most from its satire. He also, in deliberately being offensive to middlebrow ideals in his homeland, as was the case in United Trash (1996), has moments which have not aged well at all here one of the cannibalistic family a predatory lesbian.

It is however also more closer to the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre than you would presume, no way near as precise and menacing, but with Tobe Hooper's film having a lot of strangely twisted humour, a lot of bizarre characters, and with Christoph Schlingensief's movie riffing on the set-up and, in an escape through a vehicle at the end, even visual motifs. Hopper's sequel, much to the bemusement of his financers Cannon Group who wanted a straight-laced horror film, is especially a clear influence here, as alongside being such an underrated film in itself, Hooper was arguably playing to this same twisted and grotesque humour in his own country's context, of  his cannibal family becoming businessmen in eighties America, and Bill Moseley being a mad Vietnam War veteran screaming about setting up "Nam Land" as a public attraction.

The German Chainsaw Massacre is a film where most of the cast, even the female lead, are not defendable. Artur the boyfriend, who somehow manages to stay alive despite looking like grounded mince eventually with his guts only kept inside by a sliver of skin, is introduced being a near rapist, whilst our cannibal family, with a tendency of putting old man masks on their victims to kill them ritually, are a strange assortment of oddballs and even products of incest. The grandfather from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre here replaced by one clearly dead, revealed to be a skeleton in a German war outfit, the male head is doing bad ventriloquism from which everyone believes whilst one of the other members explicitly wears a winged German helmet evoking the country's warring past. And then there is Udo Kier, who sadly is not as prevalent here as in other Schlingensief films, playing a strange mad younger man on the side posing as a police officer just to grope a female friend. In terms of commitment to the performance, he at one point whilst wearing a wig sets it on fire for real, which is a something different to say the least and just evokes, with the exception of his Lars von Trier and Guy Maddin roles, how little I truly got to see from him as an actor just from the more well known genre films he made.

It is a film that, like the other Christoph Schlingensief films I have seen, if much more difficult to digest as it continues, his films of the nineties period at least being openly broad. His style is fascinating and memorable - the most obvious mannequin stunt possible, when one is thrown at a car, feels on purpose - but it is also a very acquired taste especially as in terms of the genre he is working in, horror, it becomes intentionally derailed by his provocative broadness. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre never had someone's testicles ripped off, and considering what he did with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, Tobe Hooper himself realised the comedic potential of his own premise and made a film that was broad and over-the-top comedy for the sequel, matching the tone of The German Chainsaw Massacre more even if Schlingensief's film is still, even an hour long, a much more challenging film in terms of his world's exaggerated acting, broad comedy and icky shock value to provoke and annoy his country.

Schlingensief's film is fascinating, rewarding if you appreciate Christoph Schlingensief as a provocateur. It is a film in hindsight I would wonder how a regular horror viewer would react to it, as Schlingensief's films really do have their own idiosyncratic tone which, honestly, is more difficult to chew on in that he has political ideas visually upfront. It is, in truth too, not necessarily provocative in a profound way only what he did, but a really nihilistic equivalent of chewing with your mouth open with his work as much for me as an outsider, the dirty laundry of Germany's complicated historical past and present in his career being scrutinised not through the cold eye of a figure like Austria's Michael Haneke. As a Haneke looked at Europe's failings in his chilling cerebral nature, Christoph Schlingensief instead has a gregarious and deliberately offensive tone, "gregarious" apt as, even if you may never find this film funny at all, and the location choices are actively chosen to be grimy, he plays all of this with a broad farcical tone than takes the horror tropes seriously, something comparable to when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 transgressed the first film's seriousness by being ridiculous upfront.

More so now having seen the film, I wished to have seen this on a cinema screen with an audience presuming it was a horror film with just political content than what you get with a Christoph Schlingensief film. I know this film was screened at the Showroom in Sheffield², an independent cinema in England which has been in the past the closest for me to see, in a blue moon, non-mainstream Hollywood films on a cinema screen. Baring one I have seen onscreen there, Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers (2009), which is for another review for another day, it would have been fascinating to see how people would have reacted to a film like The German Chainsaw Massacre, especially a British audience not having grown up in a country that went through unification, like this. Knowing in 2021, renamed Blackest Heart, a terrible title, this has ended up on Amazon Prime in the United Kingdom, is fittingly hilarious with my own sick sense of humour. The one film from Christoph Schlingensief not made available on MUBI, their streaming platform allowing me to see his cinema and in a context, this in itself is a perverse yet perfect way to sell this film as many baffle people, expecting a generic horror film like others on that site, will find Christoph Schlingensief's offensive production mocking the change of a united Germany there facing them. Even when it is taken off, as always happens with streaming sites with interesting films, it may appear in another unexpected place, waving with its twisted series of gore scenes and broad acting performances, to baffle more people, and I pray that continues so forth.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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

 

======

1) This one article, by Dr Sarah Pogoda, a Senior Lecturer in German Studies and German Literature for various organisations such as the University of Sheffield, has helped me considerably gain more from The German Chainsaw Massacre and admire the film greatly.

2) Screened in 2014, as is documented here, I saw this on the marquee outside and now more than ever wished I could have gone to the screening.

100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief            

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief      

Cast: Udo Kier as Adolf Hitler; Alfred Edel as Hermann Goering; Margit Carstensen as Martha Goebbels; Volker Spengler as Fegelein; Andreas Kunze as Martin Bormann; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as Joseph Goebbels; Marie-Lou Sellem as Tochter Goebbels; Asia Verdi as Nurse Morell; Brigitte Kausch as Eva Braun

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Enjoy them, the nuts of the Germans.

[Major Plot Thread Spoilers]

From the year of my birth, enfant terrible Christoph Schlingensief shot this film improvised in an actual World War II bunker, documenting the last days or so of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle before their world collapsed. You could say it is tasteless, not comparable to a serious take like Downfall (2004) with the late Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Yet, with the added irony of the Wim Wenders connection this film has which we will get into, and how most now know Downfall for turning the scene of Ganz's Hitler getting angry into an internet meme, whether about video games and films, how one deals with the legacy of the Nazis especially as a German is salient to the project's point and a fixation Schlingensief has been pointed on.

In a 2005 documentary Christoph Schlingensief and His Films, effectively an extended sit-down interview with Schlingensief by director Frieder Schlaich over his career at that point, one of the points Schlingensief made, and is contrasted by the broadness (and for me misfiring) nature of Terror 2000 (1992), is really profound to consider. That of how he talks of Germany having been ultra-tentative about Nazi history, saying that if they had left it open and let it corrode in public, there may have been less concern of its fetishisation and a rise in Neo-Nazism. German law, even to the point videogames had to be censored, understandably had a strong reaction to trying to deal with this history even if you are against censorship. One of the bleakest moments in their history is a difficult one to deal with, and yet 100 Years of Adolf Hitler cannot be said to be trivialising it either, even this perverse farce having a profoundness when, because of the evil he committed in real life, Hitler is reduced to Udo Kier as a drug addict, Eva Braun clearly being more attracted to Martha Goebbels, and Goebbels himself carrying on incest with his daughter. In fact, no one in the group of male party members still alive really likes Goebbels, more fixated on getting the Reich Councillor position and hoping to oust him even in a bunker they are all stuck in.

Terror 2000, which was made in the post-Soviet Union fall and tackling the question of migrants in German culture eventually did become merely uncomfortable, as for a subject which has been a discussion for the country even decades later, it never really was a film about the migrants themselves and does eventually, particularly with its attempt to mix corpse humour with content like rape, end up missing its target. Here the mix is right, even when it does cross into taboos like sexuality that dances a dangerous line in that territory too in one scene. It would almost being tragic seeing these people lost and broken until you remember that the real figures led to World War II and the Holocaust, the follies of people who acted worse than beasts yet tragically still human. These tragic figures a small cast of actors play in 100 Years... bicker, feel cornered, argue about who gets a higher rank when all this blows over, even Hitler's origins when he originally wanted to be a painter evoked even if reduced now to Udo Kier making arse prints in paint on canvases. Theirs is also one of the bleakest depictions of Christmas celebration you could get only screen to, with scrawny trees in the darkened corner. At fifty five minutes too, this never skips over into dragging on, and the last days of Hitler are not told the same as real life.

Case in point, Hitler does die, and yet you can become the Fuhrer, and can only take that name and that of "Hitler", if you have the moustache, which Eva Braun eventually does. It would almost be subversive in another way, were it not for the specific figures involved, that Eva and Martha Goebbels are romantically attracted to each other from their introduction, and are married at one point, even if it leads to Martha dying and her birthing a (cloth doll) child at the same time that will be put in a river like Moses in a wicker basket.

Though a film made in little time, it is a striking production, actually shot in a bunker, with the film also shot in stark monochrome and using only the lighting available from the production as the only lighting source. It neither hides its artifice either, based on a play, as you will see the clapboard multiple time and calls for "Action!" in many scenes, a film openly admitting its improvisation. So much so as I leave the most curious aspect which bookmarks the film at the end of this review, as it is the most open to interpretation. Wim Wender's 1984 Palme D'Or win at that year's Cannes Film Festival, for Paris, Texas, which could be seen as the most profane aspect of this entire film even in lieu to its trivialisation of the evil of Nazis, with the footage of the German auteur's award speech, about the potential of art, contrasted to the film it has the footage within which is about the worst of their culture being turned into a profane farce. With Kier speaking directly to camera the names of highly regards high art filmmakers and actors in his first scene onscreen, like Wenders to Margaret von Trotta, there is a sense however that, next to the emotionally tender Paris, Texas, this as Schlingensief's 'career would continue is a pit stop into the grotesque on his end. Certainly he is not pulling his punches, with malice, when he cuts to a figure by the end of the film talking of how, if you do not talk of politics at the time, the German people should have been proud of their achievements and resilience during and after World War II. In the modern day even if a misinterpretation that really skates the dangerous line of forgetting Germany's guilt and why it exists in the first place, more so footage used in a film from the nineteen eighties. Even this film bastardising and trivialising the Nazis never forgets their sins, merely mocks them.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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

Freakstars 3000 (2004)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief

Cast: Werner Brecht, Susanne Bredehöft, Ilse Garzaner, Mario Garzaner, Horst Gelonneck, Kerstin Graßmann, Irm Hermann, Brigitte Kausch, Christoph Schlingensief, Helga Stöwhase and Achim von Paczensky

Ephemeral Waves

 

But first, "How does the bath tub lift work?"

After his cinematic career, Christoph Schlingensief would transition to public events and live performances in his desire to provoke the German populous. In a review of United Trash (1996), I mentioned the infamous “Please Love Austria – First Austrian Coalition Week” stunt, involving allowing members of the public to vote asylum seekers out in a Big Brother scenario, all in mind to a far right group gaining political traction in the Austrian government at the time of that stunt. Whilst not the most provocative of these, especially in mind to the one just mentioned, Freakstars 3000 on the surface is definitely a work that could become tasteless even if in itself a provocative concept.

Freakstars, originally a television series immediately sets itself up as a curious film, neither documentary nor fictional film, begin both with a tribute with one of its participants Werner Brecht but also commenting that it had actors abused and made to act as disabled. Then an animated credit sequence appear with light hearted music, and thus begins a talent competition pastiching the likes of American Idol, which would have been in their first boom in popularity, only with the participants cast with disabled people. The project from Schlingensief was clearly meant as a provocation in terms of forcing people to think of people with disabilities (mental or physical) outside an alienating comfort zone of patronisation, like Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998). There are added provocations in this film, least this compiled production I watched, which would have been deliberately targeting the German audience; one such example, which I would not be surprised Christoph Schlingensief choose on purpose, is the iconography of a clamp for people's names and in the animated title sequence, which caused me to wonder if that was a reference to eugenics and measuring skulls.

The actual project, in terms of auditions and working with people with disabilities, is carefully done and ultimately more soft hearted than that initial concept and references suggest. Schlingensief does not look down on the people involved, all the audition sequences jovial and with applause as we see the first rounds a group gathering together in a playful singing or talent competition. The challenge is the presentation - rough early digital and TV aesthetic around the taboo of physical or tangible disability, jamming it into a middle class German viewer's eye. Truthfully, Freakstars 3000 is a failure because even the production felt this was not really enough, and that the film even less than eighty minutes goes onto tangents most of the time away from the premise. Previewing its later content, you briefly wonder if that is actually Angela Merkel on one of Freakstar's spin-offs, the future chancellor of Germany from 2005 in a mock political show, looking deeply uncomfortable as a disabled older man chews on the cud of political rot. Instead they are two of the participants of the show, one of them Horst one of the MVPs as an older man, playing a figure next to Kerstin, an older woman with schizophrenia playing Merkel, reducing German politics down to shouting figures whilst Horst thankfully points out the phrase "Hitler is a Nazi pig!" is one we need to say, or shout as he does, to remind outselves of that fact more often.

The film has tangents, from political shows to parodies of those old television advertisements that used to sell CD compilations, something I gained nostalgia for, as well as amusement that Germany had these ads too and that the fictional releases here have an exaggerated amount of discs per set, Horst's getting 555 discs for his music. It is, truthfully, somewhat of a fangless production in terms of what it is meant to be getting at. Ultimately, it's nice amused air to itself is sweet, as the denizens involved with this talent competition never seem mocked and insulted, even getting into fictitious scenarios such an abrupt (and frankly pointless) hostage sequence. There is however also a sense of the project in its entirety, if this footage compiled is the best of it, never really got to something meaningful, beyond the initial provocation of forcing the viewer to view people with disabilities. There are eventually quite a few tangents, and for everyone that is amusing, such as a home shopping spin-off, where a hand cranked mixed is proved useless, by the final act it starts to dwindle. When you get to the final candidates and a band, the talent show aesthetic is dropped in favour of a fictitious narrative, including one of the members Werner Brecht having a health scare, and a final performance with them as a free jazz band which never really gets to a point.

It evoked Young@Heart (2007), a quasi-documentary of a group of singers all over seventy, which was attempting to deal with issues of mortality and has vaguely clung to me, least for enforcing a fascinating with Talking Heads with a specific cover of Road to Nowhere, but was ultimately soon-to-be-forgotten work which never really stood out, wanting to warm fuzzy feeling of pleasantness which is always nice, but dissipates like a puddle in the sun quickly without substantial meaning added to it.. The only time the work gets mean to the competitors is the rejection of those who failed to get through to the next round, taken from the likes of American Idol, and even that here is softened considerably, even in one case with one competitor playfully wrestling the director Schlingensief on the ground restaged as a confrontation.  There is nearly a nod to the point presumed for this show, a jab at reality television and talent shows' cruelty as much as tackling disability, when a gong is used in a round to start the performances, evoking the immensely popular American show The Gong Show, but that never goes anywhere. Likely, with clear emotional sweetness, Schlingensief himself likely never wanted to be cruel to anyone who participated.

And they stand out, between Horst and Mario, the scene stealer with his singing voice and a surprising talent behind the drum kit, or Andrea a the AC/DC fan unlikely to work within a free jazz band, an entire cast of real people here full of charisma and energy. There is also something, even if obvious, pointed to reducing political parties, whether nationalist and anti-Semitic, or even a figure like Angela Merkel, into shouting caricatures, and it is poignant, especially to the references to Nazis, that it is disabled people playing them, an emphasis knowing that tragically the Nazis' view of disability were inhumane. Thankfully, they became the source for said disabled people long after they are gone to be taken the piss out of.

Sadly, Freakstars 3000 eventually loses momentum, losing focus among its various tangents and the emphasis on fake drama, even if the latter is a point to jab at reality television. Speaking as someone with autism, a learning disability, I say ahead of time I cannot speak with everyone who has a disability when it comes to gauging the film, but it definitely becomes a lighter hearted work which really never goes into true provocation. Von Trier's The Idiots, for example, was a fictional black comedy of people faking disability as a band of outsiders, likely to become offensive were it not, for me, a sense of it still being entirely on the side of disabled people. That film, part of von Trier's Dogma 95 era, really hit powerful points, especially when real people with disabilities are brought in, and those in these outsiders are forced to show either their empathy or their biases, and that it was a provocation of forcing one to think of severe disability and as a subversive nature to this within "normalised" society. Contrary, if this was considered in poor taste, it says a lot to how complacent German culture was at the time that Freakstars 3000 was mad. Milder forms of transgression, whilst useful to help built conversation, can however be much more focus than this, among many of this time for the director including a parody of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. It does feel tame, which could both be a sad state of myself to react this way, or truthfully that talking of disability requires more than a warm blanket sensation that this ultimately becomes, especially as coming from United Trash (1996), this is tonally a huge softening of the image of Christoph Schlingensief but also far less ambitious in terms of production and imagination in transgression.

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.