I Only Want You To Love Me

Although originally only intended as a television production, and certainly one of his lesser-known films, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s thoroughly anti-capitalistic I Only Want You To Love Me (1976) aka Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt likely resonated with viewers, as it did with myself, not simply because of its vivid rendering of the adverse effects of unbridled capitalism and its far-reaching, sometimes deleterious effects in late 60s Germany, but more so because it so acutely portrays and diagnoses the modern archetype of pussy-whipped males (many of whom I’ve personally known) and the burgeoning black hole from which they can never escape (a hole that is inevitably dug deeper once an ill-thought out marriage, inevitable baby, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt are thrown in the mix). Indeed, like so many of Fassbinder’s films, it is very hard to not feel some excruciating, aching sense of empathy for the characters portrayed in I Only Want You To Love Me—specifically for Peter Trepper, the delusional, and emasculated main character—a man whose intense, overarching desire for love and recognition goes crushingly unfulfilled. Like Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt, the mentally nullified nullo tranny in Fassbinder’s In A Year of 13 Moons (1978) and sweet, Mother Hubbard-like Emma Küsters in Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven (1975), Peter Trepper’s unwavering devotion and yearning for the acceptance of those he loves goes ever unreciprocated; but instead of opting for especially ultramodern panaceas to his problems, as is so typical of Fassbinder films—such as pursuing an irreversible sex change or joining the German Communist Party—Peter instead finds himself hopelessly seduced and ultimately destroyed by money and its often complicated relationship with human (specifically female) desires and emotions. 

 Told in a non-linear yet remarkably fluid, easy-to-follow manner, I Only Want You To Love Me follows the constant ups and downs in the tumultuous life of Peter Trepper, a shy, emotionally retarded and undoubtedly unpopular young man not yet in his mid-20s. Indeed, the title of this working-class melodrama, I Only Want You To Love Me, perfectly sums up Peter’s on-going quandary and sole impetus behind his entire existence as the unloved son of middle-class Catholic Bavarian parents. As ever, Fassbinder’s acute eye for chillingly portraying fascistic family relationships and dynamics is spot on in his portrayal of Peter’s mother—a cold, distinctly unmotherly mother who psychologically castrates Peter from the time he can fit into his first pair of lederhosen, and his father, an inattentive, money-driven businessman who is so disinterested in his wife and son that he is impelled to both house and bed multiple whores in other cities, a move that results in his wife becoming pathologically jealous and vicious to all around her, least of all her young son (yet she cannot bring herself to leave Peter’s father as all of her material comforts are easily provided for her). Eventually, Peter meets his future-wife, Erika (a decidedly puggish and homely Bavarian babe, and certainly not deserving of a man of Peter’s caliber, not least of all in the looks department) whom he eventually weds, erroneously believing, like so many hopeless and emasculated beta males, that marrying the first woman to give him the time of day is the magical cure-all he’s been searching for all his life. 

 Following a lukewarm wedding reception completely void of any congratulatory tone, Peter’s thoroughly antagonistic progenitors give up the home that he lovingly built for them from scratch at the beginning of the film (an especially tough blow to take considering that Peter and his young wife and future baby factory, Erika, could really use a place to hunker down as they embark on their ill-fated marriage) and are all too happy to see him set off to Munich to begin a new and promisingly lucrative, yet punishing construction job through which he hopes to support himself and his seemingly happy wife. Riding high on his success at having attained a new wife (albeit a rather stout, homely and piggish one—but the first and only woman he’ll ever penetrate), a sweet new apartment in one of Germany’s poshest big cities (replete with Turks and Moroccans on all sides, as even the landlord quietly admonishes), and a career in construction for which he seems to be richly rewarded (not realizing that the pipe-smoking Bavarian overlord of the construction company intends to cut his hours), Peter brazenly spends every back-breaking penny he’s earned and then some, going as far as to max out credit cards and take out new loans in order buy his never-satisfied and soon-to-be gestating wife the latest in minimalistic, IKEA-esque furniture, a factory grade sewing machine, designer clothes, and an antique gold bracelet (the latter of which being the equivalent of what is today known as a “push ring”—an extravagant and costly piece of jewelry lovingly bequeathed upon a spoiled alpha female as reward for successfully birthing a child). Of course, it is very easy to see where all of this is going—for a man such as Peter, whose wife and parents are his pathetic, sole sources of both emotional support and intense mental anguish and through which money becomes his only means of attempting to acquire the love and approval of either—his already frayed edges and fragile ego cannot help but bring him to one day snap and commit a characteristically pathetic murder. 

 Admittedly, I Only Want You To Love Me is much less interesting than Fassbinder’s other works, (which are typically and entertainingly replete with sordid tales of homosexual liaisons, trashy tranny escapades, and debauched interracial love triangle romps), but this film is no less important than Fassbinder’s other films in the respect that it again very keenly illustrates the fascistic psychological interplay that exists in male and female gender role relationships (whether documenting the denigrating mother and emasculated son, pussy-whipped husband and spoiled wife, or dominant bear daddy and twinky boy son, etc.), in this case bringing money into play as the central, driving force of upheaval in an already meaningless or befouled relationship. Furthermore, some academics would go so far as to claim that Peter Trepper’s behavior was born not out of a lack of self-esteem or confidence which drove him to spend non-existent money, but instead from a Freudian-derived sense of narcissism; such a theory seems to me like a bunch of hyper-pseudo-intellectual, meaningless claptrap because—let’s face it: some men are just born with an innately submissive, overtly female essence, and Peter Trepper won’t be the first or last who couldn’t resist purchasing his plump, spoiled wife a brand new car for completing their first wedding anniversary (something of a feat indeed, considering the times in which we live) or bestowing her with a “push ring” for popping out a child who will most assuredly be christened Jayden, Kayden, Brayden, Aidan, or some other modern, sickeningly common variant thereof. Indeed, I Only Want You To Love Me should be required viewing for any young, emasculated male who is considering taking his girlfriend for a walk down the aisle—especially with the ever-present, unabashedly Semitic-inspired mental effluvia surrounding television programming such as Bridezilla or The Bachelor irreparably altering the already fragile, malleable minds of young girls who, in turn grow up to idolize celebrity women who intentionally leak their dispassionate sex tapes so that legions of otherwise impotent beta-males can masturbate while their celebrity-obsessed soon-to-be wives dream of subserviently sucking Kanye West's supremely sour spade blade while sporting the latest pair of Uggs.

-Magda von Richthofen zu Reventlow auf Thule

Hot Love

Assuredly, when it comes to the pre-Nekromantik short films of Teutonic enfant terrible Jörg Buttgereit, his lurid and less than 30-minute-long featurette Hot Love (1985) – a softcore punk rock splatter flick shot on Super 8 with a soothing melodic score and pseudo-melodramatic romanticism – is his best and still fresh amateur effort. Starring and featuring a musical score by Daktari Lorenz, who also provided the same artistic services for Buttgereit’s subsequent film and first feature Nekromantik (1987), Hot Love is a proportionately pleasant prototype for the sort of psychosexual arthouse gore-comedies that would earn the bodacious blond beast director the marginal yet loyal underground cult following he has today, thereupon making the film mandatory viewing for fanatical fans of corpse fucking art. More than anything, Hot Love – like Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Pasolini’s Accattone (1961), Morrissey’s Flesh (1968), Waters' Mondo Trasho (1969), Fassbinder’s Love is Colder than Death (1969), Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Solondz’s Fear, Anxiety & Depression (1989), and Noé’s Carne (1991), is an important formative work that acted as an artistic bridge for the Berlin filmmaker, who went from being a budding 'work-in-progress' filmic artist as exemplified in amateur shorts like Captain Berlin (1982) and Blutige Exzesse im Führerbunker (1984) to an auteur with a distinguishable aesthetic signature as exhibited in his mature feature works Der Todesking (1990) and Nekromantik 2 (1991). While it has been nearly two decades since Buttgereit directed his last serious arthouse horror flick Schramm (1994), the filmmaker has gone on to direct live stageplays (one of which – Captain Berlin Versus Hitler (2009) – was shot on digital video and released on DVD) and documentaries on Japanese monster movies (in 2009, he created Monsterland for the French-German TV channel Arte), and a writer of stage and radio plays (Green Frankenstein + Sexmonster) and horror film criticism, yet all of these obsessions and talents were already perceptible in Hot Love. As a sort of “poor man’s Schlingensief” who is aware of culture trends and genre conventions but sort of a ham when it comes to politics, Buttgereit is indubitably a fiendish yet funny renaissance man of sorts and Hot Love is a fine, if less than fine-tuned, example of the sort of honed horror he does best. 

 Aside from the majority of the cinematography and some piddly special-effects, Jörg Buttgereit claims he is responsible for every aspect of the filmmaking process regarding Hot Love, including playing one of the lead characters. That being said, the story of Hot Love is simple yet effective enough, as the film was in part inspired by Buttgereit’s own experience with heartbreak, albeit of the less bloody and brutal sort. Hot Love centers around puny punk protagonist (Daktari Lorenz) who falls madly in love with a girl named Marion (Marion Koob) after meeting her by chance at a alcohol-fueled party. Daktari – a rather homely homeboy whose room is a proletarian punk rock pigsty – experiences unfathomable bliss, but particularly precarious problems arise when Marion finds a new boyfriend – a tall, blond, and handsome bully (played by Buttgereit himself) – who brutalizes both the lovestruck loser’s body and heart. Stricken with a jumbo Judas Kiss from his fleeting flame, Daktari naturally develops acute animosity, overwhelming heartsickness, and a profoundly penetrating and all-consuming lust for revenge that compels him to literally take the heart he was symbolically given by Marion. After Daktari barbarically batters and rapes Marion after stalking her one fine day in the woods, he commits suicide in a final desperate attempt to reach eternal solace, yet unbeknownst to the renegade Romeo, he has impregnated his defiled darling with his sinister seed, thereupon creating a sort of Frankenstein of the flesh that is ripened with rancor.

 Needless to say, German film has come a long way since ill-fated love stories of Veit Harlan’s melodramatic National Socialist propaganda film Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss and the darkly romantic arthouse flick Opfergang (1944).  In traditional German films, including Harlan's, it was always the female that was sacrificed in the name of love and the male protagonist was always honorable, handsome, and heroic, yet Buttgereit turns these film conventions upside down in a fiercely facetious yet seemingly and unconsciously ethno-masochistic manner. What I have always found especially interesting about the films of Jörg Buttgereit – and Hot Love is certainly no exception to this rule – is that despite being a handsome, archetypical Aryan Übermensch of sorts himself, the Berlin-born auteur always casts especially physically loathsome and patently pathetic actors for the protagonists of his films as if he is ‘rooting for the underdog’ untermensch of the distinctly American, Hebraic Hollywood persuasion. Of course, the dark horses of his delightfully demented films are always doomed to a downright deplorable fate, but Buttgereit clearly empathizes with these curious characters all the same. In a tradition more in tune with Judaic Tinseltown films like The Graduate (1967), National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), Revenge of the Nerds (1984), and American Pie (1999), the ‘hero’ of Buttgereit’s Hot Love – like Nekromantik (1987) and Nekromantik 2 (1991) – is not a conquering athletic and aristocratic winner, but a reasonably revolting deadbeat of the most irritatingly impotent kind. That being said, although Hot Love has a determinedly Germanic feel to it, it could not have been made with the crucial influence of classic Hollywood and Japanese B-monster movies, as well as the sort of slave-morality-driven dramas and comedies that have dominated Hollywood for some time now, but I guess that is what one should expect from a nation that is not exactly best known in the international film world for its slasher killers and fart jokes. 

 With its grainy and sometimes scratched Super 8 footage, intentionally and unintentionally laughable acting, stylized but sometimes sterile direction, and sometimes realistic (i.e. a genuine cow heart) but oftentimes strikingly synthetic (i.e. a plastic vagina) special effects, Hot Love – much like his subsequent work Nekromantik – is a merry yet macabre cinematic miscreation of the idiosyncratic kraut quasi-arthouse horror-comedy sort and for that reason alone, it will remain a minor classic in my mind. Similar to Kenneth Anger with Scorpio Rising (1964) and Clu Gulager with A Day with the Boys (1969), Buttgereit wasted no time telling a compelling and aesthetically titillating story in under 30 minutes with his first notable work Hot Love, which is no small accomplishment considering the lack of production values for the work.  In our increasingly turbulent times where true romance has gone rancid and eroticism in movies is more akin to a watching a live hysterectomy on television than oxytocin-driven emotions, Hot Love offers a humorous, if less than sensually heated, portrayal of Aryan amorousness run amok.  Hot Love may not be Fassbinder's I Only Want You to Love Me (1976), but it does remind us that even the dreaded Hun can be somber, if spiteful and swinish, slave of love.

-Ty E

The Tenderness of Wolves

Based on the exceptionally bestial acts of pederast German serial killer Fritz Haarmann aka the Vampire of Hanover  – who molested, murdered, and cannibalized upwards of 27 boys and young men between 1918 and 1924 – The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) aka Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe directed by Ulli Lommel (Haytabo, The Boogeyman) and produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Satan’s Brew, Querelle) is undoubtedly the greatest ‘horror’ film of Neuer Deutscher Film. Following in the hard-to-supersede footsteps of Austrian auteur Fritz Lang’s self-proclaimed masterpiece M (1931) – a work also based on the real-life murder of Haarman, but also fellow post-WWI bloodlusting seriall killers Carl Großmann, Peter Kürten, and Karl Denke – The Tenderness of Wolves takes a more realist and Fassbinder-esque approach as opposed to the big-budget German expressionist aesthetic assembled by the Metropolis (1927) director. Starring Fassbinder superstar Kurt Raab (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, Beware of a Holy Whore) in the leading role as a bald-headed bastard Haarmann, the character bears a striking, albeit more sinister and strapping (relatively speaking), appearance to Peter Lorre’s character Hans Beckert in Lang’s M. Decidedly anachronistic in nature due to unavailability of costumes and props from post-WWI era, Lommel opted for setting The Tenderness of Wolves amid the debris and devastation of ground zero Germany soon after the conclusion of the Second World War, thereupon giving the film a much more nihilistic, fiercely forlorn, and overall harum-scarum feel that is more harmonious with Fassbinder’s deracinated Deutschland of the socially and emotionally inharmonic than the post-empire/pre-nazi years. Of course, the most obvious and important difference between The Tenderness of Wolves and M is that, unlike Lang’s work, Lommel’s film is decidedly dripping with blood, but more fascinatingly yet appallingly, gratuitous and seedy scenes of exposed young male bodies, including that of a particularly venerable preteen boy. That being said, I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that not only is The Tenderness of Wolves one of the most aesthetically callous portrayals of a serial killer ever captured on celluloid, but it is also the sort of film that a real-life lust-slayer would see as the most potent and gratifying of arthouse pornography. In other words, The Tenderness of Wolves is to the chickenhawk serial killer what the kiddy arthouse flick Maladolescenza (1977) directed by Pier Giuseppe Murgia is to the debauched bourgeois pedophile. Needless to say, The Tenderness of Wolves is not the sort of ‘horror’ film that appeals to those pedestrian horror fanatics who spend their saved up allowance money dressing up in unflatteringly fitting Michael Myers costumes and going to Friday the 13th conventions.

Like William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), Todd Verow’s Frisk (1995), and Marian Dora’s Cannibal (2006), The Tenderness of Wolves is the sort of uncompromising homicidal homo flick that would be especially unsettling to modern prissy political correct viewers, not just because of the serial killer’s sadistic sodomite persuasion, but also the pathetic way his life; or lack thereof. Living in a terribly cramped, decrepit, and filthy apartment adorned with human bones, rancid meat, and kitschy angel paintings, Fritz Haarmann (Kurt Raab) is not exactly the most hygienic fellow, thus he has no problem butchering the tender bodies of his young prey and selling it on the black market in a manner that anticipates the cannibalistic family in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974); a work that was released one year after Lommel’s film that would do for Texas farmhouses what Lommel's did for German ghettos. Haarmann also has an opportunistic bisexual boyfriend named Hans Grans (Jeff Roden) that looks somewhat like director Ulli Lommel due to his dapper appearance and who merely uses his cannibalistic friend as a source of tasty twink patties and over black market goods. Needless to say, Haarmann is a patently pathetic pervert, thereupon giving a certain ‘humanity’ to his mostly chilling character and thus making The Tenderness of Wolves all the more of a vexing experience for the viewer. Like “British Jeffrey Dahmer” Dennis Nilsen, Haarmann – a cunning creature of the most bestialized yet godforsaken sort – works with law enforcement, thereupon enabling him to shield his crimes, at least for an extended, mass-murderering period of time. Considering the cops themselves have come upon hard times in post-WWII Germany, they remain absolutely apathetic towards Haarmann’s proclivity for penetrating young boys as they see him, so long as the baldheaded brute provides them with the sort of petty slum policing they are looking for. In fact, Germany is so devastated and depleted by war that an Arab black marketer (played by Fassbinder’s tragic Moroccan lover El Hedi ben Salem) of all people has the audacity to tell Haarman that, “Germany is kaput,” which is indubitably true considering an untermensch barbarian can now bed a German woman for a package of cigarettes in a country that previously put a premium on racial eugenics only a few years before. In short, The Tenderness of Wolves does for the German New Wave what Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) did for neorealism: depicting the post-war Germany in a most unsentimental light where the common man is a degraded beggar and the average woman is a worn-out whore, albeit Lommel took particular advantage of these stark circumstances – soundly synchronizing horror movie genre conventions with real-life horror – henceforth creating one of the greatest Teutonic horror flicks since, well, Fritz Lang’s M.

 

Due to his artistic degeneration into an acutely amateur auteur of such digital diarrhea direct-to-DVD horror flicks as Zombie Nation (2004), Zodiac Killer (2005), B.T.K. Killer (2005), Green River Killer (2005), Baseline Killer (2008), and other similarly generically titled and hastily assembled, wretched works, some fans of The Tenderness of Wolves question if it was actually Fassbinder in the director's seat as he was certainly on the set of the film as both producer and a co-star. In an interview featured in the book Eyeball Compendium, Lommel states in regard to Fassbinder’s contribution to the film: “He actually didn’t want to make the movie himself, but he had respect for our affinity for it. He didn’t want to do it and it didn’t fit into his career, really, and he thought it was too controversial…What I got from Fassbinder was everyone who ever worked for Fassbinder. All the Fassbinder superstars are in this movie, except for Hanna Schygulla.” Indeed, after re-watching The Tenderness of Wolves not long ago, as well as some of Lommel’s later works Cocaine Cowboys (1979), Blank Generation (1980), The Devonsville Terror (1983), and Strangers in Paradise (1984) and a marathon of Fassbinder’s movies, there is no doubt in my mind that the arthouse-turned-shithouse auteur directed it. On top of being more gory, gritty and downright vulgar – traits that dominate Lommel’s contemporary films, although in a rather retrogressive manner – than anything Fassbinder has ever directed, The Tenderness of Wolves lacks the sort of signature naked melodrama that even predominates in the Fox and His Friends (1975) director’s lesser works.  A malicious and oftentimes misanthropic cinematic work of vicious aesthetic and thematic vulgarity, The Tenderness of Wolves is probably the only German New Wave flick that did for horror what Fassbinder's films did for melodrama: unshrouding the collective soul of a defeated, dehumanized, and demoralized nation, which Lommel's friend/producer Marian Dora would continue with Cannibal (2006) and The Angel’s Melancholia (2009) aka Melancholie Der Engel.  I might be a tad bit optimistic, but maybe its about time Ulli Lommel goes back to the Fatherland and returns to his artistic roots, as the murderous mystique of cock-chomping cannibal Armin Meiwes and aberrant Austrian Aryan Josef Fritzl beckons....

-Ty E

Shadow of Angels

Like The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) aka Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe purportedly directed by Ulli Lommel (Adolf and Marlene, D.C. Sniper), Shadow of Angels (1975) aka Schatten der Engel directed by Daniel Schmid (La Paloma, Jenatsch) is a melodramatically immaculate work that looks and feels like it was ghost-directed by German New Wave alpha-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who also suspiciously starred in, produced, and used his production company for the film. Based on Fassbinder’s controversial play The Garbage, the City, and Death (1975) aka Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod; a work that irked German historian and Hitler biographer Joachim Fest so much that he would label the auteur filmmaker a, “left-wing fascist” due to the perceived ‘anti-Semitic’ subtext in the work. Not only would copies of The Garbage, the City, and Death be withdrawn from distribution by the German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, but Schmid’s adaptation was also withdrawn from theaters in new ‘democratic and philo-Semitic’ post-war Germany, thereupon sparking outrage and protest in lucidly liberal Paris, France of all places. Outraged, French post-structuralist/post-modernist philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked, "Banning or blocking a film by Schmid is no victory in the fight against anti-semitism. On the contrary, it is a victory for a neo-fascism (...). For some people will remember the poignancy of this film, its political significance and how it was forced out of the public eye." Indeed, for anyone who has seen Shadow of Angels, it seems like an asinine absurdity that such a philosophically multifaceted and aesthetically scrupulous cinematic work would not at least seem somewhat sympathetic to the Semite plight, especially if one considers the nefarious nature of many of the gentiles in the film and writer Fassbinder's less than fascistic political proclivities, but I guess most viewers need their movie morals spoon fed to them with a clear distinction of “black” and “white.” Centering around a lonely quasi-existentialist prostitute who receives abject apathy and even contempt from her homosexual husband, prissy fellow hookers, and unsympathetic parents, the physically used and abused and emotionally broken Dietrich-like lady finally finds short-term solace in the unlikely form of a rich Jew.

During the beginning of Shadow of Angels, sonorously sad streetwalker Lily Brest (Ingrid Caven) commits a seemingly sadistic act when she breaks the neck of a kitten, but by the end of the film one realizes that it is not an act of mindless savagery she has engaged in, but selfless mercy and sympathy. As a fellow pussycat of the night dwelling in the ghettos of Frankfurt in the hopes of merely getting by, Lily knows what it feels like to no longer want to live. Married to a homosexual man-child named Raoul (R.W. Fassbinder) who lives by the decidedly deranged personal dictum “beating means love” and blows all of her hard-earned money via prostitution on gambling when he is not busy playing with toys, Lily has no one in her life to reach out to. Incidentally, Ingrid Caven (who plays Lily) was briefly married to her onscreen husband Rainer Werner Fassbinder in real-life, thus making both of their performances in Shadow of Angels seem all the more audaciously authentic, hysterically  heated, and characteristically chemistry-driven, especially when Raoul seems more concerned with the size of Lily’s gentleman suitor’s genitals than the fact they are copulating with his wife. Things eventually change for Lily when a bright light appears in the red district in the form of a rich Jew broker (played by Klaus Löwitsch) who, on top of buying her body for a pretty penny, confides in the intelligent call-girl, which eventually evolves into a passionate, albeit diacritic and dangerous, love affair that is ultimately doomed due to the lovers' conflicting backgrounds, forthwith giving Shadow of Angels a vaguely Shakespearean feel of sorts. The son of two Jews who perished in the holocaust at the hands of the people in the town he now acts as the unofficial dictator of, the rich Jew is not exactly a fan of Lily’s ex-nazi drag queen father, who the kosher fat cat personally blames for his belated parents' deaths. The rich Jew believes he is, “not a Jew like the others,” but fits into character with many of the stereotypes of the Israelite Semitic type, being a cunning capitalist who allows people to starve to death if it will earn him one more shekel, yet the other cryptic ‘movers’ and ‘shakers’ of the decrepit Frankfurt town are ultimately more repugnant and vicious. For example, the Chief of Police (Boy Gobert) who states of Jews, “they hate you and yet they need you for their perverted pleasures,” thus insinuating the perennial stereotype that Jews are parasites and exploiters, is completely in bed with the rich Jew, even helping him with the cover-up of a murder and the committing of murder despite his personal disdain for the kosher broker. The only one who stays true to his old school National Socialist ethos is Lily’s degenerate father Mr. Müller (Adrian Hoven), a vitriolic cabaret singer in drag who resembles an older, lower-class version of Helmut Berger à la Visconti’s The Damned (1969). Mr. Müller has no qualms about admitting that he has killed Jews and that he wished he had killed the rich Jew’s parents. Müller believes that the rich Jew “raises her (Lily)...to degrade him,” which is indubitably true, but the uncommonly handsome Hebrew madly and hypocritically falls in love with the progeny of one of his greatest adversaries, thus his generosity is not in vain.

 As stated by Ulli Lommel’s typical tall, dark, and handsome character “little Prince” – one of the rich Jew’s most right-hand men – “cocks can achieve miracles,” especially in Shadow of Angels, but wonders of love sometimes come at a hefty price, which the wealthy Judaic is surprisingly willing to pay, even if it means the annihilation of what he loves most. Of course, in the end, the rich Jew and his gentile minions are still on top and the prostitutes and lower-class anti-Semites are still at the bottom, hence certain ‘liberal’ European’s misguided belief that Shadow of Angels is a work of postmodern left-wing fascism. If anything, it only goes to show that German auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (Parsifal, Hitler: A Film from Germany) was right when he stated that "Whoever joined the Jews and the leftists was successful, and it did not necessarily have anything to do with love, or understanding, or even inclination. How could Jews tolerate that, being that these others only wanted power,” in his aptly titled article On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the Last War (1990), as his controversial remark is certainly pertinent in regard to the hostile response to Shadow of Angels and the overall message of the film itself. Despite both Schmid's film adaption Shadow of Angels being regarded as a minor masterpiece of melodrama, as well as the play that it is based on, The Garbage, the City, and Death, being regarded as one of Fassbinder, if not his most, greatest play, that did not stop authoritarian holier-than-thou leftist gatekeepers from trying to assign these aesthetically and historically important works to the cultural garbage heap of history. Although screened in competition for the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, Shadow of Angels has never been released on international DVD and continues to be attacked (although to a lesser degree than the Fassbinder play) by self-righteous academics of the ostensibly self-righteous, cultural marxist sort.  That being said, I guess the Neuer Deutscher Film auteur died in vain when he was found dead with a script he was working on for a film about Jewish Marxist agitator Rosa Luxemburg in his hand because who needs neo-nazis when you have leftist fair-weather friends like those of Fassbinder, who was arguably the most culturally and artistically German filmmaker of the post-WWII era.  Needless to say, his Swiss friend Daniel Schmid did a great service when he directed Shadows of Angels; one of the greatest films associated with the Fass-bande.

-Ty E

In a Year of 13 Moons

Typically regarded as singularly prolific Neuer Deutscher Film auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most intimate and lugubrious film, In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) aka In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden – a foreboding work that centers around the last couple days of a suicidal transvestite – also happens to be one of the tragic filmmaker’s greatest and most ambitious works. Dedicated to Fassbinder’s lover of four years, Armin Meier (Satan’s Brew, Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven), who committed suicide after the gay filmmaker broke up with him during a trip to New York in May 1978, In a Year of 13 Moons is hardly the biographical portrayal it pays posthumous tribute to. Apparently accused of belittling and torturing Meier, Fassbinder was attacked in the German tabloids and even received anonymous death threats for what many perceived as provoking the young man’s self-slaughter. After considering being a farmer in Paraguay or a social recluse, Fassbinder finally opted to deal with the heated heartbreak of Meier’s death by getting to work on In a Year of 13 Moons, a film he went on to explain, “What is important for me is that I managed to make a film which does not simply translate my emotions about the suicide. That is my pain and mourning about the fact that I may have failed in some respects in this relationship, but that I made a film…which goes far beyond this; which tells a lot more than I could have told about Armin. And for me this was a decision for life.” As a product of the Lebensborn program – a National Socialist SS breeding project which allowed SS officers to sire children with random racially Nordic women – Meier is similar to the protagonist of In a Year of 13 Moons in that he spent his early childhood years as an orphan and never knew who his biological parents were, but the literal biographical similarities between Fassbinder’s ill-fated beau and the fictional character essentially end there. As an average-sized mensch with a striking resemblance to James Dean as depicted in his passive yet potent performance in Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven (1975), Meier does not even vaguely physically resemble the towering Nordic transvestite played by Volker Spengler in In a Year of 13 Moons, nor did he have his penis cut off in Casablanca because a Jewish holocaust survivor treated him with romantic disdain like the character in the film. Of course, being the starkest of the filmmaker’s always distressing and oftentimes nihilistic melodramas, one is better off forgetting the facts that inspired In a Year of 13 Moons and instead embrace the emotions that sparked film as Fassbinder did not title his feature-length work Love is Colder than Death (1969) for nothing. Needless to say, In a Year of 13 Moons proved to be one of the most agonizing and afflicting films I have ever seen, and I mean that in the most positive way, as no other film has provoked in me the ability to empathize with the all-consuming misery of a dick-less and suicidal tranny. 

 From its emotionally bombarding beginning to its harrowing yet inescapable end, In a Year of 13 Moons is an emotionally excruciating cinematic excursion that takes no prisoners in terms of its propensity to inflict shame and misery onto the viewer. Beginning with the superbly superstitious claim that, “Every seventh year is a Year of the Moon. People whose lives are strongly influenced by their emotions suffer more intensely from depressions in these years. To a lesser degree, this is also true of years with 13 new moons. When a Moon Year also has 13 new moons inescapable personal tragedies may occur. In the 20th century, this dangerous constellation occurs six times. One of these is 1978….,” In a Year of 13 Moons shifts gears and reveals our humble and humiliated protagonist Erwin / Elvira Weishaupt (Volker Spengler) who is beaten by a gang of Slavic homosexuals after one of them is repulsed to find that the tall transvestite is no female but a neutered nullo nutjob. As a married man with a grownup daughter and a butcher by trade, Erwin does not seem like the sort of individual that would fall hopelessly in love with fancy rich fellows, let alone have himself castrated for the most trivial of reasons. Erwin’s hooker friend ‘Red Zora’ (Ingrid Caven), a ‘tart with a heart,’ states that her full-time drag-queen friend was not even gay until relatively recently and his decision to undergo a sex change was for seemingly no reason. Of course, as you watch In a Year of 13 Moons, you learn that Erwin went through the excessive procedure in the totally delusional hope that a man he loved, Anton Saitz (played by real-life orphan Gottfried John) – a holocaust survivor turned black marketer turned prestigious property speculator – would accept him as a serious lover if he were a pseudo-woman of sorts.  As an ex-butcher who had no problem mutilating live animals, an act he said gave meaning to their lives, Erwin must have seen castration as only a minor sacrifice in the conquest of true and eternal love, but unfortunately things don't go as planned and the genitally-deprived he-woman is left with nothing to show for his unspeakable suffering, including his mangled manhood. In In a Year of 13 Moons, the viewer follows the particularly perturbed protagonist as he makes a desperate attempt to pick up the broken pieces of his past, but on his fateful personal odyssey, Erwin is only met with cold rejection and disdain from those individuals that are supposed to love him the most. Erwin even revisits the Catholic convent he spent his youth in, discombobulating the nun who helped raise him, Sister Gudrun (Lilo Pempeit), with his absurd gentle giant drag queen appearance. Describing the child she knew as a ‘good boy,’ the now grown up Erwin reflects on the fact that it was in his youthful days in the convent that he learned to lie to others because by engaging in deceptive behavior he was rewarded, thereupon sparking the quasi-schizophrenic dichotomy between his true internal self and the role he would play until falling in love with the holocaust survivor of his dreams. As can be expected, Erwin is never able to reconcile the transformation of his former male self and his ‘Elvira’ persona, thus resulting in the most lamentable yet inevitable of consequences. 

 In a Year of 13 Moons is an interesting and undoubtedly controversial work in that it contradicts Hollywood history, portraying a good, Aryan German of notably Nordic features as the victim of a cold, calculating and glaringly ugly Jew, who laughs at the man who purports to love him when he realizes he become a eunuch for him. In a sense, Fassbinder – who arguably tormented his boyfriend to the point that he committed suicide – is symbolic of Jew jerk Saitz in both repellant appearance and character and Meier – a lonely Lebensborn boy who was originally spawned to be one of Germany’s greatest sons – is Erwin, a man that is ultimately destroyed by a life of misfortune and heartbreak. Fassbinder may have had a reputation for abusing women and drugs, but one must admit there was a certain uncompromising honesty, albeit cryptic, in his cinematic art, with In a Year of 13 Moons being one of his most striking, sensitive and artistically merited examples. German auteur Christoph Schlingensief would pay sardonic tribute to Fassbinder and his masterpiece of melodramatic misery In a Year of 13 Moons with his work The 120 Days of Bottrop (1997); a work also starring Volker Spengler and other Fassbinder survivors.  Ultimately, Fassbinder himself would reach an end as tragic, if not more pathetic, than his lover Meier; but this is what one might come to expect for an individual who fucked virtually every cast member of his films, had a menagerie of exotic brown men at his beck and call and ultimately died alone of a cocaine overdose with his last script in hand.

-Ty E

Freakstars 3000

While in kindergarten at a multicultural public school, I first become aware of retarded people and their particularly outlandish and oftentimes uncontrollable behavior. Herded around the school like a bunch of spastic cattle by obese Negresses wearing unflattering sweatpants, these many times slobbering and even sometimes indecently exposed individuals certainly made their presence well known, whether they were conscious of it or not. Growing up as a wildly imaginative and television/movie obsessed child, I concocted a lot of fantasy ideas for TV series, including a ‘concentration camp comedy’ starring Woody Allen, but never did I dream of a musical talent show with an all star mentally retarded cast, but I was not the least bit surprised when I discovered that absurdist avant-garde auteur Christoph Maria Schlingensief – who once started the political party Chance 2000 that encouraged the mentally feeble to run for office – did. Predating yet in a similar spirit to the popular reality show Pop Idol/American Idol, except less retarded, Schlingensief’s Freakstars 3000 (2004) is a delightful documentary work featuring highlights and unseen footage of the German filmmaker’s 6-episode-TV show of the same name. As a work that attempts to, “highlight the problems of non-handicapped people,” Freakstars 3000 is certainly not the sort of work that one would expect to be the most successful TV program ever featured on the German Music Television Station VIVA due to perceived exploitation of less than musically inclined mental invalids. But then again, it is a sign of the times when institutionalized disabled folks make for more entertaining and original performers than those plastic philistines that occupy prime-time television. As a truly terrific testament to the melodic tenacity of Mother Nature’s most special disabled darlings, Freakstars 3000 lets the viewer know that Germany’s got talent, especially when it comes to the unique untermensch sort. 

 In between yelling amongst one another and engaging in erratic and oftentimes unpredictable conniption fits, the couple dozen or so gloriously grotesque outsider artists of Freakstars 3000 compete for the positively prestigious personal prize of being one of the seven finalists who will ultimately comprise the band "Mutter Sucht Schrauben" aka “Mother Seeks Screws”; a discordant art rock group that plays their instruments out-of-sync with one another in a most charmingly carnivalesque manner. Shot on location at the Thiele Winkler Home for people with physical and mental disabilities in Lichtenrade, Berlin, Freakstars 3000 is a welcome exception conventional reality TV mundanity as the show – with its curious yet oddly charming mental and physical cripples of immense courage – has more genuine human passion and expression than what seems like the entire history of so-called ‘reality TV’ combined, as the contestants of Schlingensief’s broadcasted realism, unlike the narcissistic nincompoops of popular American shows like Big Brother and Survivor, are for the most part completely unconscious of the fact that the camera is constantly rolling. The super freaks of the documentary range from a shy, sensitive youthful girl with Down's syndrome to a morbidly obese middle-aged man with the IQ of a 7-year-old to a spastic 60ish-year-old with an unhealthy hatred for "the swine" Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, as I discussed with a college friend so many years ago, like the special Special Olympics and other events that celebrate disenfranchised groups, it is typically the least retarded person on Freakstars 3000 who ends up being one of the final contestants thus defeating the purpose of it in the first place, although a couple extremely socially/mentally-challenged performers do get to be part of the illustrious music super group “Mother Seeks Screws.” Assuredly one of the most talked-about talents of the show is Achim von Paczensky – an ignoble member of the nobility who has had indubitably fallen from grace due to his hereditary taint – that unlike virtually other contestant on the show, seems relatively normal (at least no less mentally disadvantaged than the average American) and is even in a serious relationship with a special lady whose personal aesthetic and singing style is in the tradition of Germany’s tragic singer/model Nico (Christa Päffgen); or at least Sir Schlingensief believes so. Of course, Schlingensief regular Mario Garzaner – a small, swarthy retarded man who played the role of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in The 120 Days of Bottrop (1997) and was also part of the political party Chance 2000 and Big Brother-inspired television show Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container – steals the show in Freakstars 3000, which is no surprise for anyone that is familiar with his real-life, non-performances. 

 As can be expected, Freakstars 3000 sparked a storm of controversy in Germany, not least of all because only two generations ago, disabled members of the volk were oftentimes sterilized and even euthanized, thereupon inspiring moral ambiguity and shame in viewers who don’t know how to respond to a rather retarded man having a conniption shit on live television. As for the characteristically cliché liberal/democratic claim that Freakstars 3000 was a work of tasteless exploitation and not entertainment, I believe such a sentiment is more telling of the guilty conscious of the meekish complainer (as probably intended by the director) and not the show itself because neither Schlingensief nor the contestants at anytime seem to be participating in a work of malicious manipulation and degradation. For example, when a self-conscious contestantant complains that he got only a C in music classic, Schlingensief – a clever and creative man of high-intelligence – states that he got an F in the same class, yet he still sings, thus giving the petrified performer the much-needed courage he needed to go on with the solo singing. Also, I do not think it would be an exaggeration to state that being a part of Freakstars 3000 was probably for many of the performers, the greatest highlight of their lives and probably the point where they felt the most confident and even ‘normal’; which is no small achievement on Schlingensief’s part as he took an active role throughout the filming of the show, including wrestling and bathing members of the home for the merry mongoloids.  After all, when is the last time a bleeding heart liberal set themselves up for nationally broadcasted television show as Schlingensief does when he experiences defeat at the the hands of a rather rotund retard during an impromptu wrestling match?!

-Ty E

Freak Orlando

After searching for years in vain for a copy of Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981) – an apocalyptic cinematic epic of the exceedingly eccentric –  I can happily admit that I secured and viewed a copy of the film, albeit with a positively piss poor VHS transfer (who knows what generation), yet that did not stop me nor my girlfriend from thoroughly luxuriating in what is undeniably one of the most loony, lecherous, and lovely lesbian fantasy films ever made. More freaky than Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), more campy and obsessively stylized than Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), more marvelously mystical than Don Chaffey’s adaptation of Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and more carnally carnivalesque than Federico Fellini’s City of Women (1980), Freak Orlando is indubitably one of the most ideally idiosyncratic cinematic works ever made that has no contemporaries, aside from auteur Ulrike Ottinger’s other Sapphic spiritual films (e.g. Madame X: An Absolute Ruler, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press). Set in the fleeting fantasy world of ‘Freak City’ – a weirdo world of self-flagellating leather fags, bodypaint-covered midget artists, big bearded women, two-headed singers who sing in two-part harmony, and rival Siamese twins, among various other merry yet oftentimes miserable mother nature made miscreations – Freak Orlando is a "small theater of the world" and allegorical history of the world depicted in a marvelous maniac microcosm of the macabre yet magical. Told in five different acts of varying waywardness, the film centers around an innately unconventional protagonist named Freak Orlando aka Mrs. Orlando Mr. Orlando aka Orlando Capricho aka Orlando Orlanda aka Orlando Zyklopa (all played by Werner Schroeter’s muse Magdalena Montezuma), who seems to have more lives than a black magic pussycat. On her wild and delightfully dangerous entrada, Orlando encounters a number of bestial, bloodlusting enemies and futuristic lipstick lezzy lovers, with the outcome of her literally out-of-this-world odysseys being virtually the same: love, loss, and finally enduring the lap of the gods. Featuring a quasi-medieval dystopian setting of the decidedly deformed and daunting sort – not unlike John Waters’ Desperate Living (1977), except with more testosterone and meticulously assembled sets and costumes designs – Freak Orlando is a fiercely phantasmagorical film full of flaky fashion and tumultuous tragedy that reminds one of why people watch fantasy films in the first place.

Created after a series of co-directions with her doily dyke collaborator/lover Tabea Blumenschein (The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors, Ticket of No Return), Freak Orlando is a seemingly more melancholy and misanthropic work than her previous efforts, if stoically and mirthfully so. Although featuring a virtual carnival of undraped bodies, the film is less focused on glorifying the fiery femme fatale beauty than in, for example, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1978) where brutish blonde bombshell Tabea Blumenschein plays an integral role. Whereas in Ticket of No Return (1979), the female anti-heroess ‘She’ seems to be a fantasy character composite of both Ottinger and Blumenschein, Orlando of Freak Orlando – as a stalwart alpha-female of uncompromising personal integrity, individuality, and honor – is most certainly Ottinger’s filmic alter-ego. As a feisty and agile anvil-striking Führer of a heptad of dwarf-shoemakers, a two-headed singer of melodies, a fierce freedom fighter against the Spanish Inquisition, a merry but sometimes malevolent man who feels one head is better than two when it comes to bumping heads with Siamese twins, and campy entertainer with a queer quartet of playboy bunnies, Orlando is a renegade renaissance woman with a rugged interior and a oftentimes fetishistic quasi-New Romanticist exterior. Like a wandering Jew hopped up on Ritalin, romance, and fervent freak righteousness, arduously anomalous Orlando attempts to bring oddball order and beauty to a mostly rural city in ruins that – despite its freak-only population – seems to hardly accept her, at least until the conclusion of the film. Her greatest enemies are the ferocious yet faggy flagellants – a curious collective of self-punishing, sadomasochistic, semi-savage leather fags that sport matching black pleather uniforms (aside from one curious fellow in white) – who brutally beat and decapitate Orlando during the first act of Freak Orlando after she refuses to become their leader when the original ‘stylite’ lord (played by Eddie Constantine) falls to his much-desired death. Judging by her portrayal of the flagellants in the film, I think it is quite blatant that Ottinger is an opponent of leather fags everywhere, a group that homo-maniac auteur Rosa von Praunheim described as the male abberosexual group whose, "masculinity is damaged the most” in his documentary It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971). During the second act of Freak Orlando, Orlando Orlanda must save two acrobats from the flaming flagellants and deter their dreams of hatred, which are fueled by male inadequacy; an all-consuming character flaw the Ms. Ottinger seems to be hardly stricken with. In the end, Orlando leaves the city just as she came, admiring a topless lady flower with marvelous mammary glands.

Unfortunately, aside from a minority of unhealthily fanatical cinephiles, Freak Orlando is a film that is more often talked about and dreamed of than actually seen. After what seemed like a lifetime worth of waiting, I finally had the grand opportunity to watch this grandiose occult cinematic exposition and I cannot say I was left wanting.  Considering that Freak Orlando is comprised of five decidedly distinct acts, the film is sometimes 'hit' or 'miss' in what it seeks to achieve in terms of the moral of the story due to its excessive esotericism, but one would be hard-pressed to argue that a single second of the film is anything less than enrapturing and awe-inspiring. Like Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) meets Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), except with a superlatively Sapphic persuasion, Freak Orlando paints a pulchritudinous, if peculiar, portrait of the history of the world that is about as literal as a soundly asleep paranoid schizophrenic's most sordid and starkest dreams.   A singularly preternatural cinematic escape from the banality of the technocratic, cosmopolitan globalized world featuring a city-sized cabaret of spastic yet spectacular characters, Freak Orlando is a film that deserves a broad fan-base outside of the pompous academic and lesbian underground world.

-Ty E

Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container

Probably the most socially and meta-politically active filmmaker who has ever lived, eternal enfant terrible auteur Christoph Maria Schlingensief started his own labor union, political party (Chance 2000, Vote for Yourself), TV show shows (both real and imaginary), art action projects (one of which at the Documenta X exhibition in Kassel, Germany got him arrested for posting a sign that read “Kill Helmut Kohl!”), and even staged his own cancer experience (with the ‘ready made’ opera Mea culpa), but undoubtedly one of his most interesting public stunts was setting up a satirical Big Brother-like art project/television show titled Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container aka Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container in 2000 where he put twelve nonwhite asylum seekers in a mini makeshift concentration camp and members of the audience could vote who they wanted to be deported during his "Please Love Austria—First European Coalition Week" quasi-carny campaign. Showcased during the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) in an area next to a bourgeois Viennese opera that is frequented by art connoisseurs and tourists, Schlingensief set up the terribly trash show as a form of active protest and counter-agit-prop against the election of extreme-right politician Jörg Haider, then-leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), into the National Council of Austria. As a leader who made no lie of his disdain for foreigners and leaders of Austria’s Jewish community, as well as man who was vocally nostalgic for National Socialism and a friend/financial benefactor of certain bigwig Arab dictators, Jörg Haider was not your typical cosmopolitan globalist, prostitute-like politician; he inspired sanctions brought against his charming country by fourteen member nations of the European Union, and Western countries also temporarily relieved their ambassadors in protest, even inciting then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright – an American Jewess with a kosher bone to pick – to publically announce, “We are deeply concerned about the Freedom Party’s entry into the Austrian government…a party that does not clearly distance itself from the atrocities of the Nazi era and the politics of hate.” In the delightfully deranged documentary Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container (2002) directed by Paul Poet (Empire Me: New Worlds are Happening!), one gets to experience the realer-than-reality-TV flagrant furor of political philistines of both the left and right as they are antagonized by the always spirited and sardonic Schlingensief as he bodaciously blows smoke out of his trusty red bullhorn. Featuring post-game interviews with cultural critics, academics, members of the FPÖ, and – most importantly – Schlingensief himself, Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container makes for a socio-politically insightful work of postmodern vaudeville insanity – Big Brother Nazi Style!

As Schlingensief explains in the documentary, he got the idea for modern ‘concentration camp containers’ for Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container around the time he directed his absurdist action flick Terror 2000 - Intensivstation Deutschland (1994); a work that features crowed ausländer untermensch in what seems like the inside of cattle cars. Throughout the documentary Schlingensief antagonizes and ultimately confuses the audiences crowded around the containers, proclaimed that Austria is the, “Land of the Nazis. Land of the fascist. Here is Nazi central.” As he explains in one of the post-show interviews for Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, he concurs that, “In some aspects this venture was swinish to the highest degree.” Indeed, whatever aberrant auteur filmmaker’s main objective with satirical campaign for "Foreigners Out—Artists against Human Rights,” he certainly managed to bring out the worst in people on both ends of the pseudo-dichotomous political spectrum. While inspiring hypocritical bleeding heart left-wingers to cry, “Foreigners In! Kick out the Krauts,” Schlingensief also managed to inspire joy and nostalgia in elderly old school Austrian National Socialists, even allowing a feeble old man – who can barely hold the bullhorn – to declare that all foreigners must be killed. As an academic explains in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, Schlingensief utilized a form of social criticism originated by ‘Austrian H.L. Mencken’ Karl Kraus where one need not comment to articulate a criticism, but instead merely cite what you criticize ‘as-is’ in the right context, thus highlighting the absurdity of their political mantras and causing them to figuratively hang themselves with their own rhetoric in the process. Controversial Austrian author and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek (Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Lust) also lent her support to Schlingensief's sarcastic social experiment, writing a childish puppet show for the foreigners to perform for adoring audiences. Like virtually any great modern Austrian film, actor/director Paulus Manker (Schmutz aka Dirt, Weininger's Last Night) makes an appearance in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container as a guest speaker. Ultimately the genius of Schlingensief’s "Please Love Austria” campaign is getting people out of their houses into the streets like the good ol’ days of street fights between National Socialist and Communist groups during the 1920s/1930s.  Unfortunately, one of the most vehement and violent people in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container is a middle-aged woman whose blatantly aroused nipples are poking out of her shirt as she verbally assaults Schlingensief to a most vindictive degree, as if she is receiving some sort of much needed sexual release. Needless to say, Austria is starving for some modern brownshirts.

In the end, Schlingensief concluded that Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container was at least a partial flop due to what he described as the failure of “well-meaning leftie activists” to actually take action. Schlingensief also criticizes a speech by American theatre director Peter Sellars – a typically exceedingly effeminate left-winger who delivers an idiotically sentimental and impotent speech – for mentioning the ‘need’ for containers in NYC and Los Angeles, but not actually taking the initiative to setup such a gallant public spectacle. A female member of Schlingensief’s crew also complains that passive, opportunistic left-wingers used Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container as a petty propaganda forum, thereupon diluting the objective of the TV show: bringing attention to the ‘neo-nazi’ political policies of Jörg Haider and the Freedom Party of Austria. Since the release of Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, both Christoph Schlingensief and Jörg Haider have died, thus leaving a vast void in the German/Austrian media and public sphere. Schlingensief's antics in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container were forever immortalized in popular Austrian crime-thriller Silentium (2004) directed by Wolfgang Murnberger where he plays himself as a wacky and intemperate director of oddball yet politically-charged plays. Whatever your political persuasion, one can learn a lot from Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container and Schlingensief’s 'active-art' antics in general, as there is no doubt that it takes a certain type of integrity to get docile Westerners off their couch and into the street. That being said, maybe it's about time for David Duke to start an Occupy movement.

-Ty E

La Paloma

Before gaining about 100 pounds or so and directing kitschy exploitation films, Austrian actor Peter Kern (Hitler: A Film from Germany, Flaming Hearts) played the lead role in the cultivated high-camp work La Paloma (1974) directed by Swiss auteur Daniel Schmid (Shadows of Angels, Imitation of Life) in a nearly immaculate performance that would prove to be one of the greatest of his rather long yet uneven career. Loosely based on the novel Camille (1852) aka The Lady of the Camellias written by high yellow French fellow Alexandre Dumas, fils and with crucial influence from Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) aka Der blaue Engel and mostly likely Alfred Hitchcock’s last British film Rebecca (1940), as well as the brazen naked melodrama of director Schmid’s pal Rainer Werner Fassbinder and celluloid operetta of Werner Schroeter, La Paloma is a beauteous beast of meta-cinema decadence that reminds one why they watch films in the first place; to indulge in the wildly idiosyncratic and to simmer in seduction and sin without any of the less glorious consequences like acquiring an STD or a debilitating drug habit. Starring Fassbinder’s ex-wife Ingrid Caven (Fear of Fear, In a Year with 13 Moons) in a certainly fitting role as a morbidly depressed cabaret singer who finds pseudo-self-worth in the form of a portly pedomorphic aristocrat, La Paloma is a cinematic work about the torment and tragedy of unreciprocated love and the perennial misery that such a hopeless situation sows for both parties involved. With its immaculate accentuation of imagery via both malefic and melodic music, La Paloma is a rare cinematic treat of the most majestically malicious kind that tenaciously and meticulously tinkers with one's marrow with its curious combination of scenic sorrowfulness or sordid grotesquery.

On a more personal level, the plump protagonist Isidore (Peter Kern) of La Paloma reminds me of a personal friend’s seemingly autistic, fanboy brother. Technically a grown man in his early twenties, this rather reclusive and sedentary fellow is undoubtedly a virgin, but what else can one expect from an adult male who collects ‘everything R2-D2’ and considers Steven Spielberg the greatest filmmaker who ever lived. Naturally, I could never see my friend’s bro in a relationship with a live woman, especially a beautiful one, so the prospect of such a seemingly absurd – and to be quite frank – unsettling scenario is a captivating one, to say the least. Of course, unlike my compatriot’s brother, La Paloma 'protagonist' Isidore has two things going for him: he is extremely wealthy and he is deeply and unwaveringly in love with a terminally ill lady that is in dire need of an ego boast. La Paloma begins in a campy and carnal cabaret that seems like Weimar Berlin of the early 1930s, except updated in some sort of futuristic hell where men commit self-slaughter stoically after losing their meager earnings gambling, nearly nude preteen girls are paraded around like AKC-certified canines at a some sort of sleazy dog show, and emotionally abused and feeble females flaunt their flesh to strangers just to survive another day. Isidore is an odd exception to the typical patrons of the cabaret, as he is an aristocratic gentlemen, albeit an avoirdupois one who brings Miss La Paloma flowers after one of her moving melancholy performances, thereupon igniting the barely burning flame of their ill-fated, one-sided relationship. A fragile soul with a sometimes ferocious and callous exterior, La Paloma attempts to embrace Isidore’s passionate and ceaseless love of which she has never experienced before and seems to work for a brief period of time, until the aristocrat’s pal Raoul – a masculine, stoic, and sexually virile gentleman – shows up and inspires true love in the seemingly loveless ex-cabaret singer. That being said, La Paloma features a sort of marvelous and feverently foreboding melodrama that one feels like they are witnessing a slow but steady murder that could have been avoided had a series of bad decisions been averted. Indeed, La Paloma’s death-by-heartbreak is revealed about halfway through the film, but the greatest tragedy in La Paloma is the slow brutalization and malicious mutilation of two lonely, tender hearts because "when she (La Paloma) began to love, it was not him she loved; she loved his love for her."

Mixing psychological horror, camp fantasy, literary satire, ominous operetta numbers, and rather ridiculous yet wholly intentional melodramatic romanticism, La Paloma is, at its worse, a minor masterpiece of 1970s theatric European arthouse cinema that has no contemporaries. Like a playful yet pernicious parody of Werner Schroeter’s Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972) which, incidentally also stars Ingrid Caven, except actually accessible to a wider audience, La Paloma is a successful experiment in cross-medium camp where one does not need a background in bourgeois theatre and opera to actually enjoy it as it is an audacious and acrimonious work that will seem quite disconcerting to pompous patrician types. The film also concludes in a somewhat ambiguous manner that reveals that the joke is on the viewer, especially in regard to the precise manipulation of the spectator’s soul.  In a film where a man's single and only penetration of his beloved wife is with a knife into her cold cadaver, La Paloma is a saucy and sometime sadistic cinematic work that doesn't play nice but it plays for keeps.

-Ty E