The African Twintowers

About a decade after completing his last feature-length film Die 120 Tage von Bottrop (1997) aka The 120 Days of Bottrop – an ambitious work the director regarded as ‘The Last New German Film’ – German absurdist auteur Christoph Maria Schlingensief flew to Lüderitz, Namibia, the German South-West African colony with an entire cast, including actors Irm Hermann, Patti Smith, Robert Stadlober, Björn Thors, Klaus Beyer, Stefan Kolosko, etc. and a full film crew to direct his last cinematic work, The African Twintowers. Of course, at the time of filming, Schlingensief had no idea that it would be his last attempt at directing a film as fate beckoned and he became ill with lung cancer in 2008, tragically dying – not many years after his father – at the premature age of 49 on August 21, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. Unfortunately, Schlingensief – who spent the last decade or so running a political party (Chance 2000), hosting and directing TV shows (Freakstars 3000, Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container), working as a theatre (Hamlet: This is your Family, Nazi-line, Elfriede Jelinek's Bambiland) and opera (Richard Wagner’s Parsifal) stage director, and pretty much everything else related to audio-visual media aside from film – ultimately failed in his attempt to bring The African Twintowers to completion as scripted, but the filmmaker eventually released a documentary for German TV of the same name featuring footage from the aborted film and the many but sometimes merry misadventures it entailed. As explained early on in The African Twintowers (2008), Schlingensief’s bag (containing his annotated script for his Wagnerian 9/11 epic) was stolen by two local Herero homeboys, so on the second day of filming he decided to scrap the script as the ill-fated filmmaker falsely believed the random act of thievery was a positive premonition of sorts. Originally about Richard Wagner, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hagen of Norse Mythology and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and the Namibia Herero people, among many other seemingly unrelated things, Schlingensief refused to follow what he had left of the script as he felt such organized filmmaking made him feel “like a civil servant.” Essentially, The African Twintowers follows oftentimes flustered and even sometimes furious Schlingensief as he spends 27 days in exotic Afrika as he hopelessly tries to make sense of a film that was never meant to be, but would ultimately sow a different film of sorts which I am reviewing now. Featuring narration by the director recorded 3 years after the artistic nightmare in Namibia and not long after contracting life-threatening lung cancer, The African Twintowers is undoubtedly Schlingensief’s most dispiriting work as a document of a prematurely deceased polymath’s faux pas, frustration, and eventual failure with the medium he loved most.  Needless to say, when so-called "Godmother of Punk" Patti Smith has come to comfort your tears on an African beach, it cannot be the most blessed of days.

 Mockingly and pseudo-pretentiously dressed as ethno-masochistic German filmmakers Michael Verhoeven (Nasty Girl, Mutters Courage) and Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Until the End of the World) with an exceedingly effete scarf and gay cowboy hat, Christoph Schlingensief enters Namibia passionately, if absurdly thinking, “Can you imagine? The Golden Palm at Cannes?” in regard to his latest attempt at an eccentric epic set in the dauntingly dark continent, The African Twintowers. Over a decade before, Schlingensief directed the cinematically charming United Trash (1996) aka The Slit – a United Nations gross-out spoof set in Africa that is probably the only film to feature the curious aesthetic cross between the works of John Waters and Herschell Gordon Lewis with that of Leni Riefenstahl – but his naughty negrophiliac dreams of Namibia for The African Twintowers would not be in his favor and the film would be plagued by an overwhelming number of personal and artistic problems, including the death of the director’s father via heart attack and steady dissolution of all of his artistic intentions and resources. Originally envisioned as a feature about the American catastrophe of the September 11 terrorist attacks happening in an abject African slum where dead New Yorkers would be satirically set side by side with the sort of starved, disease-ridden bodies that appear in Africa quite regularly, The African Twintowers was set to be a sardonic attack on both Western technocratic globalization and the hyperbolic glorification of 9/11 victims in American mainstream media, but instead Schlingensief was inevitably left with 180 hours of footage that was judged by various film editors as being unworkable and inaccessible. Inspired by the Edda of Norse mythology, his former mentor Werner Nekes, and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), Schlingensief did manage to create a piece for his ambitious long-term project The Animatograph after moving (with the help of happy Herero friends) a wooden ship entitled the ‘arch’ through the desert for several kilometers that was eventually placed on a revolving stage that was bombarded by jubilant locals, which was also supposed to act as the first set-piece for The African Twintowers, but things were not to be in the humid hotbed of "Unity, Liberty, Justice." Naturally, knowing Schlingensief’s resourcefulness and creativity, not all of the footage to The African Twintowers went to total waste as some of it was screened at various art exhibitions throughout Europe and the boat was eventually taken to the Burgtheater in Vienna, Austria in 2006, becoming the center-piece in his Actionist-inspired improvised theatre play Area 7 - St. Matthews Expedition (2006); the final culmination of his animatograph project.

Ultimately, the documentary The African Twintowers acts as a torrid testimonial to the fact that Christoph Schlingensief had totally extinguished his vitality as a filmmaker, at least in any tradition sense, as by that point in his life he had already become heavily involved with ‘active art’ projects (political parties, TV shows, avant-garde stage-directing, etc.) without boundaries and with less rules when compared to the intrinsically contrived nature of filmmaking. Although he was never interested in directing films with linear storylines, by the time he started working on The African Twintowers that had a beginning and an end, once writing: "Whether in the theatre or in the cinema: it starts on the left, finishes on the right; there is the beginning, there is the end.  A fundamental mistake." Always feeling constrained by the limits of filmmaking, it was only inevitable that Schlingensief would transcend his roots as a film director like no filmmaker before or after him. Regarding his failed but sometimes fun experience with The African Twintowers, Schlingensief states at the end of the documentary: “It was a great experience which generated amazing images, strange situations…which…brought up a lot of issues, especially regarding 9/11 and the significance of images of icons which are created and remain with entire communities over decades perhaps centuries and which will just seem like alien visions from outerspace one day. Archeologists will then excavate this place with bits of food and a boat and they say, ok, there’s been a river where boats could navigate, so this project can be used to distort history and produce a greater truth than the mind can process. That’s why it defies beauty. Because you can’t find closure.” In a sense, the documentary The African Twintowers also acts as a sort of final testament for Schlingensief’s life, ending the work with the somewhat worrisome and unsurprisingly nihilistic words: “I’ve always enjoyed life a lot, even more so now but what’s really the point of it all? I mean, what…?”  Judging by the footage featured in The African Twintowers for the aborted project of the same name, the unfinished film resembled a cross between Schlingensief's previous African flick United Trash and a work by American 'enfant terrible' Harmony Korine (Gummo, Umshini Wam), but one can only speculate what could have been, but as the director once stated, "I often produce images no actor would put in his casting tape."  Assuredly, one of the best sequences in The African Twintowers is when Schlingensief teases and attacks a group of hyper and hysterical Herero schoolchildren while dressed up in an absurd penguin costume.  As he explains quite seriously in the documentary, Schlingensief had no interest in saying sorry to the people of Namibia for ancient colonial crimes of long-dead imperial Germans, but instead brings euphoria and splendid recollections to the Herero people of today.  After all, what child wouldn't have fond and vivid memories of a wacked-out German guy with a fucked-up haircut bringing a rotating boat to their barren and scarcely populated desert?!

-Ty E

Uliisses

In my humble opinion, experimental filmmakers, especially the sort involved with extreme manipulation of celluloid via scratching and painting directly onto it, spastic speedy editing, and working almost exclusively on short, nonlinear films (cine-magickian Kenneth Anger excluded) like Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man series, Sartre's Nausea) and to a lesser extent Marie Menken (Eye Music in Red Major, Go Go Go) are somewhat akin to modern guitar virtuosos like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai in that although they have mastered their respective artistic mediums in a technical and highly sophisticated sense, thereupon entering creative territories explored by so very few, it seems nearly impossible for them to create a lasting and aesthetically gratifying work that would appeal to or impress anyone aside from people in the same field. Admittedly, I have had some minor enjoyment engaging in works created by technically revolutionary experimental filmmakers like Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, Three Songs About Lenin) and Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation), but I typically rather watch the latest low-kitsch production from Aryan untermensch auteur Uwe Boll (Rampage, Auschwitz) or Ulli Lommel (Absolute Evil - Final Exit, D.C. Sniper) than endure 90-minutes of enervating and seemingly endless exercises in egotistical experimental excrement. That being said, I was quite reluctant about watching the innately impenetrable cinematic works of experimental German auteur Werner Nekes (Amalgam I-IV, Johnny Flash) – an avid collector of everything relating to pre/early film history who describes his approach to filmmaking as "light-theatre" – but I eventually gave in as the filmmaker would act as a mentor to fellow German filmmaker-turned-prestigious-polymath Christoph Schlingensief (Mutters Maske, The German Chainsaw-Massacre), who worked as his assistant for a number of years, thereupon rationalizing to myself that the elder’s filmmakers films can’t be all that bad. After watching a number of Nekes’ informative yet emotionally vacant, documentaries on pre-cinema technology like Film Before Film (1986) aka Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern? and Media Magica I-V (1996), I figured it was about time that I watch one of his more experimental and ambitious works, eventually viewing Uliissee (1982); a sophisticatedly stylized but seeming schizophrenic nonlinear, quasi-Homeric odyssey through the 'history of film' that takes elements from James Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s The Odyssey and somewhat oddly, psychedelic poet/playwright Neil Oram's The Warp. 

 Part experimental film extravaganza, part ultra-vulgar neo-vaudevillian comedy, part slick skinflick, part kraut post-hippie hysterics, part particularly peculiar philo-semitic romp, and part fanatic fan-boy exposé of Neke’s big boy pre-film toys, I would be lying if I did not admit that Uliissee (apparently a pun on 'it's Uli', Uli the photographer from the Ruhr, supposed grandson to protagonist Leopold Bloom of Joyce’s Ulysses) was a work of cinematic genius, albeit of the ‘mad scientist auteur’ on LSD-addled masturbatory sort. All but totally incoherent in structure, one is best off looking at Uliissee as a collection of loosely and – in many cases – loonily related "petites vignettes" that ultimately make an “oddball odyssey” (or more like a torrid trip) dealing with quasi-counter-culture ideas relating to philosophy, religion, and social matters, albeit of the patently ‘progressive’ aka retrogressive sort that was oftentimes satirized by Paul Morrissey (Trash, Madame Wang’s). That being said, it should be noted that Werner Nekes had the gall to describe his protégé Christoph Schlingensief’s early feature-length work Menu Total (1986) aka Meat, Your Parents – a surreal scatological work featuring less than glamorous Nazis engaged in rape and murder, among other deplorable yet droll behavior – as “fascistic” despite every innate indication that expresses the counter to that positively preposterous perspective. In Uliissee, Nekes takes scornful and satirical blows at authority figures (a group of cops invade the genitals of a hostile hippie chick), Turkish Muslims (a religious Turk in full towel-head regalia is portrayed as an anti-Semitic baboon who states, “newspapers are run by Jews…very bad people”), and Hindi gurus (a guru with what seems to be fuming feces on his face is described as a “psychic fascist”), among various others, with most of these sardonic scenarios being corresponding postmodern interpretations of Homeric adventures. Thankfully, Werner Nekes saves the best for last with various spasmodic collages and montages of lavish lipstick lesbian Tabea Blumenschein (as Penelope/Molly) – Sapphic surrealist auteur Ulrike Ottinger’s onetime lover/collaborator (Madame X: An Absolute Ruler, Ticket of No Return) and punk prostitute character featured in the kraut cocksucker classic Taxi zum Klo (1981) directed by Frank Ripploh – featured in various garmentless and somewhat compromising scenarios. The concluding scenes with voluptuous bimbo (or at least that’s how she seems to be portayed) Blumenschein are indubitably the most brilliant and bewitching scenes in Uliissee, as Nekes managed to incorporate images of the lovely lezzy with some of most aesthetically enchanting yet eccentric experimental editing sequences in a lecherous ‘Lighterature' (a word for the filmmaker’s signature style of filmmaking) climax.

Although Christoph Schlingensief would later credit Nekes for helping to catch the "experimental bug," the Terror 2000 director would later parody his former mentor’s eccentric experimental cine-mania in Tunguska - The Crates are delivered (1984); the final film in the late, great filmmaker’s "Trilogy of Film Criticism - Film as Neurosis" (Phantasus Go Home and What happened to Magdalena Jung? being the first two films) about three decidedly deranged ‘avant-garde researchers’ (all of whom apparently being cryptic and not-so-cryptic stand-ins for Nekes) on the road to the North Pole to expose Eskimos to their films. Schlingensief once remarked regarding the inspiration behind Tunguska, “I thought, why should I become Nekes? What’s with all this crap?...I wanted to separate myself (from him) and then I made the film… Tunguska - The Crates are delivered." If one would have to choose any certain Nekes film that encompasses the sort of cinematically-deranged mindset exhibited in the characters of Tunguska, Uliissee would undoubtedly be the most obvious work. As expressed in his farcical filmography, Schlingensief would eventually cite the Germans films of Herbert Achternbusch (Das Gespenst, Wohin?), Werner Herzog (Heart of Glass, Stroszek), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Fox and His Friends, Satan’s Brew), as well as the independent American films of Kenneth Anger (Fireworks, Scorpio Rising) and John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living), as being a greater influence on him than his experience with Nekes. Indeed, the experimental cinematic works of Werner Nekes, most notably Uliissee, are certainly worth seeing, especially for committed cinephiles, as the aggressively avant-garde filmmaker is certainly a master of manipulation when it comes to the celluloid medium, yet his work only offers an inkling of the endless entertainment and replay value, wonderfully wretched wit, curious ‘carnal’ charm, and reflexively and conscious “German” persuasion, of his former protégé Schlingensief; a one-man revolutionary filmmaker who not only eclipsed his former master, but also the entire medium of film itself. As for Werner Nekes, since Uliissee, he has almost exclusively stayed in the rather redundant realm of creating TV-documentaries about his proto-cinema toys. 

-Ty E

Madame X: An Absolute Ruler

Admittedly, pirates have never really floated my boat and I certainly cannot think of films as extravagantly aesthetically repellant as the Pirates of the Caribbean series and Spielberg’s quasi-pederastic work Hook (1991) for such works could only appeal to small children and buggering butt-pirates. Needless to say, Johnny Depp as proto-hippie slime-bag Captain Jack Sparrow makes for a rather pathetic pirate Lord of the Seven Seas and Dustin Hoffman makes for an even worse pirate than he does as a drag queen à la Tootsie (1982). That being said, I never would have thought that my favorite seafaring freebooter flick would inevitably turnout to be that of the campy fantasy lesbian sort, but then again I would have never expected anything of the sort to exist in the first place. Co-directed by aberrant Aryanness auteur Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando, Taiga) and her then-girlfriend Tabea Blumenschein (Zagarbata) – the statuesque stoic Sapphic punk goddess that would play an imperative part in the creation of her ladylove’s most prolific works, including the cross-genre arthouse epics Ticket of No Return (1979) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984) – Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin (1978) aka Madame X: An Absolute Ruler is not only one of the most ideally and intensely idiosyncratic buccaneer flicks ever made, but it is also the lesbian answer to the male action-fantasy film, albeit of a more absurdist, avant-garde persuasion. Unlike your typical lesbian/feminist film whatever genre of subgenre it may be in, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler is not a pirate-themed pity party of the decisively slave-morality-driven dreadful and regretful sort, but a wonderfully wayward wild woman wonder where the will to power and pleasure is the guiding philosophy. Lacking in petty sentimentalism, cliché political messages, and glorification of the weak and meek but instead the criminally rich and aesthetically wondrous, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler is a delightfully deranging Dionysian comedy of sorts that makes for the next best thing to a full-fledged lesbian fantasy fascism flick. Suffice to say, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler does for female swashbuckling filibusters what Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) did for motorcycle and fetishistically fascistic leather-fags.

During the beginning of Madame X: An Absolute Ruler, a number of diverse but equally unsatisfied women receive hidden telegraphic messages in everything from newspapers to a box of Brillo pads (steel wool scouring pads used for cleaning dishes) to the pocket of an institutionalized mental patient suffering from ‘disturbed narcissistic personality’ offering the lonely ladies the following: To all women – stop – offer world – stop – full of gold – stop – love – stop – adventure – stop – at sea – stop – call Chinese Orlando – stop! The characters include everything from bored, sexually-repressed housewives to overly-intellectualized psychiatrists with physical appearances as diversified as raving beauties to gawky dyke pilots with bad haircuts, but they are united by their overwhelming dissatisfaction with their lives and professional/gender roles. To join the beauteous yet barbaric Madame X (Tabea Blumenschein) on her dilapidated ship Chinese Orlando, they must sacrifice their previous lives which none of them think twice about doing, but none of them are prepared for enduring the dictatorship of the determinedly dick-less where totalitarian tough love and topless tits reign supreme. Upon first joining Madame X on the ship as corsair crewmembers, the conspicuously cute but callous captain – using the help of a vocal and automatic figurehead, an exact replica of Madame X (also played by Blumenschein), assembled with the utmost care by a Numidian and witch doctor of great talent – displays her “absolute authority and power” via her doppelganger at the prow of the ship reciting: “Gold. Love. Adventure.” Indeed, Madame X – a muted and multipotent miss of the most magnificent mystique, and material and metaphysical magnetism – makes good on her three promises, but not without a little bit of slapstick and swashbuckling misery, heartbreak, and murder thrown in for good measure. In a backstory early on in the film, it is revealed that Madame X initially decided to give “her soul to the devil and Satanic sea arts” after her prized beauty Orlando was killed after being engulfed in the toxic tentacles of a rare and deadly jellyfish, which subsequently resulted in the loss of the Captain’s right-hand, hence her prosthetic bladed-hand. Miss X eventually became the cruelest pirate Führer of the Far Eastern sea, thus he has to be most stern and even unfair with his new novice buccaneers. Naturally, Madame X is extra hard on a flaming faggot fairy who joins the crew as a groveling man-maid after they find him floating in the sea by his lonesome, but at least he has the opportunity to admire the charming yet sometimes cantankerous Captain’s nude body, including her erotic blonde bosom hair. As far as obtaining glorious gold is concerned, Madame X and her eclectic collection of underlings happen upon a boat full of booty-full, banal, bourgeois types (one of which is played by Peggy von Schnottgenberg aka Frank Ripploh; director of Taxi zum Klo) whom they glamour and titillate – the sort of people that incessantly and robotically repeat small talk clichés like “well, how about that?” and “What do ya know?” – and subsequently ransack at night and execute in a most Fellini-esque fashion. Naturally, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler – probably the only film where someone rides the plank in a wheelchair – is not your slap-happy alcoholic grandpappy's sort of pirate film.

As the Chinese Orlando’s in-boat psychiatrist states in a most tongue-in-cheek manner: “The age-old oppression of woman which had consolidated the habits of passivity and dependence in their character structure, made them docile tools in the hands of Madame X, a charismatic personality eaten up with narcissism and whose lust for power grew with the quasi-masochistic submission of the women beyond all bounds.” Of course, whether victims of Madame X’s megalomaniacal majesty or not, breast-flaunting buccaneers of Madame X: An Absolute Ruler certainly have a lovely, if loaded, journey where the charismatic captain’s three promises of gold, love, and adventure are ceremoniously fulfilled. Aside from the gold, Ulrike Ottinger makes good of her character Madame X’s promises as well, which I would have never suspected from a muff-diving auteur, especially of the sometimes socio-politically-charged sort. In fact, I do not think it would be a stretch to say that not only is Ottinger the most demiurgic female German director of the post-WWII era, but also – regardless of sex – the greatest kraut master of postmodern celluloid mythmaking. That being said, it is quite a shame that Ottinger's personal/artistic relationship with Tabea Blumenschein had to end, as I surely regard Madame X: An Absolute Ruler, as well as their collaborations, Ticket of No Return and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press among my favorite arthouse 'fantasy' flicks, and I am not exactly a fan of Ani DiFranco or Ellen DeGenerate. Indeed, unlike Robin Williams in Hook, not all seamen are starved for sea-salty semen; rather, some are horny, unloved housewives, pompous pussy-licking psychiatrists, and sadomasochistic Orientalists of the bearded clam diving, cunning linguist persuasian. 

-Ty E

Hamlet: This Is Your Family

If there is just one taboo obsession that German renegade Renaissance man Christoph Schlingensief (Egomania - Insel ohne Hoffnung, The 120 Days of Bottrop) revisited throughout his artistic career in various mediums, including film, theatre, television performance art, and political parties and rallies, it would undoubtedly be anything revolving around National Socialism – be it old school Hitleritism, degenerate neo-nazism, far-right populism, and/or völkisch kultur and kunst.  Inspired by his discussions with Dietrich Kuhlbrodt – a Hamburg District Court lawyer for the perseuction of crimes under National Socialism who also acted as film/theatre critic and sometimes performer in Schlingensief's films – and his fascination with concentration camps and Pasolini's final work Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), the filmmaker-turned-polymath only became all the more obsessed with all-things-nazi as the decades passed. First tackling the legacy of Adolf Hitler with his feature Menu Total (1986) aka Meat, Your Parents – a phantasmagorical fantasy of the decidedly depraved and structurally delirious that the daring auteur regarded as his finest film – Schlingensief went on to direct a play about homosexual neo-nazi leader (and later AIDS victim) Michael Kühnen  (who the director portrayed in his film Terror 2000) entitled Kühnen "94, Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler! (1994) at the prestigious Volksbühne in Berlin, a remake of NS propagandist Veit Harlan's melodramatic masterpiece Opfergang (1944) entitled Mutters Maske (1988), a Nazi-laden “German Trilogy” of films (100 Years Adolf Hitler - The Last Hour in the Führerbunker, The German Chainsaw-Massacre and Terror 2000 - Germany out of Control), and a racially-charged Big Brother reality spoof Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container (2002) where a group of brown-to-black untermensch in a makeshift concentration are departed one-by-one by members of the Austrian voting public.

 Undoubtedly, one of Schlingensief’s most ambitious and audacious artistic flirtations with Teuton-flavored fascism was his play Hamlet: This is Your Family—Nazi Line (2001); a feverish and frantic freeform reworking of the Shakespeare classic starring a cast of real-life Swiss ex-nazis that was inspired by the director’s belief that nazi-free, ‘neutral’ Switzerland was on the verge of adopting postmodern fascism à la the Swiss People's Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP). Simultaneously a play, media frenzy, and active political action campaign, Schlingensief predictably caused an uproar in Switzerland, which was captured via the director’s bloated buddy Peter Kern (who plays King Claudius in the play) via the documentary Hamlet: This is Your Family (2001). Utilizing the ‘Nazi Line’ protocol, which included SS-esque uniforms (one being donned by Schlingensief himself) and holding heated press conferences, the political program sought the objective: “Right wing extremists / neo-Nazis should experience economical and social warmth and support in order to be integrated into our society. additionally NAZI~LINE invests into psychological and medical treatment of neo-Nazis. International Corporations as well as neo-Nazis and hate criminals are kindly asked to participate.” Needless to say Hamlet: This is Your Family is just another example as to why Christoph Schlingensief – not unlike the character Hamlet – was the Fatherland’s last great 'enfant terrible.'

During the beginning of Hamlet: This is Your Family, Schlingensief – wearing a specially tailored Nazi Line SS officer uniform – makes it quite clear that he does not plan to play nice with the Swiss when he states at the beginning of a show, “Who financed your theatre? Jews who fled our…my country. Because they had to. You lined your pockets with Jewish money. You invested it in culture. That’s the truth.” Indeed, the director may have been a tad bit hard on the bombastic Swiss bourgeois, but he found a special place in his heart for brutish bootboys who used to sail the swastika. Dressed in full skinhead regalia, the carbon-copy commandos barbarically beat and sodomize effete actors on stage and sing punk rock skinhead anthems in a manner that would make most viewers doubt the authenticity of their political conversion. The lead ex-nazi Torsten Lemmer – a towering chap who sports a leather trenchcoat and slicked back hair – seems like a rather reasonable guy with surely sound intentions, but that does nothing to stop other members of Schlingensief’s production from treating him and his ex-Hitlerite comrades like they ran a gas chamber at Auschwitz, thereupon bringing doubt as to whether ex-neo-nazis can ever lead a normal life after ‘reintegrating’ into society. In fact, the prop-man for Hamlet: This is Your Family – a culturally-diversified degenerate with large African plates in his ears and aesthetically-repellent full-sleeves of tribal tattooes – adamantly refuses to “furnish props for the Nazis in this play” as if he is at risk for contracting some sort of obscure venereal disease by doing so. To the petty prop-man’s credit, one of the ex-nazi chicks claim that leader Lemmer is still a neo-nazi and that his alleged disavowing of his past is merely a ploy for him to become mayor of Düsseldorf, which probably had some to truth it as it was later revealed that he continued to work for a far-right record label from 2002-2006, despite marrying a Moroccan mud and converting to Islam in 2002. Regardless, in Hamlet: This is Your Family Lemmer and his ex-brownshirts pay tribute to poet/playright Bertolt Brecht – the Marxist race-traitor who committed racial treason by marrying multiple Jewesses – by taking a pilgrimage to his Berlin grave. Ultimately, I get the impression that Lemmer is merely a social misfit with no strong ideals aside from the desire to shock, provoke, and opportunistically attempt to gain political power because when Peter Kern asked him who he would have been during the Third Reich, he unhesitatingly states, “A resistance fighter, no doubt. I always oppose the establishment.” Aside from eccentric ex-nazis, Hamlet: This is Your Family also has the notable distinction of featuring Fassbinder Superstar Irm Hermann (in the play as Queen Gertrude), who has no inhibition about going topless despite being nearly 60-years-old at the time of filming. For the play, Schlingensief, also paid posthumous tribute to his spiritual father Rainer Werner Fassbinder for what would have been his 53rd birthday and to Hermann for her 500th performance. Naturally, Hamlet: This is Your Family – with its Germanization of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and tribute to Brecht and Fassbinder – is an Anglophile's worst nightmare.

Ultimately, in terms of a ‘social change’ experiment, Hamlet: This is Your Family seems to have been, at the very least, a partial failure, but as an active multi-media event and performance art play, Schlingensief was ultimately successful, at least in the context of creating something new, refreshing, and particularly provocative, which was in large part due to the filmmaker-turned-playright’s almost fascistic fanaticism, thereupon becoming the thing he loves to hate in the process, but to a more patently preposterous and innately ironic degree. Hamlet: This is Your Family would also act as a continuation of his work with his previous unclassifiable active art project Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, albeit this time more focusing on the terribly timid la-di-da bourgeois by belligerently and bluntly bombarding their natural habitat of the theatre, henceforth dropping political and artistic vulgarity into their lap via sardonically subverted reconstruction of Shakespeare where skinheads beat and bugger physically frail types that resemble the audience members themselves. Naturally, Schlingensief responded to certain audience attendees abruptly leaving the play by yelling to them, “you don’t deserve theatre. You don’t deserve culture. No more supper and no more culture. That’s it…go to bed. Sleep til you’re dead. That won’t be long.” And indeed, these passive spectators aka cultural parasites – individuals who are afraid to experience any new art or anything that isn’t already regard as a ‘classic’ because it takes them out of their well cultivated comfort zone – most certainly exhibit a sense of fear when confronted with Schlingensief’s agile art without boundaries. As his friend/collaborator Elfriede Jelinek –an Austrian author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 – stated of Schlingensief shortly after his death: "Schlingensief was one of the greatest artists who ever lived...He was not really a stage director (in spite of Bayreuth and Parsifal), he was everything: he was the artist as such. He has coined a new genre that has been removed from each classification. There will be nobody like him."  Not unlike Hamlet, Schlingensief – who the theme of family (both literal and figurative) played an integral part of his oeuvre – died after decades of battling his family and defending his father(land) via his art without bounds and ideas without ideology while both enduring cleverly fabricated and detectably debilitating forms of madness.

-Ty E

Zelda

Like his previous cinematic works Le salamandre (1969) and Afrika (1973), Alberto Cavallone's Zelda (1974) – a sometimes psychedelic, erotic melodrama about a celebrated racecar driver, his wife, and their merry Ménage à trios lifestyle – is a sufficiently, if superficially, nihilistic work about betrayal, negrophilia, murder, and mayhem from the seemingly preposterous perspective of debauched bourgeois types. Zelda would also be the first film that Cavallone gave into carnal commercialism as he shot scenes of hard pornography for the French version of the film, which I regretfully have yet to see. In a narrative structure quite similar to Afrika, Zelda begins with a scene of the bloody bodies of male protagonist race car driver Mark Davis (Giuseppe Mattei) and his Negress mistress Clarissa (Halina Kim) laying lifeless from what seems like an overly sentimental suicide pact, but as the film progresses and libertine-laden layers of the backstory are peeled back, one soon realizes a fierce and highly hypocritical form of female jealously and treachery is ultimately to blame. Sometimes resembling a shallow arthouse film directed by a pretentious softcore pornographer on LSD, Zelda is best perceived as an elegant erotic flick of the posh pulp persuasion which – not unlike the wanton works of filmmakers Radley Metzger (The Lickerish Quartet, Score), Walerian Borowczyk (Goto, Island of Love, La Marge), and Tinto Brass (Salon Kitty, Caligula) – were quite popular in Europa during the 1970s. Of course, despite its similarities with other films of that era, Zelda – with innately iconoclastic and misanthropic themes and oftentimes anti-erotic sex scenes – has the unmistakable feel of an Alberto Cavallone film, albeit of his more commercial blend. With characters that spout such pseudo-existentialist gibberish like “we must destroy ourselves to justify our existence” and "I detest everything that is normal" – in between talking of beastality and the lack of emotional authenticity in regard to interracial love – one cannot help but be enamored by succulently stylized cinematic sleaze that is Cavallone’s – the one and only – Zelda. 

Equipped with an action-packed assortment of acid-washed, negative, and overexposed stock footage featuring racecars, crotch-rockets, wild horses, airplanes and whatnot that comprise a large fraction (seemingly to be around ¼ of the film) of film, Zelda is a wayward cinematic kaleidoscope of cool bullshit that oversexed, ritzy twit types are into; none of which I can relate to, yet that does not detract for the rich kitsch of this cross-grained celluloid trainwreck. The title character of the film, Zelda, is a decisively duplicitous bitch with a terrible sexual itch she can’t seem to scratch, hence her particularly perverse propensity for seducing and sleeping with members of both genders instead of her perpetually horny husband. Described in the film as “a dove, a snake and a bitch at the same time” like so many other miserable matriarchs of Italian families, Zelda ultimately is the undisputed duce of the household and she wields power with her (and other people’s) pussy. In short, sex acts as a debauched form of double-dealing in Zelda that leads to familial disintegration and eventually death. Of course, no one is innocent in the film as Zelda’s racecar-driving would-be-superstar husband Henry is more interested in scubadiving than the fact that his college-age daughter Ingrid (played by blonde bombshell Franca Gonella; a woman that can barely pass for 25) is philandering with his middle-aged Negro friend, a fellow racecar driver with a need for speed and pan-sexual degeneracy. Manic for miscegenation, racecar rockstar Henry eventually falls madly and unfalteringly in love with black babe Clarissa (Halina Kim) – the wife of his black buddy – who Zelda initiually seduces, thereupon sparking the torrid threesome that will eventually culminate in the demise of her own marriage. Even after Henry’s botched attempt at suicide, which paralyzes him and thus irreparably pacifies his sexual potency in the process, Clarissa stands behind her melanin-deprived man to the dismay of overzealous Zelda; the queen bitch of her less than humble abode. In the end, Zelda and the rest of the jaded lovers seek bloodthirsty vengeance of the most malevolent, multicultural sort.

 With its cursory yet completely callous and cheaply charming cocktail of hedonistic sex, extreme sports, and mind-numbingly mundane yet unintentionally mirthful melodrama, Zelda is proof that style and cynicism can go a long way for a film that would otherwise be without a single inkling of merit. While nowhere near as worthwhile as Alberto Cavallone's quasi-surrealist sadomasochistic masterpieces of the cine-magically macabre such as Man, Woman, and Beast (1977) and Blue Movie (1978), nor even the phantasmagorical softcore flick Blow Job (1980), Zelda does make for a passable, if secondary, addition to his unruly miscegenation-based melodramas Le salamandre (1969) and Afrika (1973). Ultimately, Zelda is palatable due to its strikingly state-of-the-art synth-based musical score (created by Marcello Giombini), rather Roeg-esque nonlinear editing, pseudo-poetic psychedelic wild horse scenes, sleekly stylized shot composition, and hyper-hysterical scenes of histrionics. As a film with such positively preposterous dialogue as “is it really love or just the desire to sleep with someone with black skin?” and “Hurry up, I’m a bitch in heat,” Zelda is just another great example as to why the Italians made some of the most terribly yet trimly trash films of the 1970s and 1980s.

-Ty E

Pentimento

With 20% of its landmass and 21% of its population located below sea level, and 50% of its land lying less than one metre above sea level, the Netherlands is a tiny nation that has been historically ravaged time and time again, so it is only natural that its inhabitants would have an atavistic aversion to water and the sea; or at least that seems to be the case with Dutch avant-garde filmmaker Frans Zwartjes as vividly depicted in his feature-length film Pentimento (1979); a quasi-erotic and pseudo-exploitative ‘horror’ film where cold oceanic blues dominate the film's aesthetic, and an assortment of Adam’s ale, sweat, urine, blood, and vaginal lubrication become characters unto themselves. Of course, Zwartjes – a rather eccentric fellow whose morbid, proto-goth/death rock film aesthetic was largely influenced by his experience working in mental institutions – is no doubt not afraid of all forms of water as he is a fervent nudist who enjoys voyeuristically gazing at beautiful women’s bearded clams on the seaside as he explained quite adamantly in the documentary De grote tovenaar (2006) aka The Great Magician directed by Ruud Monster, but Pentimento is certainly no day at the beach with its severely salacious portrayals of sexual violence and sadism. Featuring a feverish and foreboding musical score that tingles one's spine and takes prisoner of one's soul, and set to a globalist post-industrial wasteland where beautiful Nordic women are nefariously encroached, experimented on, and eventually disposed of like common trash by Japanese scientists with a positively prurient poise, Pentimento is probably the closest thing to an ‘Actionist Thriller’ and the sort of film jaded Jap cannibal Issei Sagawa – who became a minor celebrity in his homeland after murdering, molesting, and munching on a female Dutch student – would yank his yellow yoo-hoo too. 

 Although a country well known for its painters and artists, especially of a magnificently morbid and metaphysical sort, The Netherlands has produced few filmmakers of notoriety aside from Paul Verhoeven (Turkish Delight, Robocop) and possibly Rene Daalder (Massacre at Central High, Population: 1), but both of these directors would emigrate to the United States and, at least to some extent, Americanize their aesthetic, so Frans Zwartjes makes for a notable exception. As a musician (playing viola for the Dutch opera), draughtsman, violin maker, painter, sculptor, academic professor and all around creative renaissance man of sorts, it was only natural for Zwartjes to be one of the first Dutchmen to embrace film as a serious and legitimate artistic medium (although initially using it to document performances) and he would ultimately approach filmmaking as a Dutch Master painter would with a certain meticulousness of the mise-en-scène of misery that entrances the viewer in a manner like they have never endured before. After completing a series of delightfully daunting and seemingly plot-less, bodacious and bleak black-and-white shorts oftentimes starring his young student wife Trix Zwartjes (who he met while teaching “Non-Applied Design” at Eindhoven Academy), including Birds (1968), Anamnesis (1969), and Visual Training (1969) – audacious awe-inspiring works that would ultimately inspire me to become enamored with the avant-garde auteur – Zwartjes would eventually experiment with color in the short with the chilling, aesthetically and thematically frigorific, bluish gray-toned short Living (1971); an unwelcoming yet weirdly wanton depiction of the biting barrenness of bourgeois life. Although still experimenting with black-and-white film stock (Audition, Bedsitters), Living would hereafter act as a rudimentary model for what would be Zwartjes most accomplished effort, Pentimento; a feature-length work with a discernible, if discordant, narrative set in a terribly technocratic building of emotional sterility where sadomasochistic Japanese scientists perform seemingly preposterous and patently perverted procedures on Dutch girls. 

 Featuring authentic scenes of unflattering female masturbation and a variety of other fecund unfriendly scenarios of noticeably feeble ladies in exceedingly perilous and lethally lecherous situations, Pentimento eventually caught the attention of The Netherland’s more militant, sexually-repressed, and intrinsically lesbian feminist population (unfortunately for the Dutch, dastardly dyke Andrea Dworkin decided to move to Amsterdam in the early 1970s), thereupon condemning the film for perceived misogyny and whatnot and bitchily bombarding a Rotterdam screening of the film. As the son of a nun that had fallen from grace who helped her boy survive starvation through the Second World War and a masculine father (an amateur boxing champ) who died while his scion was just a schoolboy, Zwartjes most certainly had an unconventional childhood where the feminine touch was the prevailing force of family, so, if anything, the prolific filmmaker probably had a special empathy and esteem for the fairer sex, even if in an erratically visceral, vicarious, and vehemently veiled manner as depicted in Pentimento; a certainly clandestine cinematic work with a seemingly effortlessly effete command. Using mere glances and symbolism to tell a sibylline story of female servitude and slavery carried out by tiny yellow men with serious cases of small man’s complex who commit ungodly acts of surgical and sexual sadism, Zwartjes demonstrates innate sensitivity towards the sanctity and sensuality of the female gender, albeit from an inordinately opaque outsider’s perspective.

With its audacious audience-antagonistic artistry, vague allusions to the Japanese experimentation Unit 731 – a place infamous for carrying out some of the most depraved war crimes committed during the Second World War – and the sexual sadism of Sagawa, Pentimento is not the sort of film that many Hollywood-spoonfed, multiculturally-enriched filmgoers will be able to stomach, but of course Zwartjes’ goal with the film was obviously not to yield to vulgarian viewers. Resembling Italian auteur Alberto Cavallone’s Blue Movie (1978) and Blow Job (1980) in its arcane approach to expressing the more labyrinthine motivations behind human licentiousness and callousness and excessive impenetrable essence of works like Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972) and Day of the Idiots (1981) by German auteur Werner Schroeter but to a more flagrant degree, Pentimento – of which the title literally means the alteration of an artist work, evidenced by traces of previous work – is ultimately a work about the progressive terrorizing and mutiliation of the female body by a Japanese doctor with an unhealthy obsession with designer high-heel shoes. When it comes down to it, only Frans Zwartjes can truly understand the artistic intent behind Pentimento, but if there is one thing we can be sure of it is the filmmaker’s determinedly indefatigable artistic forthrightness in turning personal fantasy and nightmare into cinematic reality. 

-Ty E

Menu Total

After viewing Christoph Schlingensief’s brutally bleak yet conspicuously campy black-and-white feature Menu Total (1986) aka Meat, Your Parents at its ill-fated premiere at the 1986 Berlinale Film Festival, charming character actor Udo Kier remarked to the director that, “I killed myself laughing.” Although the actor’s random interaction would later spark many great collaborations with Schlingensief, including kraut arthouse trash works like Egomania - Insel ohne Hoffnung (1986), 100 Years Adolf Hitler - The Last Hour in the Führerbunker (1989), and The 120 Days of Bottrop (1997), Kier was in the minority when it came to apotheosizing Menu Total. Described to him by his mentor Werner Nekes (Uliisses, Johnny Flash) as “fascistic” and by his ashamed father as being “terrible,” Schlingensief was perturbed (yet at the same time, strangely pleased) by the negative response to Menu Total, not least of all because he thought he assembled an elaborately farcical esoteric comedy of sorts, even later proclaiming it be, “my best film!” Ultimately, Menu Total – a Nazi-themed arthouse piece of the most grandiose grotesquery – would prove to be one of Schlingensief’s first public brushes with controversy. Within the first ten minutes of its premiere at the Berlinale, wimp Wim Wenders – a major target for ridicule in many of Schlingensief’s films – walked out of the screening in sheer disgust and by the end of the showing of Menu Total, only half of the 800 member audience remained. Of those remaining 400 filmgoers, about half of them were decisively disgruntled with Menu Total, eventually causing a full-blown fight to breakout that left respected pharmacist Schlingensief’s father in total tears. Indeed, after viewing Menu Total a number of times, I can honestly say that it is one of his most divinely deranged works, which says a lot considering it was directed by a filmmaker who has consistently equipped his films with images of absurdist rape scenarios, rampant race-hate, daffy death sequences, and every sexual perversion known (and not known) to man. Featuring a hysterical hodgepodge of campy concentration camp experimentation, crude and cynical child molestation, sadistic scatological scenarios, existential exploitation, and – more morbidly and mischievously than anything – a decidedly distasteful treatment of Germany’s National Socialist past, Menu Total is the sort of film every good politically-correct German fears and rightfully so, but Schlingensief was not interested in ignoring or sanitizing his Fatherland’s taboo past like so many of his generation, including ethno-mascohistic Holocaust-hugger Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire).

In the documentary Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme (2005) aka Christoph Schlingensief and His Films the audacious auteur displays no apprehension in stating that he is distantly related to Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels via his mother and feels that he, “would make an excellent overseer in a concentration camp,” further stating that Germans “haven’t digested Hitler since 1945,” thereupon adding to the mystique and appeal of National Socialism for newer generations of Hitler's spiritual children. In short, Schlingensief believes that artists should not, “always claim to be on the side of god,” and that he, “should be able to say “I am Evil”…I want to portray evil,” which Menu Total undeniably does, albeit in an audaciously avant-garde neo-Dadaist-Actionists sort of way, minus the pompous pretensions. Centering around a mentally unstable boy that while searching in vain for his beloved mommy, ends up exterminating an entire family, Menu Total is a recklessly wild cinematic work with a startlingly shattered moral compass. Starring German funnyman, musician, and filmmaker Helge Schneider (00 Schneider – Jagd auf Nihil Baxter, Stangenfieber) – who also assembled the irritatingly ironic cool jazz score for the film – Menu Total is an aesthetically malicious masterpiece of curiously cracked and crudely carnal kraut comedy. Taking place largely in a murky bunker where multiple maniacs meander and mess around with mutilated mortals, Menu Total is largely a mock-up, albeit more multifarious and mystifying, for Schlingensief’s later effort 100 Years Adolf Hitler - The Last Hour in the Führerbunker (1989); a 60-minute farce of the Führerbunker where the cast and crew was locked in a cement dugout for no less 16 hours in complete and utter darkness aside from the devotedly dippy director’s trusty flashlight, henceforth arguably making it the artistically faithful filmmaker’s most literal attempt at ‘Direct Cinema.” Like 100 Years Adolf Hitler, Menu Total is a nauseatingly nonlinear experiment with apocryphal themes relating to the history of the Third Reich. By exaggerating these vaguely historical but mostly fabricated stories, Schlingensief attempted to arrive at allegorical truths about the legacy of Hitler (who in the Führerbunker flick is more of a ‘SHITler’ as he passionately paints and plays with his freshly defecated feces). In the documentary Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme, Schlingensief – sounding like a vehement völkisch idealist of the Jungian denomination states quite matter-of-factly that, “I believe we carry genetic baggage around within ourselves…events that happened long before we were born.” That being said, as an aberrant Aryan artist and thus an exceedingly endemic and eccentric expressionist of the German collective unconscious, Schlingensief painted a sordid, sardonic, even sadistic portrait of the Teuton volkgeist via Menu Total; undoubtedly one of the purest and unadulterated consciously and unconsciously ‘German’ films of the post-WWII era. 

Undoubtedly, the palpably precarious 1986 premiere of Menu Total was assuredly a vicarious vantage point for Schlingensief because despite feeling hostile animosity from friends, family, and foes, the director also confirmed his artistic dexterity as an inexorable experimental filmmaker with a particularly potent propensity for invoking buried emotions in his countryman, even once admitting, “there must be some deep, dark black box inside of me. A place which is hungry to tackle material like this." Although merely seeming like a schizophrenic scat film of the uniquely incoherent sort to the uninitiated viewer – which taken literally, it most certainly is – Menu Total, like the poetry of Gottfried Benn and Stefan George, aphorisms of Nietzsche and Spengler, paintings of Franz von Stuck, Fidus and Herbert Smagon, and the films of Fassbinder and Buttgereit, is an out-and-out exegesis of the German soul, albeit taken to the sort of extraordinarily erratic excesses that only Schlingensief was capable of. Filmed in rich and thematically complimentary black-and-white film stock, Menu Total works best as symbolic cinematic expression of the soul of a self-flagellating and spiritually devitalized people, portraying a fantastic dystopian Germanic netherworld where the "shadow aspect" – the unconscious aspect of one's personality that the conscious ego is unwilling to recognize – is laid bare as the de facto persuasion of the uncivilized citizenry.  As ironically stated by a particularly debauched man in a Nazi-era Wehrmacht (army) officer uniform – who engages in ritualistic murder, molestation and mayhem – in Menu Total: "You mustn't hurt the children.  Their future is our future and our work is their future."  Keeping that in mind, Schlingensief took the opposite approach with his films, most especially with Menu Total, by intentionally and unrelentingly stirring unpleasant emotions in the viewers.  While it might not be for the better if viewers find themselves fantasizing about  becoming Adolf Hitler and spouting demented gibberish like the particularly perverse protagonist of the film, it might inspire them to renounce politically correct pretensions and artistic mediocrity, thereupon restoring testicular fortitude to the Teutons of Deutschland; a sound sentiment that the late, great Christoph Schlingensief certainly shared.

-Ty E