Screening | 3 Films from Experimental Dramatist Christoph Schlingensief

There is no appreciating the work of the late experimental dramatist Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010) outside the context of state arts funding and the public sphere. As with his polarizing adaptations of canonical operas and plays, Schlingensief eagerly blurred the boundaries between theater, activism and performance art.

100 Years of Adolf Hitler: The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker (1989)
Schlingensief applied the endurance-testing techniques of live theater to the production of this 55-minute hand grenade of a film, which opens with a hilarious rebuttal to Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. Shot over 16 continuous hours in a shared, claustrophobic bunker space, 100 Years of Adolf Hitler paints the Third Reich's last gasp as a grotesque slapstick routine, with Hitler the perennial butt of the joke; in Schlingensief's world, there's no honor in suicide nor glory in defeat. This proudly vulgar, frantic approach anticipates the salaciousness of the true-crime genre--the film is lit by a single diegetic flashlight--while upending the expectations of future generations by rewarding their macabre curiosity with sickening excess.

The German Chainsaw Massacre: The First Hour of the Reunification (1990)
In The German Chainsaw Massacre, the reunification ceremony at the Reichstag is offset by news that 4% of those crossing from East to West Germany never completed the journey. While Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre addressed the abandonment of rural America, Schlingensief's breathtakingly gnarly German export tracks a family of West German (or "Wessi") sausage-makers who see an inherent opportunity in reunification. Schlingensief's gloriously campy, proudly un-subtle approach makes The German Chainsaw Massacre a bellwether for post-Cold War globalization and disquieting parody of the idea that Germany had successfully moved on.

Terror 2000: Germany Out of Control (1992)
The final entry in Schlingensief's trilogy looks to the new millennium (per its title) and--testifying to Schlingensief's perspicacity--the problem of anti-immigrant bigotry. Two federal detectives are sent to enquire after the disappearance of a West German social worker and a Polish family that had been under his care. Their investigation leads them to the fictional town of Rassau, an unmistakable stand-in for the city of Rostock where asylum seekers were attacked by neo-Nazis over the course of several days in August 1992. Two ex-gangsters (played by Udo Kier and Alfred Edel) successfully rebrand themselves as anti-immigrant nationalists, directly evoking the perpetrators of the 1988 Gladbeck hostage crisis. Schlingensief's interest is not just to keep attention on Germany's immediate past, but also in the way murderous agitators can successfully harness the attention of Germany's foaming-at-the-mouth news media and, eventually, curry favor with political leaders.