Christoph Schlingensief
GER 1977, 40 min
The fifth film of the Amateur-Film-Company-2000, Youth Film Team Oberhausen, was made in almost 15 months of work by young people aged 15-16 from Oberhausen. In a partly ironic, partly scary way, it tells the story of five schoolmates who are lured to a castle during a summer camping trip by an arrogant (fake) count.
GER 1989-2020, 310 min + 426 min Extras
GER 1992, 45 min
In DEATH OF A WORLD STAR we can witness Christoph Schlingensief in his profession. As moderator of Kultur Extra he interviews Udo Kier on behalf of WDR. In between, excerpts from a home story in which Alfred Edel reports directly from the life of the passing world star.
“Fassbinder said ‘I don’t throw bombs. I make films’, and I would have loved to tell him, ‘I make films, too’.”
Photo: Christoph Schlingensief at the shooting of "Terror 2000"
GER 1968, 10 min
MY 1st FILM consists of two short works that Christoph Schlingensief shot on 8mm film in 1968 at the age of 8. The films show short episodes in which the filmmaker himself figures quite naturally, stages his own work, explains the plot and motivates people to participate: “Please copy me.” (Fritz Göttler)
Episodes:
1. A short Detective Story
2. A short film with Christoph Schlingensief
GER 1969, 13 min
THE SCHOOL CLASS is the first Super 8 film by Christoph Schlingensief. Schlingensief made the film at the age of nine. In it he confidently takes on the role of the teacher of a school class.
GER 1985, 13 min
In MY WIFE IN FIVE, Schlingensief composes tracks and takes to a shimmering cinematic music piece. The playlist changes constantly between the styles, as if this record had a jump – Irving Berlin's This Is The Army, Mr. Jones, an Ave Maria Variation and Jacques Offenbach's world-famous Infernal Galop can be heard. Equally to the music the pictures also have scratches.
GER 1982, 4 min
A scene builds up gradually and without comment before our eyes.
GER 1985, 6 min
Projector is running! As soon as the film strip – a little bumpier than usual – rolls through the projector, the protagonists step in front of the self-made camera. Schlingensief realized the film together with students of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Offenbach. It is his last project as a lecturer at the university.
GER 1984, 7 min
While the audience copes with the consequences of the last German film war between film reality and reality, the words are pouring out of the mouths of the characters. The conversation presents itself as an asynchronous jumble, in which everyone has something to say, but no one listens to anyone: Why don’t you listen to me? A line of argumentation seems no longer possible. One person notices in passing and yet hits the heart of the problem, which is also a problem of narration: Our epic daily routine is becoming an unbelievable chaos.
GER 1986, 21 min
In a German film institute the last minutes of the famous silent film “Queen of the Spring” are being shown. Queen Quelly is supposed to marry the alcoholic Guff, although she doesn’t want to ... After the screening the actors decide to flee – first from the screen and then out of the movie theatre. The film continues outside the cinema; everyone wants to have Quelly for themselves ... The queen becomes the source of conflict between the opposing teams.
GER 1982, 2 min
A trumpet player (Christoph Schlingensief) stands in the snow in the middle of the small town of Much and plays the German national hymn – more bad than right, but with great conviction. Regardless of this, life goes on around him.
GER 1977, 21 min
A family man grabs aunts, uncles, relatives and friends to make a film with them. He wants to prove that he can do it better than the professionals from film and television. But things are getting out of hand. The filming degenerates into slapstick, the mum goes off the rails ending up in a barn. A short circuit makes the chaos complete. HEY MOMMY, WE’RE MAKING A MOVIE brimming with grotesque moments. In the slapstick the film finds its way to the roots of the cinema.
GER 1983, 9 min
There have always been attempts to block our view, to make people think that the way is free, the way is clear, but only as far as we want. There has always been a cry for awakening and change – NOW EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE DIFFERENT!
PHANTASUS MUST CHANGE is the first part of the “Trilogy on Film Criticism”, which also includes WHAT HAPPENED TO MAGDALENA YOUNG? and TUNGUSKA – THE CRATES ARE HERE. The trilogy is Schlingensief’s personal settling of accounts with the New German Film and the attempt to make a new beginning.
GER 1980, 55 min
An old woman who is paraplegic after a car accident propagates the return to the “simple life”. Villagers let themselves be convinced and dare to follow her instructions. From the Radio Telescope, the prince “Mr. Money” – you could also call him “Big Brother” – watches his subjects’ undertakings. He gets in touch with the old woman to put an end to the whole thing. A hard, hopeless battle begins.
GER 1983, 13 min
MAGDALENA JUNG can fly and does so without much ado. All attempts to find out how, all imitations are doomed to failure. Film cannot and indeed should no longer be regarded as an reproduction of reality or a single idea. Film is autonomous (and multivalent)! Its principle rule is to act without rules. WHAT HAPPENED TO MAGDALENA JUNG deals playfully with the illusory power of cinema, with „film as a wonder thing“.
Along with PHANTASUS MUST CHANGE and TUNGUSKA – THE CRATES ARE HERE, the film is part of the “Trilogy on Film Criticism”.
GER 2010, 323 min
Schlingensief’s figure praises himself on stage as the founder of the “Opera Village Africa” and defames himself as a colonialist and missionary out to teach the poor about culture. The rest is an African cultural program and Western navel-gazing on the level of a promotional tour aimed at opening the audience’s wallets. An excruciating balancing act between morality and reality.
GER 2007, 429 min
In April 2007 Schlingensief staged Wagner’s opera in Manaus. He leaves the theatre and goes into the jungle as on the Rio Negro before going back into the Teatro Amazonas. 18 short films, he’s shooting meanwhile, will be part oft he installation TREM FANSTASMA (an opera ghost train) in São Paulo end of 2007.
GER 2011, 23 min
A rain of nightmares: deleted scenes from a film wich consists only of deleted scenes. Their most truthful moment is a dream sequence in which the agony of the first sequence dissolves in a frenzy only to come back and haunt the third sequence. Nothing is finished, not even the intertitles. Everything is becoming. Or decaying.Schlingensief is driven to despair by his actors who are in front of, thus in the way of, his camera. He curses, he dances through the picture, he repeats and repeats. He wipes the lens looking for the moment between the pictures.
GER 2002, 372 min
Quiz 3000 was inspired by the German version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Schlingensief frees the show from the idiot box and turns it into a live theatrical event. He plays the host, who isn't stingy with winnings and doesn't shy away from asking questions about concentration camps, conspiracy theories and weapons of mass destruction.
GER 2001, 349 min
Schlingensief’s “Hamlet” can be interpreted as a tribute to the classic – it even includes audio recordings from the legendary 1963 Gustaf Gründgens’ staging. Neo-Nazis perform on the streets and appear in “Hamlet” as the acting troop in the play within the play, challenging Swiss proclamations of “neutrality” and “lack of radicalism.”
GER 2004, 283 min
ART AND VEGETABLES, A. HIPLER, the first collaboration between Zimbabwean-born director Hosea Dzingirai and Christoph Schlingensief, combines the traditional stage play with an exhibition within the theatre, a succession of scenes between the fine and performing arts, tonality and atonality; between drama and dilettantism, Wagner and Schönberg; between Berlin and Harare, Lüderitz and New York, decay and renewal; first and third world; movement and inertia; black and white; sick and healthy; Volksbühne and countryside; Richard and Wolfgang, house and garden, i.e.: art and vegetables.
GER 2005, 399 min
10 years after his last film, Christoph Schlingenisef wants to give it one more shot: the location for THE AFRICAN TWIN TOWERS is Lüderitz, Namibia, the German South-West African colony. The script is about Richard Wagner, about 9/11, about Hagen von Tronje, about Hereros alive and dead, about ghosts of the past and the present. It is abandoned at day two.
GER 2005, 232 min
After working on his adaptation of Parsifal, which opened at the Bayreuth Opera House in 2004, Christoph Schlingensief developes his idea of the revolving stage further.
THE ANIMATOGRAPH is a spinning stage construction that Schlingensief frees from the confines of the theater in four editions. It is a space for projections, words, pictures and sounds that is accessible to the audience. Thus it melds everyday life, politics and art in a living cycle – and sets them spinning.
GER 2000-2001, 305 min
Established TV formats are parodied and plundered. Pop stars, MTV generation bands, AIDS patients and welfare recipients – in the U3000 subway, they are merely fillers for an all-devouring medium and its high priest, Schlingensief, appearing also as moderator, Rädelsführer and exorzist in one.
All 8 episodes of U3000:
Episode 1: “One Thousand Theories” – Diedrich Diederichsen (2000, 43 min)
With: Christoph Schlingensief, Robert Stadlober, Maria und Margot Hellwig, Spezializtz, Axel Silber, Artur Albrecht, Christoph Stölzl and Familie Abels
D 2008, 375 min
Christoph Schlingensief devoted his Fluxus Oratorio A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN (2008) to his cancer diagnosis that same year. Fear is the rock on which Schlingensief builds his church. In it he probes his relationship to God and to himself; it is a journey to himself. The church interior is modeled on that of his hometown Church of the Sacred Heart in Oberhausen. He creates images, confessions and litanies that trace the intruder and examine the fear of death.
GER 1984, 71 min
Three avant-guarde researchers on the road to North Pole. Their plan: expose Eskimos to their films. Torture can come in many forms... Schlingensief’s feature film debut marks the first of many collaborations with New German Cinema legend Alfred Edel!
TUNGUSKA is part of the “Trilogie zur Filmkritik – Film als Neurose”, which also includes the two short films PHANTASUS MUST CHANGE and WHAT HAPPENED TO MAGDALENA JUNG.
GER 1992, 79 min
After ex-gangster Bössler (Alfred Edel) and Jablo (Udo Kier) have found asylum in Rassau-City, – the one is the owner of a furniture store now, the other of a little church –, they use their forces exclusively to cleansing Germany in the sense of the Rostock pogrom.
GER 2005, 87 min
After working on his adaptation of Parsifal, which opened at the Bayreuth Opera House in 2004, Christoph Schlingensief developes his idea of the revolving stage further.
THE ANIMATOGRAPH is a spinning stage construction that Schlingensief frees from the confines of the theater in four editions. It is a space for projections, words, pictures and sounds that is accessible to the audience. Thus it melds everyday life, politics and art in a living cycle – and sets them spinning.
Documentation about the German Edition ODINS PARSIPARK.
GER 1988, 85 min
Upon returning home, Willy von Mühlenbeck must realize that his evil brother Martin has ascended to the head of their industrialist family – and that his ill mother is now in the grips of sinister doctors. When he falls in love with their terminally-ill neighbor Els, fate takes its tragic course.
Schlingensief exposes his source material's dangerous proximity to kitsch and camp by reducing the genre conventions known from Harlan, Sirk, Fassbinder & Co to the level of a daily soap. Rather than being a mere spoof, MOTHER’S MASK is perhaps Schlingensief’s purest black comedy.
GER 1986, 81 min
Jolly life on the pick-nick meadow in Mühlheim, Ruhr. The parents have fumbled out their old Nazi uniforms. It adds even more fun to the polonaise. Mama gives the starting signal for an extraordinary military parade. Her son Joe gets waked up in the middle of the night. But will he understand what they are planning to do with him? Will he be able to resist the brutal fight of the systems? Will the sperm exchange work out? Will Joe eat the raw human brain? Joe seems lost. His way leads into an abandoned shaft of the Rosendelle mine, where there is a test laboratory.
GER 2003, 75 min
What is normal? And who is retarded here anyway? How does a wheel chair work, and who decides who sits in it and who pushes it? Out of dozens of applicants awaiting their shot at fame and fortune, only the seven very best will be left and form the band “Mutter Sucht Schrauben” [lit.: Mother Seeks Screws] at the end of a fierce casting competition! Headed by a merciless jury, FREAKSTARS 3000 has the fears, the tears, the agony and ecstasy to end all Casting Shows!
GER 1986, 84 min
A desolate island in the baltic sea is governed by the creepy vampire-like baron Aunt Devil. Where once peace and love shaped the lives of the islanders, now hopelessness and discord rule. When suddenly a true love threatens the tristesse of his island, the baron cracks up … A torrent of desire, intrigue and murder ensues.
GER 1997, 60 min
Chaos total: Director Schlingensief, degraded to a set manager, will be replaced by an unknown, who get’s the Bundesfilmpreis award. Film as a nightmare – or vice versa.
Producer Volker Spengler sends an agent (Christoph Schlingensief) to Hollywood where he meets Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad and Roland Emmerich on a mission to raise money and get ex-Visconti superstar Helmut Berger to appear in the film.
GER 1990, 60 min
On 29th November 1990 THE GERMAN CHAINSAW MASSACRE hit the German cinema screens. Christoph Schlingensief had shot his radical comment to German reunification within two weeks, shortly after 3rd October 1990. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of German history, in which a 6-headed West German family from the Ruhrpott (played by Alfred Edel, Volker Spengler, Udo Kier, Susanne Bredehöft, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt and Brigitte Kausch) butchered GDR emigrants one after the other.
GER 2003, 962 min
Once Schlingensief has razed his own biography, ATTA ATTA unveils a campsite with a perch, artificial turf and fake flowers – this is where art has made itself comfy. The rest of ATTA ATTA is Schlingensief’s attempt to break loose from this gilded cage through pure actionism.
GER 1989, 55 min
The big names of the Nazi regime on the brink of its downfall fighting a very private war of their own. Gorging, screwing, machinating: the dark hallways of the Führerbunker are the perfect location for all kinds of excesses.
Regisseur_innen A-Z
