page_title: Christoph Schlingensief
section_title: Film
hierarchical_section_title: Christoph Schlingensief / Career / Film
caption_attribution_description: English: Alice Waters (one of the best-known and most influential American chefs); Gaston Kaboré (Burkinabé film director and an important figure in Burkina Faso's film industry); Christoph Schlingensief (German film and theatre director, actor and author); arrival for the opening of the 59th Berlin International Film Festival
context_page_description: Christoph Maria Schlingensief was a German theatre director, performance artist and filmmaker. Starting as an independent underground filmmaker, Schlingensief later staged productions for theatres and festivals, often accompanied by public controversies. In the final years before his death, he staged Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival and worked at several opera houses, establishing himself as a Regietheater artist.
context_section_description: Already Schlingensief's debut feature film, the surreal, absurd experimental Tunguska – Die Kisten sind da! ("Tunguska – The Crates Are Delivered!", 1984) was well received by critics. Growing up in the shadow of the New German Cinema, Schlingensief was deeply influenced by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder—many members of whose stock company of actors such as Udo Kier, Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann or Volker Spengler became regulars in Schlingensief's films—or Alexander Kluge, with whom he collaborated on numerous occasions. To said period of film, Schlingensief delivered both a heartfelt homage as well as the final coup de grâce with The 120 Days of Bottrop—starring Helmut Berger, playing an inept director's effort to remake Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)—in much the same way he dealt with German avant-garde cinema 15 years earlier with his first feature film Tunguska – The Crates Are Delivered starring Alfred Edel. Drawing parallels to the work of British filmmaker Derek Jarman, Egomania – Island without Hope (1986) starred Kier and Tilda Swinton. Other influences include Luis Buñuel, Werner Schroeter or Herbert Achternbusch—and Schlingensief's filmic works have been compared to just as wide a range of filmmakers, from Jean-Luc Godard to Russ Meyer.
  With his "Germany Trilogy", consisting of 100 Years of Adolf Hitler – The Last Hour in the Führerbunker, The German Chainsaw Massacre – The First Hour of the Reunification and Terror 2000 – Germany out of Control, Schlingensief came to prominence. Since then he shaped the cultural and political discourse in Germany for more than two decades and established himself as one of the country's most important and versatile artists. The "Germany Trilogy" deals with three turning points in 20th-century German history: the first movie Hundert Jahre Adolf Hitler ("A Hundred Years of Adolf Hitler", 1989) covers the last hours of Adolf Hitler, the second The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990), depicts the German reunification of 1990 and shows a group of East Germans who cross the border to visit West Germany and get slaughtered by a psychopathic West German family with chainsaws, and the third Terror 2000 (1992) focuses on xenophobic violence after the reunification process.
  One of Schlingensief's central tactics was to call politicians' bluff in an attempt to reveal the inanities of their "responsible" discourse, a tactic he called "playing something through to its end". This strategy was most notable in his work Please Love Austria (alternately named Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container) at the time of the FPÖ and ÖVP coalition in Austria, a work which attracted international support, a media frenzy and countless debates about art practice.
  In 2009, he joined the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival under Tilda Swinton.
caption: Schlingensief at the 2009 Berlinale reception, with his partner Aino Laberenz (right), Alice Waters and Gaston Kaboré
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