Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence

A tour-de-force assembled exclusively from archival material that travels through the work of the action artist, provocateur, filmmaker and theatre director Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010. From early Super-8 and trash films to television appearances, from art actions to the established opera production in Bayreuth – an oeuvre with astonishing topicality.

A veritable Christoph Schlingensief revue released on the tenth anniversary of the death, in 2010, of the Oberhausen-born action artist, director and provocateur. Assembled exclusively from archival materials – early films from his childhood and youth are presented alongside trash classics like 100 Years of Adolf Hitler: The Last Hour in the Führerbunker and Terror 2000; theatrical productions alongside television projects like Please Love Austria (Big Brother with refugees set to be deported) and Freakstars 3000 (casting show with disabled people) – one is enabled to experience a metamorphosis that took the enfant terrible further and further into the art and cultural establishment, culminating in the Bayreuth Parsifal production that was, naturally, also somehow provoking.

And time and again, one catches oneself wondering: What among all this would still work today as provocation and food for thought? Would some actions still even be feasible, or would they be all the more important? And with that, the film, like Schlingensief's art in general, says as much about the history of the Federal Republic as it does about the present day.

Image © Filmgalerie 451