The best Sergej Gleithmann’s movies

A traumatized young man, abused by his father, imagines himself as Adolf Hitler when dreaming of revenge. Schlingensief released this film, which follows no linear narrative structure, at a moment when right-leaning German intellectuals argued for a coming to terms of the country’s relation with its Nazi past. Schlingensief disagreed. (MoMA)

In "German Chainsaw Massacre" people meet up with a household of butchers. They detect low cost meat in the East Germans moving over the old boundary into the West and start turning them into sausage. Clara flees the slaying of her sleazy spouse and the rotting East, and lands in the arms of butchers. She is held alive simply because the daughter of the family falls in love with her. This German movie is a satirical massacre splatter flick that provides lots of inexpensive gore. It's full of political overtones and has a lot to Tobe Hooper's terror classic "The Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers". If you're a lover of German gore and absurdness, check it out!. 16 million East Germans on their way to the golden West. 4% never got there: were they turned into Wuerste (sausages)? If you knew Christoph Schlingensief's other movies like "United Trash" you will know what this is all about - some call it art, some trash. Shot in 14 days after October the 3rd 1990. With Udo Kier in a small role.

Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.

Egomania is a visually stunning end-of-the-world melodrama about lust, jealousy and murder set amidst solar eclipses, orchestral chants and the distant thunder of the boiling sea. The film’s characters – riddled with unconscious desires – find themselves imprisoned on an island. Drawing parallels to the work of British filmmaker Derek Jarman and staring Jarman’s actress-muse Tilda Swinton, Schlingensief’s raw and almost mythological film stands in contrast to his more offensive efforts.

An early declaration of war on narrative cinema, using a barrage of visual and acoustic elements while at the same time juggling ironically - as he still does - with the term 'avant-garde'. A number of other preferences and obsessions were evident at an early stage, e.g. the mind-numbing habit of having his people stumbling and screaming around: life as a race track. His films likewise feature a lot of theatrical and cryptic outpourings. No wonder that they failed at the box office. No wonder either, however, that Schlingensief was attracted to theatre.