Helge Schneider
Helge Schneider's extraordinary talent is his ability to improvise which shows his unfailing creativity. "I paint the everyday-life in the brightest colors myself", he says about himself. Reality and fiction are tough to tell apart in his life. How does a man like him, who doesn't want his audience to know too much about himself, react on a documentary portraying him as a person?
A dangerous gangster called the Lizard escaped from prison. He steals chickens and spits on old ladies. There's only one man who can catch him: the commissioner Roy Schneider!
CHAOSTAGE is the first real german Punk movie. part fictional, part documentary it tells the story of some young punks...
Alexander Kluge's News from Ideological Antiquity begins with Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's ambitious but unrealized plan to combine Karl Marx's Capital and James Joyce's Ulysses. For over nine hours, the film expands in concentric circles as Kluge, his guests, interlocutors and monologists make associative links on a range of topics that starts from a filmic discussion of Eisenstein's notes.
Hitler no longer believes in himself, and can barely see himself as an equal to even his sheep dog. But to seize the helm of the war he would have to create one of his famous fiery speeches to mobilize the masses. Goebbels therefore brings a Jewish acting teacher Grünbaum and his family from the camps in order to train the leader in rhetoric. Grünbaum is torn, but starts Hitler in his therapy ...
A musician tries to get by working several jobs.
The Seven Dwarves live deep within a female-free-zone of the Enchanted Forest, but they cannot resist the innocent charms of Snow White when she enters their world. So when the evil queen abducts her, it is up to the dwarves to save her life.
An eccentric homage to the Rainer Werner Fassbinder days of German filmmaking.
The film looks at ways of creating spezial illusions through amiguous images, perspective theatres, folding peepshows and from the 19th century, the stereoscope, which look forward to today’s holography.
Other essential predecessors of film were those devices that created the illusion of motion by taking advantage of the persistence of vision and the stroboscopic effect, such as the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope or wheel of life, zoetrope or magic drum and praxinoscope and later on, the more sophisticated flip-books such as the kinora and mutoscope.
The film traces the history of the camera obscura, the understanding of perspective and anamorphosis, peepshows and it shows the beauty of historical shadowtheaters and shadow toys.
The history of the magic lantern with demonstrations of moving slides, watertank or polarisation slides, followed by images on paper, which are brought to life with mechanical manipulations, with light shining through them or as panorama.
The funny clown Bratislav Metulskie is found dead in circus "Apollo". The retired commissioner 00 Schneider is asked to assume control of the case. Schneider and his aged sidekick Körschgen investigate to find the murderer.
Mutters Maske aka Mother's Mask is a free adaptation of the film Opfergang (1944) aka The Great Sacrifice of Veit Harlan. 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: set within a noble family from the German Ruhr, Schlingensief's story revolving about Willy von Mühlenbeck's tragic love to terminally ill neighbor girl Äls (Susanne Bredehöft) and the inheritance intrigues by his evil brother Martin von Mühlenbeck (Helge Schneider) creaks with melodramatic devices and self-conscious dialogues. Rather than being a mere spoof, "Mother's Mask" is perhaps Schlingensief's purest black comedy.
"Stangenfieber" is an almost 30-year-old short movie which runs for nine minutes. It is the first directorial effort by Helge Schneider and came out shortly after "Johnny Flash". In this full feature, Schneider was not yet director and writer himself, but with "Stangenfieber", which sounds like some tropical illness, he took that past and should also be involved with these crucial aspects of filmmaking in pretty much every upcoming film starring himself. Most of the cast in this little project are Schneider's pals and they have returned in other of his films later on, especially Peter Thoms, a longtime companion for the extravagant genius that is Helge Schneider. About "Stangenfieber", it is a movie probably even more experimental than "Johnny Flash". There is one aspect of this short movie, which occurs frequently in his films as well: men wearing drag and playing female characters, in this case a tutu. -http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2302835/reviews
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.
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)
