SCFZ

First installed in the Zürcher Migros Museum for Contemporary Art in Zurich, Schlingensief’s Cross Mutilation (Querverstümmelung) presents a sketch of Schlingensief’s “theater of the future.” Through a series of projections, Schlingensief creates an immersive installation that repurposes and overwrites his own material. At the center of Cross Mutilation is his short film External Mutilation (2007), which calls to mind the work of Austrian avant-garde filmmaker Kurt Kren. Inspired by Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), the film documents an unrealized opera work by Schlingensief.

FREAX is an opera in two acts by Moritz Eggert with libreto by Hannah Dübgen.

no beauty without the wound.

what a luck that we have killed our children.

- A crisis is a good sign as well. (pic 2 ↓)
- You have to suffer for art. (pic 3c ↓)

twodeadmagpies wrote: ↑Fri Dec 31, 2021 3:47 pm ?

The Berlin Wall as a surface reflecting art, activism, history and visions. A playful portrait.

Far away from this joyful place,
time goes by and does not return.
Time goes by, not returning,
carrying away our affections.
Far away from this joyful place,
time goes by and does not return.

Warming, gentle breezes,
pour on us your caresses.
Warming, gentle breezes,
bestow on us your kisses.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/fassbind ... my-faction

Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction
by MEAGAN DAY

...

Addicted to both work and cocaine, the quick-tempered and insatiable Fassbinder made more than forty feature films and television series and wrote or directed thirty plays in just fifteen years. Today, he’s not widely regarded as an explicitly political artist, since most of his output dealt with other subjects entirely. In his enormous body of work, Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day stands alone as a testament to the director’s cultivated literacy in socialist political ideas and his optimism that they might be of use in the hands of the German public — perhaps even that their aims might one day be realized.

But this optimism was short-lived. When Fassbinder’s work touched on left-wing politics in the years to come, his perspective tended to be either gloomy and dejected, as in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975), or cutting and sardonic, as in The Third Generation (1979). These later films angered his leftist contemporaries, creating a rift that hadn’t healed by the time of his early death. The breach was so wide that, at one point, Fassbinder found himself at a screening on the receiving end of boos and jeers by radicals who denounced him as a reactionary, to which he allegedly replied, “All leftists are idiots.”

...

In August 1967, Fassbinder stumbled into an underground theater in Munich, established six months earlier as an art house showcasing work primarily by the Oberhausen group. Action-Theater, writes Fassbinder scholar Wallace Steadman Watson, was “fifty-nine chairs . . . und saloon tables in what one critic called a ‘gloomy dive.’” Under the creative direction of its founders, a married couple named Ursula Strätz and Horst Söhnlein, Action-Theater had been transformed into a venue for avant-garde live plays.

Fascinated, Fassbinder joined the loose collective and was quickly jockeying with Söhnlein for authority. It was at Action-Theater that he collided with the student movement, which at that time was reaching fever pitch in cities across West Germany. And it was at Action-Theater that he came to know a few of those who would push the movement into its next, more violent phase — including Söhnlein and his political friends, future RAF core members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

...

A few months later, in April 1967, a group of anarchists led by the young Fritz Teufel were arrested with great fanfare for plotting to throw bombs at visiting US vice president Hubert Humphrey. When it was discovered that the “bombs” were actually just yogurt and flour, the press dubbed them the “Pudding Assassins.” Later, Teufel would gravitate to the RAF and engage in actual political violence. But for now, the incident only embarrassed the police and popularized the movement further. The youth of Germany were inclined to side with the pranksters and their leader, Teufel — which is the German word for “devil,” enhancing the general aura of mischief — over the clueless authorities.

In June 1967, matters became serious when a student named Benno Ohnesorg was killed by a police officer at a demonstration in West Berlin. A photograph of a young woman protestor kneeling over Ohnesorg’s body — strikingly similar to the iconic Kent State shooting photo from the United States a few years later — flooded the press, generating popular sympathy for the young dissidents. The student movement’s ranks swelled, and its protests increased in frequency and intensity. This was the political context in which young Fassbinder arrived at Action-Theater late that summer.

...

Director Klaus Lemke began work on a feature film, The Arsonists, inspired by the Frankfurt bombing, which centered on a band of left-wing terrorist youth looking glamorous in sultry makeup and leather jackets. Cinema student Holger Meins made an instructional film about how to fashion Molotov cocktails.

...

Sometime between the Springer play and the shuttering of Action-Theater, Fassbinder slipped off to Paris, where he was arrested during the cataclysmic youth revolt there — “whether as a participant or an observer,” Watson writes, “is not clear.” It was an apt metaphor for Fassbinder’s relationship to the Left for the remainder of his life and career.

...

Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven was released in 1975. It was quite plainly a film about the Left, and the Left hated it. Thomsen describes its reception this way:

The audience at the premiere consisted precisely of the groups at whom the film was aimed, that is, journalists and militant students. The atmosphere was so volatile that the film’s dialogue could not always be understood, and a planned discussion between Fassbinder and the audience was completely drowned out in abuse and insults. To the angry question, why the film only dealt with the idiots on the Left and not with its more constructive tendencies, Fassbinder replied bad-temperedly, “All leftists are idiots!” At that there was a deafening commotion in the auditorium, and the discussion had to be broken off.

...

Many on the West German left at the time thought that the director, who by then had become one of the most internationally celebrated figures in Germany, had abandoned them in his pessimism. But perhaps not. Rainer Werner Fassbinder died in 1982 at age thirty-seven from an overdose of cocaine and barbiturates. In his apartment, surrounding his body, were notes for a new film project: “Rosa L.,” about the life of the socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.

- Shit... shit...
- Shit? What "shit"?
- Just say "Shit!" Curse "Shit!"
- Shit!
- Repeatedly.
- Shit!
- Look at the camera.
- Shit!

https://retentionalfinitude.blogspot.co ... 2-mal.html

Before he took up armed struggle against the state as a member of the Red Army Faction and became an icon of the left by dying from a hunger strike while in prison, Holger Meins studied film at the Film Academy in Berlin, making films alongside Harun Farocki and Helke Sander. Yet his aesthetics and politics, cinematic protest and guerilla resistance, cannot be kept wholly apart. His most infamous film https://youtu.be/iczvwyzM_EQ details the making and use of a Molotov cocktail. And while underground with the RAF, Meins tricked a metal sculptor into producing functioning weapons as props for a film project, what Meins described as "a kind of revolutionary fiction." In the twelve brief chapters that compose the short film Oskar Langenfeld, Meins paints an unsparingly harsh portrait of his subject, an impoverished, aged man who attempts to maintain a dignified pose despite the humiliating power others hold over him, his miserable living conditions, and the uncontrollable coughing of his sickly body. Meins's film takes up an openly invasive perspective, pushing the viewer into an uncomfortable proximity with Langenfeld by showing intimate scenes such as his dressing or by regularly presenting extreme close-ups of his wrinkled face, even when mucus is apparent in his mouth. Meins also uses an extremely elliptical form of editing, jolting the viewer by abruptly starting and ending scenes. After mapping out the diminished, degraded scope of Langenfeld's existence, the film ends with Meins instructing Langenfeld, "Go on, say shit." Langenfeld then makes a number of attempts to satisfactorily express the dysphoria the filmmaker desires, to call the economic system that oppresses him what it is: "Shit."

Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh
Another lonely day, with no one here but me, oh
More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh
I'll send an S.O.S to the world
I'll send an S.O.S to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah
A year has passed since I wrote my note
I should have known this right from the start
Only hope can keep me together
Love can mend your life
Or love can break your heart
I'll send an S.O.S to the world
I'll send an S.O.S to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah
Oh, message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah
Walked out this morning, I don't believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home
I'll send an S.O.S to the world
I'll send an S.O.S to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, oh
Message in a bottle, yeah
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S
I'm sending out an S.O.S

https://youtu.be/MbXWrmQW-OE

Uncle Feng, an experienced policeman, lives a quiet and beautiful life in Tung Ping Chau. One day, the old lady living next door comes to ask him to go to Hong Kong Island to return the body of her daughter, a stewardess killed by the police after being suspected of being a drug smuggler. Feng finds that the "stewardess" had actually been killed before her return to Hong Kong. She had been turned into a "living corpse", and is being controlled by a Japanese magician for smuggling. With Feng's supernatural skills and detective techniques, they finally find the location of the secret altar of the Japanese magician.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Cop

A closely hewn remake of the first half of Viennese Actionist (and convicted sex offender) Otto Muehl's 1967 film Kardinal with the following minor substitutions: the original woman is played by the artist, the original artist is played by a woman wearing a powdered wig, and the film is presented as a Karaoke sing-a-long to a tune by one of Otto Muehl's more effete 80's popstar countrymen.

https://vimeo.com/8096763

A montage of brief recollections filmed in the years before the death of my mother in 2000 and the death of my father in 2007. I stand as an adult in the midst of childhood feelings, gazing at the disappearance of my family home and the changing relation to my parents.

"More than any other single film that I have seen so far in this year's Wavelengths programs, Ute Aurand's achingly lovely Hanging upside down in the Branches is a paradigmatic example of programmer Andréa Picard's unique vision. Perhaps too personal, too domestic, to register with certain other tastemakers, Hanging upside down in the Branches is precisely the kind of "small" film too often overlooked because of the fundamental modesty of its approach. (...) Aurand is zeroing in on the absolutely singular, exquisite textures of the daily life around her - (...) Separated by white flash-frames, individual moments pop like fleeting revelations, the seconds whose very preciousness is defined by their ineffability. (...) Hanging upside down in the Branches is, in some way, a diary film, but one that records sensual phenomena rather than narrative event. Or, perhaps more properly stated, Aurand generates flashes of illumination, collecting them from the slow drift of everyday existence, allowing them to achieve a hieratic character. And yet, in their filmic arrangement, in the assembly and temporal re-experience, they become a different kind of narrative, a story of us all that insists on absolute particularity, insisting that these images only mean anything because they are of these people who Aurand has deeply loved." Michael Sicinski, TIFF 2009

comment by "cultural vegetables" ↓
A whirlwind look at Germany's influential rock scene borne out of post-WWII experimentation. A reliably well-researched production, quirky inter-views with it's niche legends will likely delight fans and bewilder everyone else. In true BBC fashion, all roads invariably lead to David Bowie.

https://youtu.be/QP5dOKTB3ng

sally wrote: ↑Fri Mar 25, 2022 9:24 pm material - thomas heise (2009)

sally wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 2:42 pm vaterland