The Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me

August 21, 2010 2:21 PM

Christoph Schlingensief is dead.

The prolific and polarizing director died of lung cancer today. Film maker, theater director and tv talk master, he always provoked strong reactions. According to Elfriede Jelinek, he was one of the greatest artists that ever lived (link to reactions (in German) and photos).
After having been diagnosed with lung cancer he wrote a stage play about his death and initiated a project to build an opera house in Burkina Faso.

His works were always very personal and tackled many German topics, he became famous for a trilogy of films (most of the following clips can be considered NSFW) "100 Years of Adolf Hitler", "The German Chainsaw Massacre" and "Terror 2000".
He took on the talk show format with Talk 2000, game shows with U3000 (filmed in a regular subway through Berlin and broadcast on MTV) and DSDS ("German Idol") with Freakstars 3000.
Please Love Austria was his take on Big Brother with illegal foreigners and the winner of the show gaining the right to stay in Austria.

He formed a party for the German elections in 1998 and did so much more...

• His works
• Trailers and other media of his movies, plays and shows
• A short biography from 1998
• Another (badly scanned and OCR´ed) one from Guggenheim

posted by Glow Bucket (4 comments total)

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posted by ioerror at 3:17 PM on August 21, 2010

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making the rounds on German tumble blogs right now is this great clip from his Please Love Austria action, the austrian lady who attacks him while insulting him as an "artist": "Du deutsche Sau Du! .. Du Künstler"
posted by ts;dr at 5:12 PM on August 21, 2010 [2 favorites]

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posted by namagomi at 4:46 AM on August 22, 2010

I just heard about this tonight, and actually came here to see if there had ever been a Metafilter post about him. Post more above the fold, GB, I missed this a few days ago and probably a lot of other people did too.

Anyway, the New York Times obit.
posted by intermod at 9:58 PM on August 25, 2010