As far as Kraut comedies are concerned, none can compare to the dementedly iconoclastic semi-surrealist works of Christoph Schlingensief and his work Die 120 Tage von Bottrop – Der letzte neue deutsche Film (1997) aka The 120 Days of Bottrop – The Last New German Film – a ferociously farcical parody of German New Wave cinema (most specifically the works of R.W. Fassbinder) – is arguably the ardent Aryan auteur filmmaker’s most keenly reflexive and gut-busting effort. Featuring campy cameos and puckish performances from some of the biggest names in German New Wave (and Kraut cinema in general) – including Udo Kier, Helmut Berger, Volker Spengler, Leni Riefenstahl, Roland Emmerich, among others – The 120 Days of Bottrop is an overwrought unlove letter to German motion pictures that is more harsh than the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche’s in terms of its bloodthirsty besmirchment of the Fatherland. The 120 Days of Bottrop features a number of the real-life surviving members of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lecherous, carnivalesque inner-circle in a notably degenerated state (including Volker Spengler as an eccentric flaccid-cock-smoking producer) as they attempt to remake Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final masterpiece Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom(1975) at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin – Europe’s largest building site and the setting for Fassbinder’s 15 ½ -hour TV movie Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) – in a mere 5 days under increasingly topsy-turvy conditions. Intended as the final work of Neue Deutsche, the filmmakers in The 120 Days of Bottrop run into trouble as they begin to lose money and actors for their ostensibly ambitious final project. Part-homage but mainly a savagely sardonic satire of German cinema and post-nationalist Teutonic kultur in general, The 120 Days of Bottrop is very possibly the final word on German New Wave cinema from a director who couldn’t have been better suited for the job. Being a child of the German New Wave and casting many Fassbinder regulars (Margit Carstensen, Udo Kier, Irm Hermann, etc) in his own uncompromising and antagonistic absurdist works, Schlingensief offers a candid and carnal perspective with The 120 Days of Bottrop that is more sportively sadistic than stalely sentimental in its portrayal of the once-revolutionary film movement its pays exorbitantly erudite yet erratic anti-tribute to.
Alex Herreisenherz
