Christoph Schlingensief United Trash 1995–6 AM12
United Trash – Die Spalte
(United Trash – The Slit)
Christoph Schlingensief, 1995 Germany, 35 mm transferred to Blu-ray, 75 min
United Trash confronts us with an extremely bleak view of Western civilisation in which violence spreads across the world while being turned into empty spectacle by the media… It marks a departure from the specifically German concerns of Schlingensief’s earlier works by responding to violence at the global level, and Schlingensief takes his debasement of film to new levels in this truly appalling piece of trash culture that comes with its own health warning.
(David Ashley Hughes, Reinventing the Left: Radical Responses to German Reunification, 2006)
In this grotesque and blasphemous comedy – a response to the United Nations’ failure to control violence in the Balkans and Rwanda during the early 1990s – a black child is born to a German general working for the UN in Africa. Hailed by a deposed bishop set on overthrowing the Vatican as the Messiah, the child’s face is horribly disfigured in an accident, producing a cranial slit. At the same time, the local despot conspires to kill the US president via a discarded Nazi rocket powered by burning human sacrifices. Shot in Zimbabwe, the entire crew was arrested on suspicion of making pornography and the footage smuggled out of the country to complete the production. (Australian Cinémathèque)
See the full Tate Film programme.