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.
Writer
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.
Rolf
An early declaration of war on narrative cinema, using a barrage of visual and acoustic elements while at the same time juggling ironically - as he still does - with the term 'avant-garde'. A number of other preferences and obsessions were evident at an early stage, e.g. the mind-numbing habit of having his people stumbling and screaming around: life as a race track. His films likewise feature a lot of theatrical and cryptic outpourings. No wonder that they failed at the box office. No wonder either, however, that Schlingensief was attracted to theatre.
