News

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDore O.'s Alaska (1968)The German avant-garde artist Dore O., whose poetic films were at once vast and intimate explorations of dreams, has died at 75. O. was a founder of the Hamburg Filmmakers Co-op (1968-1974), a participant in the famous German exhibit documenta 5 in 1972, and a prolific painter. The DVD label Re:voir Video had recently released a collection of six restored films by O. In 1988, the critic Dietrich Kuhlbrodt wrote: "Dore O. has become classic, and suddenly it turns out that her work has passed the various currents of time unharmed: the time of the cooperative union, the women's film, the structuralists and grammarians, the teachers of new ways of seeing."Subscriptions are now open for Notebook magazine, our print-only publication devoted to the art and culture of cinema. Subscribe now and you’ll...

This article is taken from Koschke #2, the publication of Berlin Critic's Week 2019. The issue brings together writings inspired by the film and debate program running alongside the Berlinale with reflections on the late German director and notorious public provocateur Christoph Schlingensief, whose legacy is also one of the topics of the opening conference at Volksbühne. Authors and interviewees include Erika Balsom, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Lili Hinstin, Eva Sangiorgi, Tricia Tuttle, Kong Rithdee and many others. Christoph Schlingensief. Courtesy of Filmgalerie 451.Christoph Schlingensief was the nightmare of the German middle class. He would target those elusive yet powerful elements of society that can only be defined negatively—neither right nor left, neither poor nor rich, neither gushing nor aloof—and drag them onto every stage, before every camera, into every spotlight. The Mittelklasse, the bourgeois median, was his origin, his métier, his life’s work. He raised hell wherever normality became normative.

Though he spent the last few years of his life openly battling the lung cancer he knew would kill him, the loss of Christoph Schlingensief back in August came as a shock nonetheless. He was, as Hugh Rorrison wrote in the Guardian, "a talented, energetic maverick, often working on several projects at the same time: films, theater, opera, blogs, interviews, prose, art actions, videos. By the end of his life he was considered one of the most influential figures in the German theater and something of a national treasure." And though he was only 50, he had created "a new genre that defies all classification," as Elfriede Jelinek wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. "There will be nobody like him."

Partnering with Filmgalerie 451, we present a retrospective celebrating Schlingensief's work in cinema. If you're completely unfamiliar with his work, one way in might be the documentary Christoph Schlingensief and His Films (2005), in...