The German Chainsaw Massacre (a.k.a. Blackest Heart)

Schlingensief portrays the first hour of German reunification as a national slaughter. The news of the opening of the Wall sends a West German butcher's family into an almost unrestrained bloodlust. In a run-down hotel kitchen, they slaughter former GDR citizens. THE GERMAN CHAINSAW MASSACRE is a short-term reaction to a short-term political development. Schlingensief consciously uses the rapid camera movements, the sound of a chainsaw always present in the background and its gimmicky performance in concrete use on people as an element of trash. The film also interprets German unity as such, as a blood-soaked, cannibalistic act of the incorporation of the East by the West.

Germans celebrate their reunification in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in October 1990. Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker speaks of unity and freedom. A young woman kills her husband with a huge knife and flees. Her car, a Trabant, identifies Clara as an "Ossi". She passes the last remnants of the old border troops and reaches the West. A butcher's family was just waiting for the like of her... Christoph Schlingensief, the great provocateur, gives a disturbing and very bloody answer to some questions about German reunification.

THE GERMAN CHAINSAW MASSACRE is a provocative, at times almost hysterical mixture of rage and blood, as much associated with the genre of "trash movies" like Tobe Hooper's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and its sequels as it is with the classic horror of Hitchcock's PSYCHO. This is not to everyone's taste. In several interviews, the author and director referred to the thoroughly sinister and bitterly evil, yet comedic side of his work. At the same time, he also told of how anger arose in him at the time about the "banana images" and "hypocritical images" on television - when the new visitors from the East were welcomed by the West with tropical fruits (a scarce commodity in the GDR), while he himself saw above all the appropriation and exploitation by the Western economic power. 

Image © Filmgalerie 451