Die 120 Tage von Bottrop (1997)

The last survivors of the onetime Fassbinder circle meet in Berlin a decade and a half after the master’s death because they want to make a stand against the unrestrained commercialization of German cinema. Their plan is to make what they call the very last “New German Film” in the Fassbinder style: a remake of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final work, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.” It is to be shot at Potsdamer Platz, which, like German cinema in general at the time, looks like one huge construction site. During filming, however, the scheduled director, Schlingensief, is replaced by a certain “Sönke Buckmann”—a combination of the names of the two commercially successful directors Detlev Buck and Sönke Wortmann. For his work, aimed entirely at winning audience approval, he promptly receives the German Film Award, presented by successful actress Katja Riemann. So much for the central plot. But the real core of the film lies in Schlingensief’s collage-like scenes, which portray the business of filmmaking as a wild experiment in which failure is a central possibility. For instance, the Fassbinder crowd waits for Helmut Berger, announced as the star, only for him to arrive dead drunk and disheveled; here, in true Fassbinder fashion, chaos becomes the guiding principle. Unpredictable events render a linear plot and an orderly shooting schedule useless. Before long, the ambitious film project is in danger of collapsing, and the actors and the entire crew increasingly turn into the very lunatics they are supposed to portray. This is the beginning of an absurd-looking excess in which everything is called into question and the project ends up adrift in a dramatic no-man’s-land, amid wild visual insertions—including clips from earlier Schlingensief works, as well as disturbing battle scenes, images of surgery, and pornographic footage—and occasional, seemingly out-of-place comic interludes.