Page 206 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

two titles represent the best known of the Berlin director's highly visceral works of horror cinema.
These films (alongside the symphony of suicides that is Der Todesking (1990) and the Nazi-inflected
serial-killer classic Schramm (1993)) have been ptaised by fans and vilified by critics in fairly equal
measure.
In the past, Buttergereit's much-banned necro-porn-horrors have been frequently dismissed
as little more than 'disappointingly witless' and 'morbidly titillating' attempts 'to disgust the most
jaded conceivable audience'.' However, it can be argued that these movies are more thematically
complex and technically sophisticated than is popularly supposed. Equally, they share the artistic
and ideological concerns more usually associated with the canonic auteurs of the Young German
Cinema and the New German Cinema of the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s: specifically
Volker Schlöndorff and Hans Jürgen Syberberg in the first generation and Werner Herzog and Rainer
Werner Fassbinder in the second.
Buttgereit's films dwell on the existential isolation of the desiring German subject and the
libidinally ambiguous re-animation of the deeply repressed historical past. As such, they represent
highly self-reflexive plays on cinema's capacity for the dissemination and reproduction of regressive
ideologies of race and gender. In so doing, Buttgereit delivers not, as has been argued, the 'limp,
inane' message that 'it's okay to fuck the dead as long as you don't kill them',2 but a considered, and
often playful, exploration of one of the core subjects of recent German cinema. Through his unruly
and repulsive imagery we are offered Die Unbewaltigte Vergangenheit - the past that has not been
adequately dealt with.

THE BUTTGEREIT BACKGROUND

Born in 1963, the year following the Oberhausen Manifesto's demands for a 'new German feature
film' predicated upon 'new freedoms', liberated from 'the influence of commercial partners' and
'the control of special interest groups',3 Buttgereit received his first Super-8 camera as a first holy
communion present. He made his first film in 1977, as West Germany veered to the political right
and various left-wing, feminist, anti-establishment and terrorist groups such as the Red Army Faction
and the Baader-Meinhoff group came to the cultural and political fore. In the face of ideological
divisions at the heart of West German society, and the evolution of Kluge's Young German Cinema
into the distinctively historically engaged New German Cinema, it is notable that Buttgereit's early
film career ranged across genres. (These ranged from parodie monster and super-hero shorts to mock-
rockumentaries set in the West Berlin punk scene.)4 However, it is still possible to trace a culturally-
engaged thematic continuity across these early works rhat is of great relevance to German cinema of
the period in general, and the Nekromantik movies in particular.
In 1981, Buttgereit covertly shot the six-minute short Mein Papi, a slice of cinéma vérité displaying
for ridicule Buttgereit's elderly, overweight and vest-clad father. The film was screened in clubs, mostly
as a back-projection to live performances by the experimental noise band Einsturzende Neubaten, with
Buttgereit being paid for his art in vodka. The real payment, however, as the director remarked in
interview with David Kerekes, was the satisfaction of having 'whole audiences laughing at [his] father
behind his back'.5 The New German Cinemas location, in Thomas Elsaesser's words, of 'history in

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