Protokino. Not quite friendly with adequacy, the director, of those who are called with excited aspiration Authors, Creators, Demiurges and other titles with capital letters, conceived to create a completely risky, even by his immodest standards, project: reshoot, reading purely in their own way, but no less hardcore Salo, or 120 days of Sodom de Sade and Pierre Paolo Pasolini. Of course, in the new project cult German pretty quickly found the cast, and the camera! Motor!' - shooting began, if the actors did not begin to massively get into all sorts of traumatic troubles, fake corpses on the set did not become real, and the director himself - not to go crazy even more.
The film “120 days of Bottrop” in 1997, in fact, the last truly loud film of one of the leading directors of the second stream of the “New German wave” Christoph Schlingenzief, doomed to contradiction was initially. In this lapidary timekeeping, but unrestrained content metakino from beginning to end is extremely difficult, and sometimes even impossible to understand over whom so grotesquely, absurdly, derogatoryly and cruelly teases Christoph Schlingenzief, for whom the topical satire has always been a tool of double-edged, since equally in its meaning in the "120 days of Bottrop" he and the great Rainer Fassbinder, the more so much of his creative identity, etc., Desadrechevsky also has to play in this role of the painting by himself, and by his post-muermander, and by the end, by himself. But the director does not regret the loss of this, he does not feel sorry for anyone - neither the actors who at times had to die in the name of art, nor himself, that this art itself killed; rather, he is no longer able to overcome his own madness about the unfulfilled as the project should be.
Remarkably, with its schizophrenic intimacy and pathological attention to everything physiological, natural, extreme, Bottrop’s 120 Days rhyme with Hitler’s Centenary – The Last Days in the Fuehrer’s Bunker, and the well-known, albeit humorous, phrase that every brilliant director should be like Adolf Hitler is here perceived as an unquestionable practical realization. And not for a moment Schlingenzief does not allow himself to doubt: and where there is that fine line between genius and true madness, if, according to the logic of the director, they are inextricably linked with each other - a brilliant madman is a priori capable of everything, for him there are no forbidden themes and works closed tightly by the oppression of censorship, he is free just as much as he considers necessary, agonizing his own creative completeness, even if all this has to pay an exorbitant price. Moreover, the whole comedy component in the tape is sinister by definition: laughing not at himself, not at the RVF, not at the whole of European cinema, an alien part of which Schlingenzief always felt himself, the director increasingly penetrates the film text with the arrows of an absurd nightmare, and the flight into reality of cinematic, parasinematic, turns into a flight to nowhere. Creativity as a cosmogonic “all” becomes chthonic “nothing.”
That is, the film of Schlingenzief is perceived even more than a metakino; at least in the same “American Night” by Francois Truffaut, the cinema nevertheless let go of its creators, giving them at least some hope of salvation from the chimeras of real fiction, then Schlingenzief’s mastery is infinite, and it is not that difficult to banish him from himself, but impossible, because no one has the right to deprive himself of talent, except God, even if the director-actor-writer-musician himself thinks so. The 120 Days of Bottrop, like John Waters's Crazy Cecil B. and Long Live Caesar!, is more appropriately defined as a protokino, an original movie that reflects itself many times rather than once, existing not as a parallel with that extra-frame reality, but as an absolute in its purism art of momentary images, editing glues and camera angles, plot and image, lofty ideas and glossy voids. Art is not doomed to immortality, because the memory of film is so fleeting, and originality sooner or later will become a common place, pastiche and even recognized plagiarism.