Christoph Schlingesief Tunguska 1984 AM12
Tunguska – Die Kisten sind da!
(Tunguska – The Crates Are Here!)
Christoph Schlingensief, 1986 Germany, 16 mm, 71 min
Tunguska is primarily a moralising story about torture and disfigurement. It casts the history of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking as a story of grossly abused power. It not only tells but also shows viewers how the vanguard exploration and development of film’s unique visual language has resulted in a crude biological objectification of spectators... It also illustrates with its tragic narrative how the entire tradition of non-narrative cinema is a dead end set with a lethal trap.
Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer, Christoph Schlingensief: Art Without Borders 2010
In Schlingensief’s allegorical reading of aesthetic dictatorship, three researchers travel to the North Pole to torture Eskimos with their avant-garde films. The title refers to an explosion at the Siberian Tunguska River in 1908. Likely caused by the impact of a meteorite, it was the subject of myth and anxieties about cataclysmic destruction. The surreal and often fragmented narrative includes a love story about two naïve teenagers who are held captive by the researchers and forced to endure their films, fusing elements of horror and science fiction with the films other romantic and gothic themes. (Australian Cinémathèque).
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