Mutters Maske

“The filmmaker’s most conventional feature in terms of narrative construction. Influenced by the florid cinemas of Werner Schroeter and Douglas Sirk, MUTTERS MASKE is Schlingensief’s reimagining of Veit Harlan’s lugubrious Agfacolor melodrama OPFERGANG (1944). A dreary fantasy about sublimated passion, significant for having been made in a country approaching defeat, Harlan’s film concerns a married man who really loves his neighbor, a woman who is a free spirit but who is dying from some unnamed illness throughout the film. Schlingensief updates the pace, adds layers to the narrative that make it less risible and more enjoyable, and identifies the fatal disease as AIDS. In the context of Schlingensief’s other films, MUTTERS MASKE is the last of his films that could be called restrained.” Laurence Kardish, “Anxiety made Comic”, for the catalogue of the Schlingensief exhibition at Kunstwerke Berlin and MoMaPS1 in New York.
“Schlingensief exposes his source material's dangerous proximity to kitsch and camp by reducing the genre conventions known from Harlan, Sirk, Fassbinder & Co to the level of a daily soap. Rather than being a mere spoof, MUTTERS MASKE is perhaps Schlingensief’s purest black comedy.” (Frieder Schlaich)