Ausländer
Raus! Schlingensief’s Container
Paul Poet | Austria | 90 min. | video | 2002 | Canadian Premiere
| Featuring Christoph Schlingensief, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Einstürzende
Neubauten
In the summer of 2000, German provocateur Christoph Schlingensief
set up a refugee camp in front of the Viennese Opera House. He interned
twelve actual refugee applicants in a large shipping container and
streamed their life over the web for the week. As in any “reality
TV” show, the audience was allowed to vote their least favourite
player out of the compound – and, in this case, out of the
country.
Crowned by a banner with the phrase “Ausländer Raus!”
(“foreigners out”) on it, the container became a national
flashpoint – hundreds of Austrians converged on the square
and 800,000 others logged on to the website to cast their ballots.
Schlingensief (dubbed “the German bad-tastemeister”
by Variety) served as the ringmaster, watching bemusedly
as people of every stripe shed their demure exteriors and let fly
their inner prejudices. Jorg Haider’s extreme right Freedom
Party funneled their consternation through the press – it’s
never clear if they were insulted because they were being taunted
or because somebody else thought of the idea first. The hippie left
reacted en masse, storming the container and “liberating”
those inside during their weekly Anti-Haider demonstration.
Paul Poet designed the website and documented the action from its
inception to its logical conclusion. Poet’s resulting documentary
covers the bases – from the use of art as a political challenge,
to the concept of national embarrassment in the face of a civilised
world, to the shit-disturbing narcissism of Schlingensief himself.
Preceded by |
