Born in 1963 to loving parents whose gift of a Super-8 camera for his First Holy Communion has inadvertently led to the corruption of filmgoers everywhere, Jörg Buttgereit is a guy whose deviant 16mm films belie the fact that his true love is Godzilla.  His numerous short films, which jump from superhero capers like Captain Berlin - Saves The World to the furtively-filmed documentary Mein Pappi (which became a club favourite of Einsturaende Neubauten's Blixa Bargeld) were a mainstay of the German underground film scene in the early '80s, and led to a collaboration with Michael Brynntrup on Jesus - Der Film in 1985/86 and Hot Love (also 1985), the short that would lay the groundwork for a labour-intensive feature film.  Nekromantik (1987) was Buttgereit's breakthrough film, and the one with which his name is most often linked.  His synthesis of balls-to-the-wall absurdist violence and a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour captivated audiences around the world, and won him the attention of international censors who were aghast at this smut with art-house pretensions.  After three further features, Der Todesking (1990), Nekromantik 2 (1991), and Schramm (1993), all of which were produced on meagre independent budgets, Buttgereit's increasingly serious films are still banned in many countries, including our own.  He now writes for TIP Magazine in Berlin and gets paid to lecture at the schools that wouldn't take him as a student 20 years ago.  (Kier-la Janisse)

Der Todesking (The Death King)
(dir. Jörg Buttgereit, Germany, 1990, 74 min., format: video)
Der Todesking is probably the least-seen and most sought-after of Jörg Buttgereit's features.  With suicide as the central character and all others as its byproducts and accomplices, Der Todesking is liquid nihilism that is as deadly as it is contagious.  Told in a series of vignettes categorized according to the days of the week and segregated by intermittent glimpses of a slowly decaying corpse, Buttgereit's sepulchral opus is an unpleasant journey from birth to death and decay (it is also of significance in that its suicides have been universally misunderstood as the consequence of a chain letter, although Buttgereit admits no such conscious decision.)  Each suicidal segment varies in aesthetic as well as structure, and does its best to obliterate certain cliched notions about suicide: a lovelorn worman who abandons her own suicide to facilitate another's; a man inexplicably beating his head to the wall until he is dead; a secluded bridge whose jumpers are respectfully listed by name; and the living girl whose drawing of "The Death King" is what provides the film with its title.  Says Buttgereit: "Just like believing in Santa Claus or something, she wants to have something she can look to and say 'That's why these people don't want to live anymore'." Der Todesking is a document of destruction, a haunting and complex ode to the bewitching pull of death, and one that may be Buttgereit's most ambitious work to date.  (Kier-la Janisse)

Schramm
(dir. Jörg Buttgeriet, Germany, 1993, format: 16mm)
"Today I am dirty, but tomorrow I'll be just dirt."  - Carl Panzram
The king of deutche malaise is at it again!  Jörg Buttgereit will be here in person to introduce his most recent film, Schramm, an uncompromisingly bleak foray into psychosis that proves my belief in teutonic superiority when it comes to the serial-killer epic.  Florian Doerner Von Gustorf plays the titular anti-hero Lothar Schramm who, in between screwing an inflatable torso affectionately named 'Take My Body' and dispatching of bothersome Jehovah's witnesses, is suffering from an obsessive love for the hooker net door (played by Monika M, the nekro vixen who stole your hearts at last year's CineMuerte).  "At once a meditation on the banality of evil and an oddly moving portrait of human pain," writes Noah Cowan.  Buttgereit's trademark grainy 16mm stock and sureal non-linear editing, coupled with Scramm's Flannagan-esque, genitally-directed masochism and repeated hallucinations concerning bodily deterioration make Schramm essential viewing for art-house gorehounds.  "It's far from a reassuring experience, but it's a jarringly unforgettable one."  (Mitch Davis)
"Pure filth that you are guaranteed to love!"  (Kier-la Janisse)