Niklaus Schilling

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Niklaus Franz Josef Schilling (born April 23, 1944 in Basel ; † May 6, 2016 in Berlin ) was a Swiss film director , cameraman , film editor and screenwriter .

life and work

Schilling is an important representative of German auteur films . Thematically and technologically he is considered to be unusually keen to experiment. In his films, the native Swiss defines his own and every time different perspective on Germany. (u. a. Rheingold , The Willi Busch Report , The Luminous West! , The Blind Cow )

The son of a bank clerk was raised a Roman Catholic . Even in early childhood he was fascinated by the lavishly staged church services - a play of colors and shapes, symbols ... “My first serious film experiences took place at Sunday missionary film screenings in the early 1950s. Not infrequently the film tore or burned: an unbelievable experience ... “ Middle school, Basel School of Applied Arts - legendary Bauhaus preliminary course. 1960–1963 apprenticeship as a (window) decorator in a department store. Despite great moral scruples at the beginning, Schilling can soon no longer escape the pull of the cinema: He watches one film after another, from À bout de souffle to Dr. No . With a small inheritance, acquisition of 8 mm film equipment including a tape recorder, first experiments. In 1962, cleaning system II and, in collaboration with his older brother ( Alfons Schilling ), Cosmos Action Painting are created . Employment as “assistant for everything” at a film production company for industry and advertising in Zurich. Camera assistant, television reports as a cameraman for ITN and ABC. (including “100 years of first ascent of the Matterhorn”) Meeting with Vlado Kristl .

Moved to Munich in November 65. Brief production assistant at Kruse-Film (= HB male !) Meeting with the so-called (informal) Munich group. ( Klaus Lemke , Rudolf Thome , Max Zihlmann and others) Cameraman for films by Lemke, Thome, Gosov, May Spils , Jean-Marie Straub and others. a. There is a division of labor with Hubs Hagen, who is responsible for the camera movements, while Schilling primarily sets up the light. In 1971, Nightshade first directed a full-length feature film, which was produced with the help of a financier without any funding, and for which Schilling then also took on the distribution work. (“In search of an audience.”) Encounter with Douglas Sirk . After the planned melodrama Pianoforte in particular failed twice a few weeks before shooting began, he was only able to realize The Expulsion from Paradise five years later. Since 1968 Schilling has been working with the actress Elke Haltaufderheide (also Elke Hart), whose production company Visual-Film produces its feature films. Since 1981 Schilling has been experimenting intensively with the possible uses of video technology for feature films. 1986 Establishment of a "studio for electronic images". Niklaus Schilling has lived in Berlin since 1991.

Peter W. Jansen noted the following about Max Ophüls Prize winner Schilling and his preferred motifs “Border” and “Movement” : For Schilling, border means and in his films it is always something different from that between states, languages, attitudes. There are also boundaries between day and night, life and cinema, outside and inside, reality and fantasy, rigid attitudes and traveling, place and time, scene and journey. And here, too, it is always about crossing, overcoming and dissolving borders. That is why his films are more consistently and obsessed with movement than almost any other; they live and breathe with it, are moving images in two senses, in and with which people travel and drive a lot.

Films (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Niklaus Schilling is dead
personal data
SURNAME Schilling, Niklaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schilling, Niklaus Franz Josef (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss film director, cameraman, film editor and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH May 6, 2016
Place of death Berlin