Niklaus Schilling
Niklaus Franz Josef Schilling ( born April 23, 1944 in Basel) is a film director, cameraman, editor and author.
Life and work
Schilling is an important representative of German auteur film. Thematically and technologically it is considered unusual experiment. In his films, the Swiss-born defines a unique and each time different perspective on Germany. ( inter alia Rheingold, The Willi Busch Report, The Luminous West! , The Blind Cow )
The son of a bank official was educated as Roman Catholics. Even in his early childhood, he was fascinated by the elaborately staged worship - a play of colors and shapes, symbols ... " My first serious film experiences found in the Sunday Mission film screenings in the early 50s instead of Not infrequently ripped or burned it. the film: an amazing experience ... " middle School, Art Basel School - legendary Bauhaus preliminary course. 1960-63 Teaching as ( showcase ) dresser in a department store. Despite initially great moral scruples to Schilling can the pull of the cinemas soon no longer escape: he sees one film after another, from À bout de souffle to Dr. No. With a small inheritance acquisition of an 8 mm film equipment including tape recorder, first experiments. 1962 as arising cleaning system II and in collaboration with his older brother (Alfons Schilling ) Cosmos Action Painting. Position as "Assistant for All" at a film production for industry and advertising in Zurich. Camera assistant, television reports as a cameraman for ITN and ABC. ( inter alia, "100 Years of the first ascent of the Matterhorn " ) encounter with Vlado Kristl.
In November 65 move to Munich. A short time production assistant at Kruse - film ( = HB- males! ) Meeting with the so-called ( informal ) Munich group. ( Klaus Lemke, Rudolf Thome, Max Zihlmann and others) cinematographer on films by Lemke, Thome, Gosov, May Spils, Jean -Marie Straub et al case of labor and cooperation with hubs Hagen, who is responsible for the camera movements while Schilling set up especially the light. 1971 Nightshade directorial debut of a feature-length film, which is produced without any funding with the help of a financier, and in which Schilling then also hire labor mitübernimmt. ( " In search of an audience. " ) Encounter with Douglas Sirk. Especially after the planned melodrama Pianoforte fails twice a few weeks before we started shooting, he can realize the expulsion from paradise until five years later. Since 1968, Schilling worked with actress Elke Haltaufderheide ( Elke Hart) together with a production company Visual film produced his feature films. Since 1981, Schilling experimented intensively with the possibilities of video technology for the cinema feature film. 1986 Building a " studio for the electronic image ". Niklaus Schilling lived in Berlin since 1991.
About the Max Ophüls Prize winner Schilling and his favorite subjects " limit" and " movement " noted Peter W. Jansen: limit means for Schilling and is in his films always something else than between states, languages, attitudes. Boundaries are. Between day and night, life and cinema, outside and inside, reality and fantasy, rigid attitude and Travelling, time and place, scene and ride And always, the aim here is to cross boundaries, to overcome and resolve. That's why his movies are so consistently and obsessed like no other determined by the movement, live and breathe with it, in a double sense is moving images, is traveled and moved into and with whom much.