- Source: Alexander Tuschinski
Alexander Tuschinski is a German film director, film producer, writer, actor and musician. His documentary Caligari in the Desert was a submission to the 91st Academy Awards.
Life and works
= 1988-2008: Early life
=Alexander Tuschinski's paternal family is of Bukovinian nobility, with Polish roots, and bears the coat of arms Nałęcz. Both of his parents were born in Romanian Sighișoara and emigrated to West Germany in 1983. Tuschinski was born in Stuttgart on 28 October 1988. As a child, he watched silent films, slapstick-films and early sound films on VHS cassette with his father Paul, leading to a fascination with silent movie aesthetics, montage and camera tricks. Tuschinski particularly recalled watching films starring Charlie Chaplin. In elementary school, he acted in school theater performances. Tuschinski called his father Paul, who passed away in 2009, his "best friend", crediting him with shaping his sense of humour, as well as his attitude on arts, history and politics.
Tuschinski attended Dillmann-Gymnasium in Stuttgart, Germany, and originally wanted to study physics after graduating in 2008. However, he changed his mind shortly before enrolling at university realizing that film was his main passion, and instead started studying Audiovisual Media at Hochschule der Medien. As a pupil, Tuschinski produced several comedic short films and music videos which he published on YouTube prior to 2008. Early on, he discovered his desire to make films with unusual structures and elements, as he felt in reality, moods and situations can switch in any moment, as well.
= 2008-present
=Shortly before graduating Dillmann-Gymnasium in Summer 2008, Tuschinski wrote, produced and directed the no-budget comedy film Killer Squirrels (Killereichhörnchen) with a 56-minute runtime, releasing it on YouTube, using his parents' Hi8 video camera. As with many of his films, he composed and performed songs and instrumental music for the soundtrack. The next year, he wrote, produced, directed and edited the feature film comedy Menschenliebe about student life and dating. Tuschinski produced the film parallel to his studies, and it had its premiere early 2010 in Stuttgart. Tuschinski wrote the screenplay between November 2008 and January 2009 as a newly enrolled student at Hochschule der Medien inspired by student life and produced the no-budget project entirely from his savings parallel to his studies. Filming took place from April to September 2009, and he credited his studies to have given him insight in technical aspects of filmmaking. The cast consisted of 46 amateur actors found among Tuschinski's friends and acquaintances. Tuschinski's father Paul passed away on 24 August 2009, a few days before filming for Menschenliebe ended. Shortly after filming, Tuschinski cited O Lucky Man!, Barry Lyndon and the opera films by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle as works that were stylistically influential to him. Menschenliebe had its world premiere in January 2010 at Dillmann-Gymnasium in a screening for cast, crew and friends. In March 2011, Tuschinski expressed his desire to have a production company produce his next feature film.
Afterward, Tuschinski, again parallel to his studies, produced the documentary film Quasicrystal Research and the no-budget music video Mutant Calculator, writing and producing the music for both. According to him, he filmed Mutant Calculator to "clear his head" after the bigger production Menschenliebe. Quasicrystal Research was selected to play during the Australian National Science Week in 2012, being shown in 400 venues around Australia during that week. During 2010 and 2011, Tuschinski occasionally performed satirical songs live on stage, combined with comedy routines.
Menschenliebe had its US premiere at Park City Film Music Festival, and in 2011/12, along Mutant Calculator, went on to win numerous awards at festivals in the United States, which was covered in the German press and on German TV. Parallel to this, from around 2010, Tuschinski had started filming the first scenes for his next low-budget feature film Break-Up, again parallel to his studies. He first announced working on Break-Up in a February 2012 press article.
Tuschinski's first novel, Das Fahrzeug, was published in Germany in 2011. In Summer 2011, Tuschinski graduated Hochschule der Medien as a Bachelor of Engineering in Audiovisual Media. His Bachelor's thesis focused on reconstructing Tinto Brass' original intentions for the film Caligula that, in the 1970s, had been changed in editing without the director's input. Before graduating, Tuschinski had already written papers on film history and on Tinto Brass' film Nerosubianco. From October 2011, Tuschinski enrolled at University of Stuttgart to study history and literature. On 13 February 2012, he did a public reading from the novel Das Fahrzeug at Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart, and on that occasion also performed satirical songs he had written. During a second reading at Literaturhaus Stuttgart, he first presented scenes from his work-in-progress film Break-Up. While Tuschinski was filming Break-Up, he reached out to German film director Hugo Niebeling whose films he considered influential to his style. They became friends, and Hugo Niebeling made positive remarks about Tuschinski's works.
In 2012, Tuschinski restored several of Tinto Brass' 1960s films using material from the director's private archive, and they were screened at a retrospective in Hollywood. In 2014, Tuschinski was called an "encyclopledic Brass expert" on Caligula. The same year, Tuschinski wrote an essay on Tinto Brass' film The Key which was published as a booklet with the British Blu-ray release of said film. Break-Up had its world premiere in Los Angeles in early 2014. It was called a "surreal satire on power and conventions", and was filmed with 38 amateur actors, again cast from friends and acquaintances of the director. The film received awards in the United States. In the summer of 2014, Tuschinski received his second degree as a Bachelor of Arts in history and German philology at Universität Stuttgart, and immediately continued pursuing a Master's Degree in history there. That year, he published an album featuring classical music recorded on synthesizer and vocoder.
In 2014/15, Tuschinski produced, wrote, directed and edited the feature film Timeless mostly in Stuttgart. He had started writing the film in 2013. The cast included international actors like Harry Lennix, Rick Shapiro and Angus Macfadyen, whom Tuschinski had met at film festivals. On the occasion, Lennix called Tuschinski "an avant-gardist and neo-classical director". In August 2015, scenes with Helmut Berger were filmed in Stuttgart. Shortly after filming ended in 2015, Tuschinski considered Timeless "by far" his best film. In an interview, Tuschinski mentioned doing the film with a low budget and no external funding, so he would be able to start filming immediately and be spontaneous. As people helped the production without expecting payment, sequences like a WW2 scene featuring a Soviet T-34 tank were possible despite being initially planned with fewer props and sparser settings. In 2016, Hörzu reported a theatrical release happening soon. In 2021, Tuschinski self-published a coffee-table book about the filming of Timeless featuring information about the production process and numerous photos.
Parallel to producing Timeless, Tuschinski assisted Hugo Niebeling in restoring and re-editing B7, Niebeling's director's cut of his 1972 film showing the Berlin Philharmonic performing Beethoven's seventh symphony conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Additionally, Niebeling and Tuschinski together edited Niebeling's short film Apotheosis of Dance from the last movement of the symphony. Parallel to this, Tuschinski produced his own experimental short film Gold., which set the last movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony to images of nature and decay. Gold. won the "Golden Pelican" award at Mykonos Biennale in early 2015.
After Timeless, Tuschinski produced and directed several short films between 2017-2019, including a silent movie adaption of Woyzeck starring Thomas Goersch, the experimental film Cycle-Kreislauf, as well as several documentary portraits of artists. Among those documentaries, the film Caligari in the Desert about Roger Ball was a submission to the 91st Academy Awards, and the film The Songwriter of Botnang portraying Gerda Herrmann, a poet and composer born in 1931, was screened at several international festivals. In late 2017, Tuschinski filmed first scenes for his feature film Revolution!, including Helmut Berger's last appearance in as an actor which was filmed in Salzburg during December of that year. While the film Revolution! as of 2024 has been shelved, some of its scenes were used for the short film Gas-Shaped Light and for Tuschinski's autobiographic 2024 documentary Cutting Squares.
In 2018, Tuschinski's research into, and interest in, Tinto Brass's work on Caligula was examined in his feature documentary Mission: Caligula. At the documentary's premiere in Los Angeles, Tuschinski made a joint announcement with Kelly Holland, then-owner of Penthouse and rightsholder of Caligula regarding a proposed new cut of the film. In the 1970s, Brass had been dismissed by Penthouse in post-production before he could complete editing, and his workprint had been dismantled to edit the film again from scratch. In 2016, Tuschinski had discovered and reconstructed Tinto Brass' unfinished workprint in Penthouse's archive. The announced project would have aimed for Brass to restore and finish his 1970s workprint of Caligula with Tuschinski's assistance. In case Brass would decline to work on the film, Tuschinski would have finished the workprint according to his reconstruction of Brass' 1970s style and plans.
In Summer 2019, Tuschinski started filming a feature film adaption of his novel Fetzenleben. The film used the same title as the novel, but was freely adapted, focusing on a love story set in Paris and changing many aspects from the novel to fit the new setting and focus. Filming in Paris started in August 2019, and the cast consisted of German and international actors. As with his prior feature films, Tuschinski produced, wrote, directed and edited Fetzenleben himself, improvising many scenes on set. Additionally, he wrote and performed much of the film's soundtrack on accordion, piano and various instruments. The film won several awards at international film festivals and has a runtime of 165 minutes.
From 2020, German online magazine postmondän published interviews that Tuschinski conducted with artists of his friend circle, like Gerda Herrmann, Stephen Kalinich, and Tomas Kurth (known as vanderkurth). The November 2020 Blu-ray release of the 1971 film The Other Side of Madness includes a booklet written by Tuschinski, in which he gives a positive assessment about the film's visual style, sound design and editing. From Winter to Summer 2021, Tuschinski produced, filmed, directed and edited the feature-length documentary Statue of Liberty about vanderkurth's life and his quest to build a "Statue of Liberty of Stuttgart" during lockdown. Tuschinski calls the film a "docu-comedy". Throughout the film, its making is part of the documented process, giving it an experimental meta layer. Statue of Liberty screened together with Fetzenleben and the second instalment of Die Liedermacherin von Botnang at Filmschau Baden-Württemberg in December 2022. The same year, Tuschinski also was editing consultant for the feature-length film Freedom Parade - Dance for your Life!, which documented the political activism of the Berlin-based group "Freedom Parade with Captain Future" during 2020-2022.
On 27 December 2022, Tuschinski published his hour-long documentary Whisper and Laugh (Flüstern und Lachen) on YouTube. The film portrays German protest singer Yann Song King, the peaceful protests in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic and the treatment of "unvaccinated" people in the country in winter 2021/22. It was filmed at 30 demonstrations throughout Germany and maintains a sense of humour while retelling the period from the protesters' point of view. Tuschinski produced the film entirely by himself, filming it on a smartphone. On 1 March 2023, Whisper and Laugh screened in competition at Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival at Regal Cinemas at L.A. Live, together with Tuschinski's short film "Vigil" (Mahnwache) about a healthcare-workers' demonstration in Berlin. Eugen Zentner considers Whisper and Laugh as part of 2020s German counter-culture.
In 2023, Tuschinski digitally released his concept album Cut Squares, which he composed and recorded by himself. Eugen Zentner considers the album's second half an "anti-war-album", while the first half mainly addresses conformity in society. He names it as characteristic for 2020s counter-culture pop music and notes the album's "unconventional, at times very experimental" sound, which together with the lyrics tells a story about the narrator "breaking out of a depressive situation with another person, and both finding like-minded people." Most of the music was written during lockdowns between 2020-2022.
From 2023, Tuschinski began researching and publicly discussing his paternal family history. On 22 November 2023, he presented an overview of his research on Demeter Ritter von Tuschinski, his great-grandfather, during a conference at Bukowina-Institut an der Universität Augsburg. In September 2024, Tuschinski published a reprint of his grandfather Constantin's collected 1929-1942 works, including the first published biography of the author that Tuschinski wrote based on his research. Tuschinski intends to follow this up with a collection of Constantin's 1960s-1980s creative writing, and with a standalone, more thorough biography.
Filmography (excerpt)
= Feature Films
== Short films (excerpt)
== Music videos
=Awards (selection)
Best Director (for Fetzenleben): Independent Filmmakers Showcase Los Angeles, 2021.
Best Dramatic Feature (for Fetzenleben): Independent Filmmakers Showcase Los Angeles, 2021.
Best Editing - Short Film (nominated, for Gas-Shaped Light): Maverick Movie Awards 2021.
Bronze Remi Award (for The Songwriter of Botnang): WorldFest Houston 2020.
Best Short Documentary (for Caligari in the Desert): Berlin Independent Film Festival 2019.
Best International Film (for Timeless): Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival 2017.
Best Foreign Film (for Timeless): California Film Awards 2016.
Golden Pelican (for Gold): Mykonos Biennale 2015.
Best Director (for Break-Up): Maverick Movie Awards 2014.
Best International Film (for Break-Up): Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival 2015.
Best Comedy Film – Silver Remi Award (for Break-Up): WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival 2014.
Best Editing (for Break-Up): Oregon Independent Film Festival 2014.
Best Foreign Feature (for Break-Up): Oregon Independent Film Festival 2014.
Best Foreign Film (Break-Up): American Movie Awards 2014.
Best Short <5 min (for Hollow Date): Berlin Independent Film Festival 2013.
Best New Filmmaker: Take One Awards 2012.
Special Jury Award (for Menschenliebe): Honolulu Film Awards 2012.
Best Director (for Menschenliebe): California Film Awards 2011.
Best Comedy (for Menschenliebe): Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival 2011.
Best Foreign Film (for Menschenliebe): Nevada International Film Festival 2011.
Best New Director (nominated, for Menschenliebe): Action on Film International Film Festival 2011.
Silver Ace Award (for Mutant Calculator): Las Vegas Film Festival 2011.
Gold Medal for Excellence (for Menschenliebe): Park City Film Music Festival 2011.
References
External links
Official website
Alexander Tuschinski at IMDb
Take One Magazine: Interview with Alexander Tuschinski.