Werner Schroeter

Rosa von Praunheim is an icon in the scene: gay activist, loving provocateur and a very special filmmaker from Berlin for decades. His curiosity for people and their fates runs through his extensive film work. For his 70th birthday he has now made 70 new short films. In the first part of the big project, he confronts Thilo Sarrazin with the mayor of Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky, and the Turkish lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates; shows a homosexual hustler in Bucharest; gossip reporter Andreas Kurtz, who knows everything about Berlin's celebrities; Rosa's neighbors who live with her dependent brother; Esther Bauer, who survived Auschwitz, and the Berlin comedian Ades Zabel. High on the roofs of Berlin, the gay chimney sweep Alain Rappsilber tells him about his fetish leather meeting Folsom.

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Elfi Mikesch accompanies Werner Schroeter in staging a tribute to Lautréamont in Berlin.

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Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, provides us with an intimate insight into Schroeter’s artistic output during the remaining four years of his life.

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"On the occasion of the premiere of Nel Regno di Napoli in Cannes in 1978, Werner Schroeter gave me an audio interview about this film and about his work in general. Our meeting took place on the terrace of the Hotel Majestic, in the midst of excitement of the Cannes festival life, a few days after the screening of Nel Regno di Napoli and in the presence of the photographer Jean-Claude Moireau. Vivre à Naples et mourir is the audio capture of that informal meeting that happened on 20 May 1978 and which is, as per director's wish, more like a casual conversation than an interview in the strict sense of the term (a set of questions and answers).

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When director Daniel Schmid grew up, his parents ran a hotel in the Alps, and this singular setting was to influence his film. Rather by coincidence, he came to Berlin in the early 1960s and became part of the new German wave. Schmid worked with, among others, Wenders and Fassbinder, for example, as an actor in Wender’s The American Friend. He met Ingrid Caven, who was to play a diva in several of his films. This is a documentation of a part of modern European film history and a good analysis of artistry and how it corresponds to the individual behind the camera. A wealth of archival footage brings us close to many directors and actors in Schmid’s circle. If you’ve never seen a Daniel Schmid film, you are sure to want to after watching this portrait of his life.

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A meeting with Werner Schroeter. An sequence originally featured in Wyborny's Das letzte Jahr extended here to its own short film.

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Klaus Wyborny's Das letzte Jahr is a take on Ovid's "Fasti" in three parts. Yet, "a character as confused as our protagonist hardly would have been able to write the first three. For that it needs a clearer head, and thus one essentially would have to be even more confused. In this respect, the fourth book would have to be about me, my humble self."

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German director Werner Schroeter invited his favourite opera singers to a 13th century abbey near Paris. There was no pre-planned action. There was no script, no continuity. On the other hand, there were precise constraints that provided the rules of the game: the setting, the Abbey of Royaumont, and the chosen participants. Each singer came accompanied by a person of his or her choice, and worked on an aria chosen by the director.

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Documentary film about a young actor from the GDR who lives in West Germany after moving there. It deals with his close relationship with his mother, his fears, and his sex life. Narcissistically open, radical in his dealings with himself and others, enthusiastic about his profession, rebelling against everything he considers cheap convention.

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Philippe Garrel’s documentary on France’s second wave of masterful filmmakers. Featuring Jean Eustache, Chantal Akerman, André Téchiné, Leos Carax, Jacques Doillon and Benoit Jacquot.

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Jesus returns to present-day Bavaria, walks around Munich in a somewhat dazed manner and strikes up an affair with a nun, arguing that they are married anyway. Therefore, he refers to himself as "Ober" (waiter), obviously the male form of "Oberin" (Mother Superior). He occasionally transforms into a snake when being afraid and is finally carried up into the sky by the nun, who transforms into a bird of prey.

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One of Werner Schroeter's most important and inventive works, this threadbare evocation of Jean Genet's notorious Querelle depicts the erotic adventures of two sailors through the world's seaports in the manner of a cut-rate silent movie.

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In the future, Simulacron, a computer project simulating reality, encounters strange occurrences after its leader's death. Dr. Stiller questions the sudden disappearance of a friend and wonders if Simulacron holds the answers.

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Film director Jeff and his lead actor are taking their time getting to set. In their absence, the crew lack a purposeful way to spend their time waiting, so they drink heavily. However, as booze is downed and frustration sets in, morale hits rock bottom.

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Schroeter’s film is a chronicle of Germany from the Nazi era until the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, centering on three women who search for a career as singers and dancers.

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Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music – with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.

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Feminist short film set in West Berlin. A militant group of homosexuals who campaign for women's liberation. Dietmar, who reenacts the oppression and helplessness of women, can only express his protest in one sentence: I don't want to be the Easter Bunny, even though I am sensitive and need affection.

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"The film starts with a shot of a cassette recorder, and it has a juke box in it. There’s always music in it. When I was asked by some critics at a festival press conference what the film was all about, I said 'it’s about the song All Along The Watchtower, and the film is about what happens and what changes depending on whether the song is sung by Bob Dylan or by Jimi Hendrix.'" Well, both versions of the song appear in the film, and everybody thought I was pretty arrogant to explain the story this way. But the film really is about the difference between the Dylan version of All Along the Watchtower, and the Jimi Hendrix Version. One is at the beginning and one is at the end." – Wim Wenders

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One of Schroeter’s first experiments in choreography, as he stages actors in an empty room.

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La morte d’Isotta is a passionate melodrama inspired by Richard Wagner and Comte de Lautréamont, with Schroeter appearing in a principal role.

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"Of all the female interpreters I know, Maria Callas was the one who, in her expressive power, could let time stand so long until all fear disappeared, including that of death itself, and reached a state similar to what should be called happiness has been. Just as a blind person develops his sense of hearing and touch better than a sighted person, Maria Callas was proof that one could work out of oneself without following stupid rules in a restricted system - she was too short-sighted to ever take the baton from the stage to be able to see the conductor - can turn weaknesses into one's own creativity without looking." - Werner Schroeter

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Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.

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Meetings in Lisbon...

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Werner Schroeter directed this dark and surreal tale of a man determined to save a lost lover from a grim fate at the hands of a violent mob. The city of Santa Maria is falling into chaos as an armed military faction is poised to take power in a coup d'etat. Ossorio used to call Santa Maria home, and he has returned in its darkest hour to find the woman he loves, hoping to rescue her from the violence that is lurks around the corner. As Ossorio searches for his love, he meets Victoria in a shabby hotel, who in turn introduces him to her father Barcala, who for the right price is willing to take Ossorio and another passenger away on his boat. While Ossorio is willing to pay Barcala what he wants, can he find the mysterious woman before the ship sets sail?

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After reading a postcard that her mother let go in the wind, a woman learns that she has a twin.

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Werner Schroeter's lovely and touching portrait of the great German actress Marianne Hoppe, whose career spanned from the glory days of the Weimar era through the Nazi years to a postwar return to the stage in Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and experimental productions by Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller.

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Schroeter casts his tutored eye on Mnouchkine, the legendary founder of the avant-garde Théâtre du Soleil, with whom he shared an affinity for collage and pastiche, improvisation and distillation, ancient Greek drama, commedia dell’arte, opera, and Asian traditions of theater and dance. In this fascinating study of the creative process, Mnouchkine is seen directing her company in a revival of 1789, her defining political work, along with her 1977 film Molière and the theatrical premiere of Hélène Cixous’s The Horrific and as Yet Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia. - MoMA

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A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses.

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One of the most caustic and personal essay films ever made, Werner Schroeter's account of the 1983 Manila Film Festival, presided over by Imelda Marcos, chronicles the legacy of American and Spanish imperialism as it presents a "kaleidoscope of a ravaged country."

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A woman experiences psychic disintegration and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

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An exhilarating, essayistic documentary about the 1980 festival of experimental theatre in the French city of Nancy. Werner Schroeter's favourite of his own films.

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One of Werner Schroeter's most important and inventive works, this threadbare evocation of Jean Genet's notorious Querelle depicts the erotic adventures of two sailors through the world's seaports in the manner of a cut-rate silent movie.

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An impoverished young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg, West Germany to find work. He takes a job in the Volkswagen factory after he travels through Northern Italy by train.

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Thirty years of Neapolitan history (from 1942 to 1972) through the ups and downs of the Cavioli and Pagano families.

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Werner Schroeter's rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films.

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With the ascetic grandeur of Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Schroeter evokes the visions of Saint Joan, partly through unused footage of Darling and Caven pantomiming in his 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran. - MoMA

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Two women, one from Boston and one from Germany, flee their empty lives to seek fulfillment in Mexico. The Black Angel is a transitional film; on one hand, it is a companion piece to Willow Springs, featuring two Schroeter regulars as characters far from home and in extremis; on the other hand, it is a film essay about Mexico and as such a harbinger of Schroeter’s nonfiction work to come. While he clearly shares his characters’ fascination with Mexico, the filmmaker also savages touristic exoticism – the otherworldly appearances of his protagonists and their rapturous reactions to new surroundings contrast sharply with the sober perceptions of Mexican history and economics featured in the documentary segments and in the prosaic presence of a non-professional cast of locals. - Harvard Film Archive

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Living together in an isolated house, three women go to murderous lengths to keep strangers out of their private retreat.

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A series of tableaux illustrating the life and death of a celebrated 19th century German opera singer.

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Fusing Shakespeare‘s tragedy with the Verdi opera, Schroeter's Macbeth is a fascinating television experiment shot entirely in a studio with several electronic cameras. As Schroeter would recall, "I arranged the Verdi music for a quartet of violin, accordion, piano and oboe, but modeled the rhythms on Argentinian tangos and boleros. The actors sang with horrifying, shrill voices.... The use of video allowed me to produce extraordinary colors.... Of all my films, Macbeth was most unwelcome: Audiences don’t like their Shakespeare to be presented in this way, but I do not differentiate between kitsch and culture...". - MoMA

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Schroeter's virtuosic staging of the Oscar Wilde tragedy is a complex montage of image and sound, filmed on the grand steps of Baalbeck, the ancient Roman temple in Lebanon, and interweaving Lebanese and German folk songs with the music of Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Mozart, Bellini, and Donizetti. Elfi Mikesch, the cinematographer of Schroeter’s later films, designed the film’s sumptuous costumes. A contemporary critic for Le Monde wrote admiringly of Schroeter’s depiction of "the deadly struggle between dark Christian morality and luminous paganism.“

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Schroeter’s film is a chronicle of Germany from the Nazi era until the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, centering on three women who search for a career as singers and dancers.

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Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music – with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.

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Werner Schroeter's stunning split-screen short deals with what the director called "archaic, fundamental themes" of love and mourning.

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In a dark and spare theatrical space, four characters use gesture, language, and movement to explore themes of desire and mortality.

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Aggression, Schroeter’s first 16mm film, is the fictive portrait of a woman who is oppressed by her (unseen) boyfriend.

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A love triangle, accompanied by traditional German Christmas songs.

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One of Schroeter’s first experiments in choreography, as he stages actors in an empty room.

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La morte d’Isotta is a passionate melodrama inspired by Richard Wagner and Comte de Lautréamont, with Schroeter appearing in a principal role.

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Carla is a different form of homage, in which Carla Aulaulu sings a song by Gitta Linds.

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"Of all the female interpreters I know, Maria Callas was the one who, in her expressive power, could let time stand so long until all fear disappeared, including that of death itself, and reached a state similar to what should be called happiness has been. Just as a blind person develops his sense of hearing and touch better than a sighted person, Maria Callas was proof that one could work out of oneself without following stupid rules in a restricted system - she was too short-sighted to ever take the baton from the stage to be able to see the conductor - can turn weaknesses into one's own creativity without looking." - Werner Schroeter

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"My camera was silent, and so I started to compose wild sound collages for my films from my records with the help of tape, for example with my favorite Callas arias. I even got her to sing with herself that way. I also contrasted Schlager scraps of the Caterina Valente, whom I adore, and Christmas carols with the pictures. I cannot interpret what began then. I am an artist, I work intuitively." - Werner Schroeter

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Animated stills of Maria Callas and overlaid with a soundtrack of her singing.

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In the first part of this short film, Schroeter tries to visualize the artist as Lucia in the mad scene of the third act of the Donizetti opera. Schroeter uses four scene photos of Callas, isolated on a dark background, in gestures and facial expressions, highlights of the mad scene and cuts them one after the other in such a way that the impression of movement - of walking - arises. This anticipated movement becomes an ornament as the photos are dragged from right to left. The unnatural effect could be an accurate expression of madness. In the second part of the film, Schroeter uses three more shots of the singer: a private photo of Callas as Norma and a picture in a magazine that probably shows her in an exuberant pose as Medea (Cherubini) and nicknamed her “the tigress” in the press. The film has such a musical rhythm in its editing technique that the sound could be dispensed with.

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