Werner Schroeter

  • Werner Schroeter – Salome (1971)

    1971-1980DramaGermanyTVWerner Schroeter
    Salome (1971)
    Salome (1971)

    Shot in a Roman temple in Baalbek, Lebanon, based on Oscar Wilde’s play, this television film features the drama of Salome, who asks Herod for the head of John the Baptist, whom she loves and who rejected it.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Deux AKA Two (2002)

    Werner Schroeter2001-2010ArthouseDramaFrance

    Quote:
    A young woman named Magdalena (Isabelle Huppert) retrieves a postcard that had been cast into the wind by her biological mother (Bulle Ogier) from a seaside town in Portugal and discovers that she has a twin sister named Maria. From this seemingly introspective opening premise on identity, connection, and history, Deux diverges into unexpectedly abstract, non-intersecting trajectories that involve a schoolgirl attraction with a fellow classmate, a mother’s wartime romance, a serial killer who leaves a tell-tale rose on the bodies of his victims, a lonely woman who adopts a fox as a household pet. Composed of asequential and dissociated vignettes, the film evokes the baroque tableaux of Sergei Paradjanov, the formalism of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and fractured surrealism of Luis Buñuel infused with quasi-religious iconography and Actionism of Otto Mühl (most notably, in the image of disemboweled figures such as ornamental cherubs).Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Malina (1991)

    1991-2000ArthouseDramaFranceWerner Schroeter

    Quote:
    Based on an introspective feminist book by Ingeborg Bachmann which I haven’t read but is described as a difficult fragmented work that exposes emotional reactions and stream-of-consciousness meditations on her identity vs. three men in her life, two lovers who try to control her or take over her identity, her obsessive love, and her scary father. The author, Bachmann, died in hospital after a fire in her house. Schroeter takes these real-life and written elements and applies his own treatment to the whole mess, showing scattered fragments of her life mixed with many and endless emotional breakdowns, fire and mirrors used as artsy symbols, a writer’s block, existential explorations on identity, some references to her interests in Wittgenstein, and various surreal imagery involving violinists, her father in a Nazi uniform, and lots of flames, all together in one jumbled emotional mess, like the inside of a schizophrenic woman’s mind. Unrewarding arthouse piece.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Der Rosenkönig AKA The Rose King (1986)

    1981-1990ArthouseExperimentalGermanyWerner Schroeter

    Synopsis:
    Released in English-speaking countries as The Rose King, the German Der Rosenkonig is another of director Wern Schroeter’s self-indulgent studies of intense, artistically expressed human passion. The scene is a large Portuguese estate. Still-beauteous widow Magdalene Montezuma lives in empty luxury on the estate with her son. This close familial relationship is shaken up, but ultimately strengthened, by the arrival of a low-born laborer. Director Schroeter unfolds his tale with the slightly surreal logic of a midsummer daydream.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Flocons d’or – Goldflocken (1976)

    1971-1980ArthouseGermanyMusicalWerner Schroeter

    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.

    Film en quatre épisodes : Cuba, Drame du rail, Coeur brisé et La Trahison. Dans Flocons d’or, qui traite de la mort, l’héroine Montezuma est l’épouse française d’un gros propriétaire terrien qui se droque. L’action se déroule à Cuba vers la fin des années 40. Des quatre épisodes du film, un seul comporte une ironique lueur d’espoir.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Willow Springs [+Extras] (1973)

    1971-1980ArthouseGermanyQueer Cinema(s)Werner Schroeter

    Schroeter set out to make a film about Marilyn Monroe ten years after her death as a meditation on the new feminism in America. The result was this bizarre chamber melodrama about three women who turn an abandoned shack in the Mojave Desert into a kind of Charles Manson commune. The three lure men to their lair, force them to have sex, then rob and murder them. With a music track that includes Bizet, Yugoslavian folk tunes, the Andrews Sisters and the Blue Ridge Rangers, Schroeter fashions a spectacle of female power which critics have compared to Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Altman’s Three Women.

    – San Francisco CinemathequeRead More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Palermo oder Wolfsburg AKA Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980)

    1971-1980ArthouseGermanyWerner Schroeter

    Quote:
    This film begins in the town of Palermo, where the film’s central figure, Nicola, is a young victim of Sicily’s high rate of unemployment. He decides to leave Palermo for Wolfsburg in Germany in search of employment. Along with Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (1973), Schroeter’s film becomes one of a handful of films to broach the subject of the difficulties foreigners faced in their attempts to integrate into German society without the support of the family and community structures they had left behind in their home countries. Like Regno di Napoli, Palermo oder Wolfsburg follows a chronological structure, but Schroeter’s innovation in this film is to divide the narrative into three distinct sections or acts, each having their own particular style. Palermo oder Wolfsburg won the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1980, notably the first Golden Bear ever awarded to a German director.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Die Generalprobe AKA Dress Rehearsal (1980)

    1971-1980DocumentaryExperimentalGermanyQueer Cinema(s)Werner Schroeter

    The first of Schroeter’s series of documentaries about theatrical performers, Dress Rehearsal began as a commission by German television for a short report on the 1980 edition of the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France. Inspired by a number of the performers at the festival, Schroeter created instead a feature-length film essay. In particular, he focuses on Pina Bausch and her troupe from the Wuppertal Tanztheater, the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno and the American performance artist Pat Olesko. Out of an engrossing and entertaining collage of various impressions from the festival, including rehearsals, performances, interviews, readings and encounters onstage and off, Schroeter develops a meditation on the relationship between art and politics and presents an early formulation of his ideas about performance as a form of love.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Argila (1969)

    1961-1970ArthouseExperimentalGermanyWerner Schroeter

    SYNOPSIS
    Schroeter’s legendary two-screen projection Argila.Read More »

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