Magdalena Montezuma

In his earliest work, German director Werner Schroeter was inspired by opera, and made several short 8mm films about the prima donna Maria Callas. This film focuses on Maria Malibran, a legendary Spanish-French opera singer who died in 1836 at the age of 28. She forms the starting point for a series of stylised tableaux introducing variations on different levels, including in the form of musical phrases. The spectator is thrown into fragments of stories that take place in a non-existent country, in which the characters do not have any clear identity and are mutually interchangeable. The film, a reflection on the 19th century cult for geniuses and divas, was regarded by Schroeter, who died last year, as his most important work. It focuses on acting, including that of Magdalena Montezuma (regular Schroeter actress), Candy Darling (from the Warhol stable) and Ingrid Caven.

Werner Schroeter mixes Stravinsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Maria Callas and Janis Joplin in this delirious biography of the doomed nineteenth-century mezzo-soprano.Read More »

Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality.Read More »

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 »

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’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 »

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 »

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

She purchased a ticket of no return to Berlin-Tegel. She wanted to forget her past, or rather to abandon it like a condemned house. She wanted to concentrate all her energies on one thing, something all her own. To follow her own destiny at last was her only desire. Berlin, a city in which she was a complete stranger, seemed just the place to indulge her passion undisturbed. Her passion was alcohol, she lived to drink and drank to live, the life of a drunkard. Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened during her flight until it reached the level at which it could be lived. The time was ripe to put her plans into action.Read More »