Werner Schroeter

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.

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.

An unusual story of a triangular relationship in Vienna. A woman shares an apartment with a man named Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls under his spell. It will be her last great passion. Her feelings are so strong and all-encompassing that Ivan can neither understand nor return them.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A love triangle, accompanied by traditional German Christmas songs.

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

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.“

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

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

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.

Personal diary-style documentary of German Gay rights activist Von Praunheim's sojourn in the US.

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.