Today's Out Spotlight is a German film and stage director whose flair for lush visuals and heightened emotions introduced an operatic sensibility to the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s. They are also the first German director to ever receive the Golden Bear for the Berlin International Film Festival. Today’s Out Spotlight is Werner Schroeter.
Werner Schroeter was a key person of the New German Cinema of the 70s. Next to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog und Wim Wenders he is known as the most important German film director of the postwar period who made himself a name also through theater and opera productions. His works combined an intense interest and knowledge of German History and personal dramatic and emotional investigations. What separated him from most of his contemporaries was his almost complete rejection of realism, social and political, and high camp.
Living by Oscar Wilde's dictum: "Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess,” his mixture of flamboyant, gender-bending minimalism and stylized melodrama, inspired by 19th-century Italian bel canto opera and the music of German romanticism, often juxtaposed with popular song, blurred the distinction between art and kitsch. His eschewal of conventional narrative made him a marginal figure, but towards the end of his life, with several retrospectives at festivals and cinemas, he gained a wider audience of cinephiles. He kept a faithful, mostly gay, following.
Born in the central German state of Thuringia on April 7, 1945, a few months before the end of the World War II, Werner Schroeter spent his childhood moving from school to school, and traveling around the world before finally completing his high school education in Heidelberg. He enrolled at the University of Mannheim to study psychology, but completed only three terms. Shortly after school he attended the experimental film festival in Knokke, Belgium where he was able to view a number of films of the New York Underground, exposing him not only to the numerous aesthetic possibilities of experimental cinema, but to the possibilities of independent film production, which would enable him to remain relatively free from the institutional constraints of the commercial film industry.
Schroeter began to make short, experimental 8mm films, which made him aware of the possibilities of independent film production. A meeting with another German experimental film-maker, Rosa von Praunheim (born Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky), later a gay rights activist, resulted in their co-directing Grotesk – Burlesk – Pittoresk (1968), which featured Magdalena Montezuma, who went to become Schroeter's favorite star, appearing in almost all his feature films until her death in 1986.
In 1968, Schroeter made his first full-length film, Eika Katappa (1969). This 144-minute, black-and-white film anticipates some of his archetypal themes; dissociated vignettes, asynchronous music and sounds, characters striking campy poses, literary citations and an operatic approach to passionate love, painful beauty and death . “Eika Katappa,” won the Josef von Sternberg prize of the Mannheim International Film Festival and introduced a new phase in his work, in which fragments of narrative begin to appear amid dense clusters of enigmatic sounds and allegorical images.
Working with Montezuma, whose dark, angular beauty suggested Callas, Schroeter created a series of 16-millimeter features, including “Salome” (1971), “The Death of Maria Malibran” (1971) and “Willow Springs” (1973), which considered gender and identity as a form of performance — a notion then gaining currency in postmodern philosophy.
With “Kingdom of Naples” (1978), he moved into 35-millimeter, a medium that allowed him greater control over color and texture. Visually, his work took on a ripe, almost bursting quality, with deeply saturated colors exploding out of dark backgrounds.
“Palermo or Wolfsburg,” his breakthrough film, was a 175-minute epic that evolved through three distinct styles — Italian neo-realism, Hollywood melodrama and theatrical absurdism — as it traced the itinerary of its unhappy protagonist from south to north, poverty to prosperity and freedom to imprisonment. It told the story of about an immigrant Sicilian laborer’s frustrated attempt searching to work and to integrate in German society. It was one of the few films to broach the subject of the difficulties foreigners faces.
“Palermo” won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1980. In doing so he became the first German filmmaker to win the festival’s highest honor, the Golden Bear, for his stylized feature.
The Death of Maria Malibran (1971) gained Schroeter the reputation as the mad genius of German cinema, and the only director Fassbinder considered an artistic equal. A series of baroque tableaux enact the short life of Maria Malibran (played by Montezuma), the 19th-century Spanish prima donna, who died aged 28 in 1836 from injuries received in a riding accident. The hypnotically perverse biopic had no discernible plot and no direct dialogue, with the music on the soundtrack ranging from Mozart to anachronistic melodies such as St Louis Blues.
His last collaboration with Montezuma, “The Rose King,” was his first to deal openly with homosexuality. Filmed in Portugal and punctuated by hallucinatory imagery, operatic underscoring and camp posturing, it tells the story of a horticulturalist whose love for his mother is surpassed only by his obsession with a handsome handyman, whose beauty the gardener tries to enhance by grafting roses to the young man’s body. The film seems at once a parody of German Romanticism and its logical, morbid end point.
After Montezuma’s death in 1984, Schroeter worked with the French actress Isabelle Huppert on two fiction films, “Malina” (1990) and “Deux” (2001), but he devoted more of his time to stage work and documentaries. His “Poussières d’amour” (1996) brought together the divas Martha Mödl, Rita Gorr and Anita Cerquetti in a 13th-century abbey for a discussion of art, life and advancing age. In “The Queen” (1999), he interviewed the actress Marianne Hoppe, whose career began with Max Reinhardt, flourished under the Nazis and ended with a 1997 farewell performance at the Berliner Ensemble.
His final film was “This Night,” a dark fantasy set in a totalitarian future that drew mixed reviews and was little seen outside Europe.
In 2010 he was honored at the Berlin Film Festival again with a special award for lifetime achievement. He passed away after an operation for cancer, which Schroeter had been battling for the last three years of his life. He died on April 12 in Kassel, Germany. He was 65.