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 »

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

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.Read More »

Quote:
Werner Schroeter is one of the German new wave’s prophets without honour. He was too confrontationally weird to take his place alongside Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog in the international distribution sweepstakes and the disturbingly freaked-out Nuit de Chien goes a long way to suggesting why.

The film posits Pascal Greggory as a man fleeing a nameless fascist dictatorship currently in the throes of a power struggle. Fleeing the nation, he can’t seem to find his wife and in searching for her winds up in brothels, alleys and avenues of power. As in the best magic realism, the country is a place of surreal dislocation, with people doing appalling things apparently against their personal dispositions and making peace with insane circumstances.Read More »

Werner Schroeter’s adaptation of a novel by Ingeborg Bachmann, Isabelle Huppert portrays a writer who suffers from an interminable case of existential angst.

Synopsis:
An unusual story of a triangular relationship set in Vienna. A woman shares an apartment with a man named Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls in love. It will be her last great passion. The singlemindedness of her love is so great that it is more than the man can comprehend or respond to. The film’s subject is nothing less than love- and the loneliness of the lover. Read More »