Facets Multimedia: Cinémathèque: Werner Schroeter

FACETS CINÉMATHÈQUE

October 2012

The Facets Cinémathèque is located at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. in Chicago. For more information on films playing in the Cinémathèque, please call 773-281-4114.

WERNER SCHROETER

October 5–11

"One must regain a sense of wonder"
-Werner Schroeter

The Goethe-Institut Chicago and The Facets Cinémathèque are very proud to present a selected retrospective of films by Werner Schroeter, the renown German filmmaker and theater director who passed away in 2010 at the age of 65. He directed 41 films and numerous stage plays and is undoubtedly one of German cinema's most important artists. However, Schroeter was never fully appreciated as a part of the seminal movement which became known as the New German Cinema, mostly due to the experimental nature of his filmmaking. In contrast to his contemporaries R. W. Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Volker Schlöndorff, Schroeter spent the first phase of his career making 8mm shorts and television films. By the time he made his first feature, The Death of Maria Malibran (1972), the New German Cinema had already firmly established its reputation at home and abroad.

While the star directors of the New German Cinema used their visibility to make realist films about recent German history, Schroeter's filmmaking, for much of the 1970s, oscillated between avant-garde essay films and documentaries. Although his contribution to German cinema during this period was crucial, his avant-garde sensibility unfairly placed him on the outskirts of the New German cinema. His marginal status led to the inconsistent distribution of Schroeter's films, a state of affairs which sadly remains true today. It was not until his international 1980 art house success, Palermo or Wolfsburg — the grippingly realist story of an Italian immigrant worker's fate in Germany — that Schroeter gained the international acclaim he has long deserved. No less admiring was the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote that "what Schroeter does with a face, a cheekbone, the lips, the expression of the eyes...is a multiplying and burgeoning of the body, an exultation."

This program was made possible by the Goethe-Institut Chicago. Special thanks to, Stefan Drößler of the Filmmuseum München, Detlef Gericke-Schönhagen and Karin Oehlenschläger of the Goethe-Institut Boston, Juliane Camfield of the Goethe-Institut New York and Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art (New York).

Chicago Reader CINE-FILE Senses of Cinema

Film Comment Cinema Scope

THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES
(NEO REGNO DI NAPOLI)

WINNER
Best Direction
Best Cinematography
German Film
Awards

WINNER
Best Feature Film
Chicago Intl
Film Fest

Recommended!
-Chicago Reader

Cahiers du cinéma critic Serge Daney asks whether The Kingdom of Naples is "leftist fiction, kitschy melodrama, photo-roman, a decadent chronicle of a city, opera in a minor key, or simply the first realistic narrative film by Schroeter?" It is all of these and more: an epic chronicle of proletarian family life in Naples from 1943 to 1972 that brilliantly captures the wretched poverty, overwrought passions, and political, religious and economic upheavals of Sicily across two generations. Schroeter assimilates neorealist aesthetics and class sympathies with the tempestuous excesses of popular melodrama, borrowing freely from Rossellini, Pasolini, Visconti, Brecht, and Rossini.

Directed by Werner Schroeter, Italy/West Germany, 1978, 130 mins. In Italian with English subtitles.

Chicago Reader

Showtime:
Fri., Oct. 5 at 7 pm

SALOME

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."

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1971, 81 mins. In German with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Sat., Oct. 6 at 7 pm

DRESS REHEARSAL
(DIE GENERALPROBE)

WINNER
Outstanding Non-Feature Film
German Film Awards

Dress Rehearsal was Schroeter's favorite film, a dispatch from the World Theater Festival in Nancy, France, featuring dance and theater performances by Pina Bausch, Kazuo Ohno, and Reinhild Hoffmann, that he elevated into an exhilarating essay on love and desire; feelings and expression; and the artist and society. Using repetition, fragmentation, and montage, and incorporating music by Mahler, Strauss, Verdi, and Puccini, Schroeter fashioned a collage of rehearsals and performances, conversations and poetic ruminations, all centering on the idea of creative experimentation.

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1980, 88 mins. In French, German and English with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Sat., Oct. 6 at 9 pm

DOUBLE FEATURE:
Two X Werner Schroeter

ARGILA

A syncopated double projection of the same film—one in black-and-white and silent, the other in color with sound-that has the effect of plunging its four actors into a kind of mise-en-abyme. As Wim Wenders observes, this gives us the strange sense of watching a film that is "simultaneously a memory of itself."

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1969, 36 mins. In German with English subtitles.

with

NEURASIA

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

Directed by Werner Schroeter, 1969, 41 mins. In German with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Sun., Oct. 7 at 1 pm

GOLDFLAKES
(FLOCONS D'OR)

Even by Schroeter's exalted standards, the human body has rarely seemed so sensuous, or the human face so nuanced, as in Goldflakes, the apotheosis of his early career and a true underground film (none of the actors were paid, yet Schroeter still ended up deeply in debt). Shot in multiple languages, set in (a faked) Cuba, France, the Ruhr region and Bavaria, and structured in four acts, the film reflects on themes of fortune, destiny, and mortality. Actress Bulle Ogier later said that "the sequence in black and white was the most beautiful thing I ever did in cinema. Werner was able to unveil a kind of fragility, a delicate transparency, in me. So too with Andréa Ferréol, who was never more luscious, sexy, or Renoiresque." With Bulle Ogier, Andréa Ferréol, Magdalena Montezuma, Udo Kier.

Directed by Werner Schroeter, France/West Germany, 1976, 160 mins. In Spanish, French and German with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Sun., Oct. 7 at 3 pm

THE BLACK ANGEL
(DER SCHWARZE ENGEL)

The Black Angel begins, like Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, with documentary images of Mexico City and voiceover commentary, then becomes the mystical journey of two women tourists, a German and an American embassy secretary. They mutually search for meaning and self-fulfillment among the ruins of the Incan gods in a film which Schroeter considered "a nostalgic joke, a cheap farce" of kitschy colonialist romanticism.

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1974, 71 mins. In German with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Mon., Oct. 8 at 7 pm

THE SMILING STAR
(DER LACHENDE STERN)

NOMINATED
Best Feature
Chicago Intl
Film Fest

"A work beyond categorization, more a weave or flow of different beauties that lie therein"
-Cinema Scope

As a guest of the Manila International Film Festival, Schroeter was horrified to discover the yawning gap between rich and poor in The Philippines. He began to film clandestinely, using modest funds offered by the actor Peter Kern, and researched the legacy of colonialization through archival footage. Drawing parallels with the tortured histories of South American countries, and with his own fiction feature The Black Angel, The Smiling Star is one of Schroeter's most personal essay films, a self-described "kaleidoscope of a ravaged country" and "a look behind the mask of the Marcos dictatorship."

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1983, 108 mins. In Tagalog, German and English with English subtitles.

Showtimes:
Mon., Oct. 8 at 8:30 pm

THE DEATH OF MARIA MALIBRAN
(DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN)

"Sublime and bizarre"
-Film Comment

"What Schroeter does with a face, a cheekbone, the lips, the expression of the eyes, is a multiplying and burgeoning of the body, an exultation"
-Michel Foucault

"Schroeter's film is a delight to the eye—rich, strange and perverse"
-TimeOut London

"Bizarre"
-TimeOut Chicago

The early 19th-century mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran, whose bel canto voice and beauty enflamed the hearts of Rossini and Bellini, died in 1836 at the age of 28 after falling from a horse, yet even today she continues to enchant opera singers like Cecilia Bartoli, who devoted an entire album to her work. No mere biopic, The Death of Maria Malibran perpetuates her myth and mystique through a dreamlike series of Romantic tableaux, the inimitable superstars Montezuma and Darling leading a cast of women and transvestites who embody the force and fragility of divas throughout the ages, from Maria Callas to Janis Joplin, the modern-day Malibran to whom Schroeter dedicated this masterwork. With Magdalena Montezuma, Candy Darling, Ingrid Caven and Christine Kaufmann.

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1972, 115 mins. In German with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Tues., Oct. 9 at 7 pm

DER BOMBERPILOT

Schroeter's first film for German television 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.

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1970, 65 mins. In German with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Wed., Oct. 10 at 6:30 pm

WILLOW SPRINGS

Three women living in blissful isolation in the California desert find their communal life threatened by the arrival of a strange man. Willow Springs shares with Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) and Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977) a kind of surreal, dreamlike humor, and similarly hints at fractured or interchangeable female identities.

Directed by Werner Schroeter. West Germany, 1973, 78 mins. In German and English with English subtitles.

Showtime:
Wed., Oct. 10 at 7:45 pm

PALERMO OR WOLFSBURG
(PALERMO ODER WOLFSBURG)

WINNER
Golden Bear
Berlin Intl
Film Fest

"Palermo oder Wolfsburg is Schroeter at his artistically most complex, all-embracing and all-encompassing—just marvel at the way the film begins on a quasi-early Viscontian note to end like Sirk at his most tempestuously mournful and Bene at his most somber"
-Cinema Scope

"The wealth of ideas is still impressive"
-Chicago Reader

An impoverished young Sicilian, working at a Volkswagen plant in the industrial German city of Wolfsburg, finds himself isolated and shamed and decides to take revenge. Schroeter, who justly won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, contrasts the poetry of Sicily with soul-sickened Germany, "this land without light, without sun, without song."

Olaf Moller writes, "Palermo oder Wolfsburg is Schroeter at his artistically most complex, all-embracing and all-encompassing—just marvel at the way the film begins on a quasi-early Viscontian note to end like Sirk at his most tempestuously mournful and Bene at his most somber... With a meditation on choices and attitudes, positions political and aesthetic, it quite befits its subject: the Passion of the Sicilian migrant worker in the holy land of capitalism, West Germany at its most social democratic."

Directed by Werner Schroeter, West Germany, 1980, 175 mins. In Italian and German with English subtitles.

Slant Magazine

Showtime:
Thurs., Oct. 11 at 7 pm

Tickets:

$9 general admission Order tickets
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For all Cinémathèque inquiries, contact Charles Coleman at 773.281.9075 or charles@facets.org