Werner Schroeter

When director Daniel Schmid grew up, his parents ran a hotel in the Alps, and this singular setting was to influence his film. Rather by coincidence he came to Berlin in the early 1960s and became part of the new German wave. Schmid worked with, among others, ...  (more)

German director Werner Schroeter invited his favourite opera singers to a 13th century abbey near Paris. There was no pre-planned action. There was no script, no continuity. On the other hand, there were precise constraints that provided the rules of the game: the ...  (more)

Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.  (more)

Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, ...  (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.  (more)

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

An exhilarating, essayistic documentary about the 1980 festival of experimental theatre in the French city of Nancy. Werner Schroeter's favourite of his own films.  (more)

One of the most caustic and personal essay films ever made, Werner Schroeter's account of the 1983 Manila Film Festival, presided over by Imelda Marcos, chronicles the legacy of American and Spanish imperialism as it presents a "kaleidoscope of a ravaged country."  (more)

Documentary on State terrorism during the last military dictatorship in Argentina, made in its aftermath. Invited by the Goethe-Institut to hold a workshop with young film students, Schroeter contrasts the official statements of the regime with the testimony of ...  (more)

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

Feminist short film set in West Berlin.  (more)

Animated stills of Maria Callas and overlaid with a soundtrack of her singing.  (more)

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

Jesus (played by the director) 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 ...  (more)

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

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 ...  (more)

Werner Schroeter directed this dark and surreal tale of a man determined to save a lost lover from a grim fate at the hands of a violent mob. The city of Santa Maria is falling into chaos as an armed military faction is poised to take power in a coup d'etat. ...  (more)

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

An impoverished young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg, West Germany to find work. He takes a job in the Volkswagen factory after he travels through Northern Italy by train.  (more)

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 ...  (more)