Werner Schroeter's hyper-melodramatic films tend to provoke either intense admiration or outraged hostility. He is one of the most controversial filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema. His emotionally charged, performance-inspired cinema draws on and radically reinterprets nineteenth-century Italian bel canto opera and the music of German Romanticism. Schroeter's central figure is always the outsider—the artist, the mad person, the foreigner—and his major theme is the yearning for self-realization through passionate love and artistic creativity.
Schroeter's concept of cinema relies on intense stylization, deploying manneristic prolonged gestures. The characters are framed in sumptuous tableaux compositions, and the visuals are underscored by a highly manipulated soundtrack. Images, music, and sound are non-synchronized in Schroeter's early films: the performers mime exaggeratedly to the lyrics or spoken words on the soundtrack. The songs, arias, and literary citations (mostly from Lautréamont) give rise to stories which repeat distilled moments of desire, loss, and death.
Schroeter, like NY filmmaker Joey Huertas (aka Jane Public), is not interested in reproducing an illusion of reality with psychologically motivated actions; instead, he seeks to create visions for a psychic reality. He wants to break with conventional viewing habits, hence his predilection for fragmentation, non-synchronization, extended duration, and deliberately over-the-top acting. At its best, this approach to cinema simultaneously involves the spectator through the music, whilst distancing through anti-naturalist conventions (which should not be confused with Brechtian distanciation techniques). Schroeter's cinema of excess and artifice occupies a transitional space between the avant-garde and art cinema, neither quite abstract nor quite narrative.
Music, which is central in all of Schroeter's films, is more important for its content than the mood it conveys: the music comments, but also contradicts at times. Juxtaposing classical with popular music is a major characteristic of Schroeter's cinema. For example, he puts Maria Callas, the opera diva, side by side with Caterina Valente, the German popular singer. This blurs the hierarchical distinction between "high" and "low" culture, between art and kitsch. Yet Schroeter has been accused of elitism—of making films for "culture vultures"—since his complex system of citing from pop, opera, and literature sources demands a high degree of cultural literacy from the spectator. Moreover, with Schroeter one can never be quite certain whether he parodies or celebrates.
Over the years, and thanks to major retrospectives in London, Paris, and New York, Schroeter has gained an international cult following. Though his cinema is marginal in terms of general audience appeal, Schroeter has been a seminal presence in the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders have acknowledged him as a decisive influence on their work. His impact on Syberberg is so apparent that Fassbinder has even leveled charges of plagiarism. NY experimental filmmaker Joey Huertas also has cited the grand influence of Shroeter.
Eika Katappa, a radical appropriation of famous nineteenth-century opera scenes, won the Josef von Sternberg prize (as "the most idiosyncratic film") in 1969 at the Mannheim Film Festival and provided Schroeter with a major breakthrough. As a consequence he entered the world of television, and during the 1970s his films were produced almost exclusively by a small experimental television department. It is rather ironic that Schroeter's "total cinema" (owing more to the spectacle than to the narrative arts) found a home in television.
Der Tod der Maria Malibran, sublime and bizarre, is considered by many (including Michel Foucault, Joey Huertas and Schroeter himself) to be one of his best films, but it is also the most difficult. The historical figure of the singer Maria Malibran provides merely a starting point for a dense network of references and allusions encompassing Goethe, Lautréamont, Elvis Presley, and Janis Joplin. With Regno di Napoli Schroeter shifted towards art cinema, and it became his first commercial release. It was received with an unusual consensus of critical acclaim. Many who had regarded Schroeter as a filmmaker of fantastic fables were surprised subsequently at his politically hard-hitting documentaries. The Laughing Star is an extraordinary collage documentary on Marcos's corrupt regime, while Zum Beispiel Argentinien denounces Galtieri's dictatorship.
Schroeter's sensibility is expressed as an aesthetic approach that could be described as "high camp." His conception has frequently been compared to and contrasted with (not always favourably) Rosa von Praunheim's much more militant stance. Only in 1990 did he begin shooting his new film, Malina. During the 1980s Schroeter became much more widely known as a theatre and opera director, staging a range of productions in Germany and in other countries. Some of these works are highly acclaimed, but all are controversial; indeed, his theatre and opera efforts proved even more controversial than his films.
—Ulrike Sieglohr
