Worlds of Longing – The Cinema of Werner Schroeter

He has been a singular figure in Germany's cinema landscape for four decades: Werner Schroeter, to whose work we will pay tribute with a cross-section of 13 films from all of his creative phases. Werner Schroeter came upon art at an early age. As a youth he discovered Maria Callas, whose time-dissolving intensity he later sought to evoke in his films. He started off in the late 1960s with experimental super 8 films after having studied just a few weeks at the film academy in Munich. In 1967 he traveled to the experimental film festival in Knokke, Belgium, that gave him an important impetus and the notion of an aesthetic liberated from all constraints. In 1969 his first full-length film EIKA KATAPPA was awarded the Josef-von-Sternberg-Preis at the International Film Festival Mannheim, paving the way for his future career.

Schroeter is a passionate filmmaker. His radical contra-position to everything conventional allows him to create an imaginary world on the screen that opens up new spaces of perception and experience. With opera-like theatricality and an excessive richness of means of expression, Schoeter brings rampant visions of his central motifs to the screen: the big, absolute emotions, life, love, and death. It is existential filmmaking that views art as a necessity of life.

Schroeter has shot more than 30 films in the course of his career and staged theater plays and operas since the 1970s. He continues to be highly productive: His latest movie, NUIT DE CHIEN, premiered last year in Venice, where Schroeter was also awarded the prize of the jury for his lifetime achievement.