Keeper of the Flame: an exploration of “German cinema’s greatest marginal figure”, Werner Schroeter

“In Werner’s work, the actor’s performance always develops in a crescendo – but a crescendo which begins on an extreme emotion.” This is the testimony (for the French magazine Vertigo) of Alberte Barsacq, who was in charge of costumes and/or production design for many of Werner Schroeter’s films and theatre pieces from the mid 1970s until his death in April 2010. Malina (1991), on which Barsacq worked, is a prime example of this process. 

Scripted by Elfriede Jelinek from Ingeborg Bachmann’s largely non-narrative 1971 novel – and situated between Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) and David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) in an unwritten history of a modern ‘cinema of hysteria’ – it portrays a character known only as ‘The Woman’ (Isabelle Huppert) going completely to pieces, especially in relation to the mixed messages received from the two men in her life, the seemingly protective Malina (Mathieu Carrière) and the elusive dream-lover Ivan (Can Togay). 

The Woman’s swift descent into madness is not merely a personal affliction, but also – as is often the case in Schroeter – the reflection of a wider social malaise. (A similar premise powers his 1982 Day of the Idiots, starring Carole Bouquet.) The assumed, conventional realities of time, space and action shift with every edit. We can never be sure whether Ivan actually exists, or what Malina’s feelings and intentions toward the heroine really are. 

Huppert spends most of the film in paroxysmic states, shouting, crying, setting things alight – so many things that the final act places her and Carrière, for nearly 30 minutes, amid real flames on an enclosed set: Schroeter refused the option of special effects. The actors sweat and flinch as they handle burning papers and telephones. Yet, as Huppert relates in Elfi Mikesch’s film portrait Mondo Lux: The Visual Worlds of Werner Schroeter (2011), the director was able to inspire total trust and loyalty in his collaborators, no matter what extremity of emotion had to be reached. 

Born in 1945, he was a sensitive child, regularly mistreated by his school peers and taken away frequently on trips to other countries (hence, no doubt, the cosmopolitanism and multilingualism of his later work). He began his artistic career in the 60s as a dabbler in the cultural underground, using Super 8 film to match still photos and reproductions of paintings to opera recordings of Maria Callas – the passionate, youthful experience which he always cited as the origin of his creative drive. 

Having won a cult reputation, Schroeter became the regular beneficiary of German TV’s ‘little television play’ policy. Extremely low-budget films – The Bomber Pilot (1970), Gold Flakes (1976) – developed his unique style and method. His early masterpieces date from this period: the collage of music and images Eika Katappa (1969) and the unconventional opera biopic The Death of Maria Malibran (1971) both feature his very own ‘superstar’ – in the Andy Warhol Factory mode – Magdalena Montezuma (both films are available in fine DVD restorations from Filmmuseum Austria). 

Thomas Elsaesser once called Schroeter “German cinema’s greatest marginal filmmaker”, and he has been revered by fellow directors from Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Chantal Akerman to José Luis Guerín and Rita Azevedo Gomes; but he has inspired surprisingly little English-language film criticism and academic scholarship – some scattered articles and book chapters and one monograph (Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter by Australian scholar Michelle Langford in 2006). In French, a rather novelistic evocation by Philippe Azoury, entitled To Werner Schroeter, Who Was Unafraid of Death, appeared in 2011, a year after the director’s passing. And Filmmuseum Austria promises that a major survey and analysis of Schroeter’s multifaceted career, edited by Roy Grundmann, will appear in print by early 2018.  

Schroeter is, in one significant sense, very much a filmmaker of his time – a time that is increasingly an object of fascinated nostalgia for today’s cinephiles. This is the period between the end of the 60s (especially post ’68) and the start of the 80s, characterised by, on the one hand, innovations in narrative feature filmmaking (especially in Europe) and, on the other hand, developments in radical cinema theory in journals such as Screen). Highlights of this immensely fertile era include the delirious films of Carmelo Bene in Italy (a figure sadly even less well-known than Schroeter) and Ulrike Ottinger in Germany, the early work of Fassbinder, Akerman’s most experimental films, Raúl Ruiz’s discovery by European critics, and Jacques Rivette’s least inhibited explorations (Duelle and Noroît in 1976). 

All these movies were, to a fault, baroque, florid and excessive. Some were ‘costume dramas’, though never pretending to a naturalistic recreation of times past. They sometimes inhabited – to the point of high camp – the husks of dead genres, such as the high seas pirate adventure or the social problem melodrama. Their trademarks were lurid colour schemes, outlandishly theatrical performances, and stop-start, never entirely coherent narratives. Often they flaunted a classic (perhaps archaic) literary, theatrical or operatic text as their point of departure – not so much enacted as pulverised and then requoted, frequently out of sync with the dramatic action. 

Something more than outrageous fun was at stake for the more intellectually oriented fans of this cinematic trend (and bear in mind that Schroeter boasted of committing a little housebreaking in Marseille with his drinking buddy, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: for this in-crowd, theory and practice were never too far apart). Excess mattered, because what needed to be exceeded was, on the one hand, fixed meanings (such as the standard interpretations of classic texts) and, on the other, fixed identities (conservative and conformist class or gender roles). 

Schroeter’s movies were, in this regard, not only among the beachheads of a future queer filmmaking; they were also explosions of what theorists hailed as a ‘cinema of the signifier’. They hurl the chaotic materiality of their colours, images, rhythms, sounds and gestures at us with such brute force that – as Timothy Corrigan suggested, writing about Schroeter’s USA-shot Willow Springs (1973) – they create a place “outside the confines of history… where history is redefined finally by the excesses and possibilities that escape it”.  

The most remarkable aspect of Schroeter’s oeuvre is that he never gave up, or substantially compromised, his aesthetic approach. Bene returned to theatre (and TV), Akerman detoured into art galleries, Rivette took on a more classically Balzacian guise and Fassbinder negotiated a rising curve of mainstream production opportunities; Schroeter stuck to his uncompromising path. His career did diversify – into personal documentary, beginning with his ‘poetic collage’ of a theatre festival in Dress Rehearsal (1980); into the deceptive semi-realism of The Kingdom of Naples (1979) and Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980); and into slightly more upmarket, star-driven vehicles like Malina, thanks to the opportunities offered by sympathetic producers like Paulo Branco in Portugal. His work in theatre was steady and prolific from the early 70s to the end of his life, too. But the audience for his films has always remained marginal and the full extent of his work difficult to access, even in the age of digital downloading. 

Why this lingering resistance to a director whose films are, as Fassbinder proclaimed, “as important as [Josef von] Sternberg’s”? One can learn as much, and maybe more, from those who loathe and dismiss Schroeter’s work as from those who devote themselves to it: when Vincent Canby reviewed the Jean Genet/ Kenneth Anger-drenched The Rose King (1986) for the New York Times, eager to mock its avantgarde affectations, he inadvertently stumbled upon the key to the director’s very particular montage technique. Faced with a cascade of fragmented scenes and obsessively reiterated imagery, Canby gibed: “This is the sort of film in which so many shots are repeated I’m not at all sure that anything happens more than once.” 

The narrative temporality of Schroeter’s films is indeed peculiar. At the very moment they begin, they flash forward to initially inexplicable glimpses of later events and outcomes. At the end, as in Malina and The Rose King, there is sometimes a literal conflagration, apocalyptic in its implication. In between, the story is (as Michelle Langford suggests) “caught in a state of stasis”, obsessively repeating certain performative gestures (fainting, screaming, kissing, beseeching, dying…) and group tableaux (recalling everything from grand opera and the pietà to Murnau’s Nosferatu and Mishima Yukio’s ritual suicide). 

But these repetitions never take on a predictable, systematic pattern; irregularity is everything. Even on the formal plane of image and sound patterning, nothing neatly rhymes or ‘folds over’ in a conventionally satisfying way; as David Ehrenstein notes of Eika Katappa in his Film: The Front Line 1984, “each new musical cue propels the film forward while keeping it from achieving definitive shape”. Above all, with that characteristically constant and undecidable slippage from reality to fantasy noted in Malina, we are plagued by a fundamental doubt worse than that which gnawed at Canby: not the question of whether things are happening “more than once”, but whether they truly have happened even once.  

Ultimately, it is a question of that hopeful space “outside the confines of history” that Corrigan flagged. Schroeter’s faithful collaborator, Barsacq, had her own view of what she called his “anachronistic time of utopia”. His films aimed to be timeless, in the sense that they suspended themselves between the intense, perfect, remembered passions of youth and a better future to come – perhaps in death, which is swathed in such romanticism by Schroeter. But between the lost past and the phantom future is the horror of the present, with all its political ills (laid bare in his final feature This Night, 2008) and constraining role-play. 

Luckily, against the paralysis and dysfunction induced by present-day reality, there remains the subversive force of Schroeter’s proudly discombobulated mise en scène and his remarkable work with charismatic actors. His goal, Barsacq says, was “to attain ecstasy, to figure passion”. Few filmmakers have gone so far in this quest. 

► Anguish & Ecstasy: The Cinema of Werner Schroeter runs at the ICA from 19 February-12 April