Werner Schroeter
The most avant-garde director in the wave of modern German cinema whose consistent cinematic approach is to explore fragments or episodes of a person's life, ignoring any linear narrative and presenting a series of postcards, poetic images and symbols, important fragments, and scattered impressions instead. Has a strong interest in opera and many of his movies deal with this world of divas or singers or feature operatic soundtracks and visual drama. This faux-structure and seemingly random editing jobs in his movies do not add to the movie or offer a useful or interesting viewpoint to the audience, the sole excuse for this seems to be experimentation with structure. This, combined with his penchant for inserting pretentiously poetic, enigmatic and nonsensical dialogue or monologues result in pointlessly confusing movies that are neither inventive, rewarding or challenging. Of course, arthouse fanatics find something to praise, falling back on useless intellectual and art references for anchors. Schroeter started with small experiments and short films, then episodic longer creations that are basically a collage of images, dramatic impressions and random music, and then more complex and difficult full-length films that heavily use themes and symbols.
The insane as a metaphor for people too afraid of their own needs and eccentricities to live life in the real world dominated by standards and impersonal institutions. That's one possible interpertation, but Schroeter seems more interested in staging theatrical and poetic scenes of madness rather than cohesive thoughts. A highly neurotic woman feels she isn't getting what she wants from her boyfriend so she turns herself in as a terrorist so that they'll put her away in an asylum. The rest of the movie meanders between endless pretentious soliloquies an verbal exchanges, poetic rants, histrionic theatrics like characters out of a Zulawski movie, symbolic props and dancers, the mad talking about things like the sun and stabbing husbands while urinating on each other, the nurses discussing methods of caring for these unique individuals without really caring, their job consisting of converting the 'insane' to normal social creatures, etc. A terribly self-indulgent pretentious movie that thinks it's some kind of opera, offering no insights and no reward.
A typical early film by Schroeter that strings together a series of images to explore a subject. This one depicts the life of the famous drama-queen opera singer through strange episodes, from endless footage of people in heavy makeup and various sets, singing and acting melodramatically, to a scene of a woman melodramatically following and begging a man in the street as he walks away, to a strange expressionistic meeting between a white-faced man (death?) and a woman in a snowy forest, various other artsy performances and odds and ends, to a scene of death that made me think of Monty Python's sketch on 'deaths of famous people' and that this is what they were making fun of.
Based on an introspective feminist book by Ingeborg Bachmann which I haven't read but is described as a difficult fragmented work that exposes emotional reactions and stream-of-consciousness meditations on her identity vs. three men in her life, two lovers who try to control her or take over her identity, her obsessive love, and her scary father. The author, Bachmann, died in hospital after a fire in her house. Schroeter takes these real-life and written elements and applies his own treatment to the whole mess, showing scattered fragments of her life mixed with many and endless emotional breakdowns, fire and mirrors used as artsy symbols, a writer's block, existential explorations on identity, some references to her interests in Wittgenstein, and various surreal imagery involving violinists, her father in a Nazi uniform, and lots of flames, all together in one jumbled emotional mess, like the inside of a schizophrenic woman's mind. Unrewarding arthouse piece.
Werner Schroeter uses his typically pointless method of cutting up a story and presenting it in random fragments spliced together, mixed with laughable, unbearably pretentious monologues and visual allegories, such as a boy who tells a fire to 'make light in my heart', or 'when children kiss and cannot speak, one of them must die', or unsubtle Christ and Mary visuals. The little story there is involves a mother and her son who move to a mansion to grow roses, and a rose king who has a strange, caregiving but sacrificial homo-erotic relationship with the practically comatose son in some heavy-handed metaphors. This provides an excuse for endless painful poetic reveries and artful imagery, including blood on roses, an insane mother plagued by cats and mice, heavy-handed religious symbolism, a crucified cat, and rose-grafting as a twisted metaphor for forced romantic idealism.
Absolutely berserk and incomprehensible arthouse movie. The many bizarre characters and scenes are obviously either meant to be poetic or symbolic, but it is all a poetic metaphor for what exactly? Allegedly an autobiography for Schroeter, but given the impenetrable nature of this fragmented movie, the result is a masturbatory experiment unfit for audiences. The only element possible to extract from this creation is a character study on an insane, lonely, drug-addict of a mother who is probably hallucinating half of the scenes in this movie involving lots of men fawning over her, and her twin daughters who are mostly unaware of each other but sometimes meet under strange or violent circumstances, probably a metaphor for someone with a double life and split interests or identities. The rest of the movie consists of sliced up fragments: A lesbian first love in school, an endless stream of men, many of them in unform, all come to flirt or fawn over the women, a tranvestite cabaret, a pet fox, rotten dolls growing on a tree, two naked white mimes, a serial killer, manic behaviour, an incomprehensible poetic narration, sailors, a suicide, a murder, lots of bad singing, a sprinkling of gore, a mass of dead bodies, and a dead body as a puppet.