A Credible Utopia

Front matter

Peter Valente . -

A Credible Utopia Essays on Selected Films of Werner Schroeter

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Contents

Introduction A Personal Journey over the Years with the Films of Werner Schroeter - 13

THE SIXTIES Schroeters Experimental Films

Repression and Freedom: On Werner Schroeter’s Neurasia (1968) - 23

Introduction

A Personal Journey over the Years with the Films of Werner Schroeter

I remember attending the retrospective of Werner Schroeter's films in 2012 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I attended most of the screenings because I had been aware of his name at the time, since I had watched many of the films from the so-called New German Cinema. I was immediately attracted to his films because they seemed so unusual compared to the other German films at the time. I admired the theatricality and almost unhinged emotional quality of the films. They seemed improvised and irreverent. Schroeter was a kind of romantic with both his feet in the real world. He writes in his autobiography:

I hitchhiked from Heidelberg to Ludwigshafen to meet sailors in 1965 and 1966. How could it be anything but romantic to come close to others, and not only in one’s thoughts and feelings? We wanted to experience real life... Back then there were gas lamps everywhere, and the BAsF chemical factories blinked like something in a science fiction movie —a wonderful image of the night. There was a friendly tart, getting on in years, who wanted to adopt me. But instead I hitchhiked home at four in the morning and was driven to school by my mother. Love was an unknown feeling that I still wanted to experience. To know love and then die —a death in love, a Liebestod — was an incredibly romantic notion.

They were films that did not take themselves too seriously even when dealing with serious subjects like the nature of love and death.

At the time of the retrospective in 2012, there was hardly anything in English’ on his films and only one film available on pvp domestically, in America.” At the time, what seemed obvious eluded me. William E. Jones writes:

Economics have played a role in Schroeter’s invisibility, but political forces are at work as well. When film industries avoid gay subjects, especially in places where homosexual behavior is punishable by law, filmmakers wishing to get beyond the puritanical norm of simpering apologia or outraged exposés (or worst of all, silence) have few options: experimental filmmaking, pornography, or some combination of the two.

General audiences may be uncomfortable with the excessive quality of the films, the flamboyant aspect, the drag, the mannerisms, the queer performances, etc. which all reflect a gay sensibility. But perhaps there are other reasons that Schroeter’s films are not better known. To fully appreciate a typical Schroeter film requires a certain familiarity with high European literature and art as well as opera and music in general. Ulrike Sieglohr writing about Deux, in his essay on Schroeter’s Deux, “Divine Rapture, writes: “Although at the core extremely subjective, Deux also contains references to European art history

1 Fora long time only Michelle Langford’s Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time, and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006) was the only book available in English. Recently, a collection of essays on his films was published, Werner Schroeter (Vienna: Osterreichisches Filmmuseum; Synema-Gesellschaft fiir Film und Medien, 2018), edited by Roy Grundmann.

2 At the time, Palermo or Wolfsburg was the only available pvp from Facets.

INTRODUCTION and literature, and this balancing act, while doubtless intriguing for dedicated Schroeter followers, is likely too opaque for the uninitiated” His films are demanding in this respect and can be off-putting to some viewers. Schroeter relates a funny incident that happened at Cannes when his film Deux was shown there in 2002, which illustrates the way in Schroeter's films could be seen; he writes: “one critic wrote that he didn't understand it all, but he felt as if he had seen several centuries of European art history running past him. Voilà? I have mentioned Schroeter's name to professors who taught film at universities who, and if they had heard it, had, nevertheless, not seen any of his films.

Palermo or Wolfsburg was the first film I saw on DVD in 2011. It contrasted the excitement, enthusiasm, and passion that Schroeter saw as fundamental to the Southern Italian sensibility with the Northern German sensibility. But, as Paul B. Precido notes, in his book An Apartment on Uranus, the fictional reality of a North and South on a map is maintained for political reasons; this reasoning is less about geography and more about seeing the North as superior and the South as inferior:

As the anti-colonialist critics Anibal Quijano, Silvia Rivera Cuscanqui, and Walter Mignolo teach us, the South does not exist. The South is a political fiction constructed by colonial prejudice. The South is an invention of modern colonial cartography: the combined effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the growth of industrial capitalism, still in quest of new territories to use for the extraction of raw material.

We must collapse these vertical distinctions which enforce a duality of inferior and superior, and hack the power grid; imaginatively interrupt and redirect the flow of knowledge, moving through fissures and gaps, to arrive at a new language. Being born in the south of Italy, Schroeter’s film helped me think about these distinctions.

During this time, I had also purchased a bootleg copy of The Death of Maria Malibran. Because of my passion for opera, I knew Maria Malibran was a famous opera singer who had never recorded and died from complications after falling from a horse; but, at the time, I knew nothing about the director, except for a brief reference to him in Katz’s Encyclopedia of Film which was basically negative. As I watched the film over the years, Icame to see Schroeter’s obsession with death and its connection to love and the idea that self-realization is also linked with the death of the male: the desire of the transgender person to fully embody herself. For Schroeter, a Utopic space exists where love is not a problem and transgender men and women are free to express themselves. At the time, I wrote in my journal about The Death of Maria Malibran: “Each scene is composed mostly ofthe closeups oftwo female faces (or in some scenes, transgender women, or sometimes three, with rarely a male face); in each scene, we see one face drawing closer to the other, in an attempt to kiss the other, overcome by unspeakable longing. As each brief scene comes to a close, the slow movement of the women stops. The figures are posed in a very stylized manner, and the effect of the lightning makes the faces almost appear unearthly, angelic, against a black background, with their lips barely touching, as in a painting by Giotto” I would eventually come to see many of Schroeter’s films as they slowly made their way onto DVD.

I never found Schroeter’s films perplexing or confusing as many others have. Watching his films is a kind of somatic experience. However radical his films appear on the surface, they all appeal to the eyes and to the body first. He is not a realist like Fassbinder, nor political in the same way. Der Bomberpilot flirts with Nazism, but it is ultimately not a political film like The Marriage of Maria Braun. He is more akin to a filmmaker like Melies; he is a magician with the camera as Melies was, able to evoke an entire world outside the real word, with its own laws, that defy gravity as we know it, and with its own sensibility. I think those who have experimented with making films can understand the films of Werner Schroeter intuitively.

I was first drawn to his films as a filmmaker; I’ve worked in 8mm, 16mm, and digital. When viewing his films, I asked myself questions like: how did he get that lighting to produce such

INTRODUCTION an image? What kind of film did he use? What kind of camera? I also admired his use of texts from literature, such as the Songs of Maldoror by Lautréamont, which he used in two films: The Death of Maria Malibran and the late film, Deux. I admired the way he used music in his films to comment on a character’s thoughts, or to conflict with what is on the screen. Most of my films did not contain dialogue but I made extensive use of different kinds of music, from opera, to popular music, to jazz. I imagine Schroeter must have been aware of Kenneth Angers use of music in his films, the way it comments on the images and adds another dimension to what one is seeing on the screen. So, I approached Schroeter from the viewpoint of a filmmaker first, and not an academic.

After watching Schroeter’s films over the years, I am continually astonished that he is not well known, and furthermore, why Criterion has not released any of his films to date. Growing up in the time when vus tapes were all the rage, I was able to see so many films; it was as though everything came out on VHS tapes. In any case, with the advent of DVDs it was clear that the market controlled what would be released. Fassbinder can be coopted for political reasons, and his kind of Sirkian melodrama is generally appealing to a wider audience. Even gay films like Fox and His Friends are more about class than the homosexual lifestyle. Schroeter’s films are more overtly gay in style and subject matter and as a result, if he’s taught at all, it is in gender and queer studies programs. His films are sensual and erotic and exist in their own realm of fantasy and fascination. They are utopian in the sense that they exist in an idealized world of personal freedom. His aesthetic didn't change when he made more seemingly political films, it was always manneristic, stylized, and operatic, more than it was a statement of ideology. Fassbinder wrote the following about Schroeter:

Werner Schroeter will one day have a place in the history of film that I would describe in literature as somewhere between Novalis, Lautréamont, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline; he was an ‘underground’ director for ten years, and they didn't want to let him slip out of this role. Werner Schroeter’s grand cinematic scheme of the world was confined, repressed, and at the same time ruthlessly exploited. His films were given the convenient label of “underground, which transforms them in a flash into beautiful but exotic plants that bloomed so unusually and so far away that basically one couldn't be bothered with them, and therefore wasn't supposed to bother with them. And that's precisely as wrong as it is stupid. For Werner Schroeter's films are not far away; they're beautiful but not exotic. On the contrary.

Many filmmakers have also borrowed from Schroeter. Timothy Corrigan, in his essay, “Werner Schroeter’s Operatic Cinema,’ writes about Schroeter’s influence on German filmmakers:

Fassbinder ‘definitely learned from Schroeter’s films’ and ‘Daniel Schmidt is unthinkable without Schroeter? Herzog has frequently admitted the importance of Schroeter to his development; and, according to Fassbinder, that recent demiurge of German filmmaking in America Hans-Jurgen Syberberg is little more than a ‘merchant of plagiarism; ‘an extremely capable Schroeter imitator, who while Schroeter helplessly awaited recognition competently marketed what he took from Schroeter.

Fassbinder called Schroeter the white angel, whereas he saw himself as the black angel: Fassbinder was sexually sadomasochistic and Schroeter was femme. He loved women for their femininity, for the way they moved, sang, or gestured. On the screen, his women are sensual. Schroeter’s women were not the kind of direct political tool they were for Fassbinder. Schroeter may have been a feminist but he didn't have to be one; Magdalena Montezuma was his muse and appeared in many of his films before she succumbed, years before he did, to the cancer that would eventually kill him. Isabelle Huppert was Schroeter’s muse in his final years. She appeared in his next to last film, Deux; in that film, Schroeter capitalized on her fame. In some sequences

INTRODUCTION the lighting is so brilliant that her face radiates a youthful determination and inner confidence, while also being tender and occasionally, unsure of herself. Her range of emotions in this film is brilliant. Schroeter would write about her: “Isabelle Huppert and I have been great friends ever since Malina. Even after work on that film was over, we remained close and regarded our friendship as a great gift. Isabelle is very intuitive and has a calm center, a harmonious strength, that she has worked to find for herself, making it her own by dint of experience.” As the credits roll at the end of Deux, Huppert appears radiant, a white angel, indeed; it is a truly memorable scene.

Schroeter was more of an idealist than a strictly political filmmaker. In each of these films, his yearning for a Utopia can be seen. They call on the viewer to examine their own life and to consider their right to express themselves, even in an oppressive society. The final sentence in Schroeter’s autobiography seems to encapsulate why his films are so important and why I consider them essential viewing. Schroeter speaks of our “overwhelming longing” for “a credible Utopia,’ despite our “full awareness of disaster, despite torture, viciousness, and intrigues.” This “hopeful hopelessness and hopeless hope” is the central theme in the films of Werner Schroeter.

Corrigan, Timothy. “Werner Schroeter's Operatic Cinema.” Discourse 3 (1981): 46-59. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/41371588.

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. “Chin-up, Handstand, Salto Mortale—Firm Footing: On the Film Director Werner Schroeter, Who Achieved What Few Achieve, with Kingdom of Naples.” In The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, edited by Michael Tóteberg and Leo A. Lensing, translated by Krishna Winston, 17-53. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Grundmann, Roy, ed. Werner Schroeter. Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum; Synema-Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2018.

Jones, William E. But Our Life Depends on What’ Real. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014.

Preciado, Paul. An Apartment on Uranus. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2019.

Schroeter, Werner, and Claudia Lenssen. Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy. Translated by Anthea Bell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

THE SIXTIES

Schroeter’s Experimental Films

Repression and Freedom: On Werner Schroeter’s Neurasia (1968)

Werner Schroeter’s early experimental film, Neurasia, contains the purist expression of his romantic and dramatic sensibility. With minimal props and a bare setting, four characters act out a drama that includes pain, pleasure, the glory of self-expression, and the violence ofrepression, accompanied by a soundtrack including Ethel Waters, Ruth Etting, Sophie Tucker, Aunt Jemima, and Percy Sledge. When a character is offered the possibility ofa heterosexual relationship, it always ends in pain and confusion. But the one who asserts their independence from this coupling will dance and sing and express their individual selves. This film is Schroeter’s fierce assertion of his independence as a filmmaker, and even here, he foreshadows his late film, Deux, with the problem of the double, the couple, as it relates to the realization of ones identity.

As the film opens, we see four people, three women (actresses Carla Aulaulu, Magalena Montezume, and Rita Bauer) and one man (actor Steven Adamczewski). Schroeter writes about these early friendships:

I had made good friends during that year [1968] of working in 8mm. I was thinking of those friends, Magdalena, Carla, and the others, and of a kaleidoscopic pattern, a selection from themes close to my heart that were developing in my mind like a wide horizon. The idea was to present our sense of life, the demands we made on ourselves, and achieve a change in our usual habits and the way we saw things. The group was an aesthetic movement, an aesthetic revolution, running parallel to the political events of 1968. I received compliments on that at the time, and I still do. My work was seen as the breaking of windowpanes that had become dull...I didn’t want anything to do with psychological cinema, preferring the free interplay of music and film. But of course I also encountered a great deal of hostility.

In the opening scene, Rita is on her hands and knees, at the center of the screen; Carla is above her, standing on a couch, but the overall effect appears as if Carla is standing on top of Rita. Magdalena stands to the far right of the screen, and Adamczewski is to the far left of the screen. Thus, a power dynamic is set up early in the film. The central struggle will be between Carla and Magdalena, between freedom and domination; the man will be inconsequential in the beginning of the film. Magdalena gives the man across from her a quizzical look as if to say that she is jealous of Carla’s show of independence. There is no sound at this point. Magdalena says something to Carla; but she responds by laughing and taking a sip of her wine. Magdalena and Adamczewski are in awe of her. At one point, early in the film, he hands Magdalena a kind of demonic talisman. Later, he and Magdalena are seen worshipping and offering up prayers to the talisman. Carla wants no part this cult of worship, which we will discover is a force for repression, and would rather drink, dance, and freely express herself.

Carla, seeing a naked man (Admczewski) crawling across the floor, moves towards him, and grieves over his apparent, dead body. The male must die for her to fully realize herself. For Schroeter, this is an idea he will explore more fully in The Death of Maria Malibran: the male must die in order for the trans woman to emerge. In the next scene, she begins her tri-

REPRESSION AND FREEDOM umphant dance sequence, which will continue throughout the film, fanning herself. In one scene, the man from Magdalenas cult approaches Carla, gets down on one knee, and affectionately places his head on her belly. He represents a figure of death to Carla, because he is sexually repressed. Throughout the film, Adamczewski either accompanies Carla on the guitar, or is Magdalenas slave. The heterosexual male figure of strength and aggression, an ideal in Nazi Germany, is here passive, unsure of himself, gay, and repressed.

As Carla continues to dance in a flamboyant manner, Magdalena and Rita look on with boredom and indifference. At one point, they try to force Carla onto her knees, to stop her from expressing herself, while we hear on the soundtrack, the voice of Ethel Water's singing her song “Am I blue,” with the lines, “Tm just a woman, I’m only a woman, waiting on the weary shore, Pm just a woman, only human” When Magdalena is alone with the man, he appears indifferent to her, and is in his own world. Ethel Waters continues to sing about love lost while Magdalena is in agony, presumably because of the man. Schroeter cuts the song prematurely at the line, “Was I gay,’ allowing it to resonance with a meaning it didn't have in Ethel's time. Then there is a cut to the man's face. Through cutting Schroeter reinforces the idea in the film that the man is gay. He continues to court Magdalena but to no avail. He remains her puppet and submissive to her. Even in this early film, Schroeter seems to be critical of gay men attempting to find a relationship with straight women, thus ignoring their true identity. But he was never militant like his friend, Rosa von Pranheim.

While Magdalena continues to suffer in her relationship with the gay man, Carla flirts with one of the women in the cult since she identifies primarily with women rather than men. In identifying with women, Carla/Schroeter was trying to realize her identity. While Magdalena and Adamczewski seem in a trance, robotic, as they drift, listlessly across the screen, Carla is seen dancing and enjoying herself; she is alive, awkward, charming, an amateurish dancer, but fully confident, and comfortable with herself.

Magdalena marries the repressed man. In one scene, his hands are folded in prayer, while she is wracked by pain. She finds release in offering her life to the demonic talisman, while he is praying, perhaps to be cured of what he sees as a sexual disease. He goes to Carla for comfort. Carla plays a singer in this film as she would do again in Der Bomberpilot. Here we see her performing, in an elegant black dress, for an audience. As Magdalena and the man continue to worship the idol, Carla tests the limits of her sexual identity, by dressing in leather, in elegant dresses, and in drag, experiencing both pain and pleasure, and flamboyantly femme.

Even as Magdalena is trying to assuage the pain of her friend, Rita, presumably also suffering from a failed relationship, we see Carla singing, with one hand on her hip and another on her leg, a posture that asserts her feeling of independence, as if to say that she will have no part in the pain of coupling. In this film, Magdalena also appears in her guise as a lesbian cult leader who asserts her domination over two people, as she would, later on, in Willow Springs, though here she dominates a man and a woman. At one point, Carla is seen approaching the camera, holding the hand of Adamczewski, who is on her left, and Magdalena, on her right. Carla appears to be in a trance as a result of being in their grasp; it is a result of their brainwashing her. But she breaks free of the spell when she lets go of their hands and is alone. Then she begins to move her body slowly, improvising various dance steps; this is a private dance, for no one else, and just an expression of herself; it is as though she is in dialogue with herself, as she moves, or rather slowly undulates; she is casual, awkward, sensual, free.

Carla Aulaulu is wonderful in the film; she is possessed of a childlike ability to radiate internal emotions with a controlled intensity. She is not afraid to look directly at the camera, demanding to be seen and heard on her own terms. The accompaniment ofthe Hawaiian music on the soundtrack, and her subtly

REPRESSION AND FREEDOM masculine features, gives the feeling of a drag performance. Roy Grundmann writes, in “The Passions of Werner Schroeter”:

Schroeter’s cinema of stylized if deliberately amateurish or imperfect gestures and fleeting allusions to popular culture has a long tradition in queer circles — for instance, in the experimental wing of the downtown New York dance scene... but also in the mundane acts of queer fandom as practiced, for instance, by gay men re-enacting their favorite movie scenes. The way Adamczewski and Montezuma handle Aulaulu as he collapses in performed hysteria is reminiscent of feverish Hollywood melodramas that queer audiences reperform in a utopian spirit, refusing to separate victimization and suffering from resistance and survival.

And the effect of Carla continuing to dance in this awkward manner and unafraid to express her femininity, as Percy Sledge sings, “Tm sending a prayer up to heaven for you return” creates the oddly sensual effect of her overall performance. She is a young boy, a young girl, a woman, a man; in her dancing, she inhabits, even for a brief moment, different genders as a result of her physique and the way Schroeter films her.

Magdalena and the man continue be part of a cult of repression, symbolized by the magic talisman; Magdalena is seen gazing in a trance at the talisman on the wall. Eventually, both she and the man surround Carla and interrupt her dancing; they pick her up and lay her on the ground. She eventually dies. Repression wins over free expression. This is story of ’68 again: revolutionary action unable to change the basic foundation of oppression.

In his autobiography, Schroeter writes about the reception of the film:

Someone from a Bavarian film club for young people called Neurasia a ‘Schroeter musical’; in Munich such films were shown in the Other Cinema. That was roughly the kind of reaction we wanted. The film critic Fieda Grafe called Neurasia a “stage for language: In the magazine Filmkritik, which was very important to me, she wrote: ‘Neurasia is a silent film with music. The tunes fit with the images as they used to in the days when the pianist was still sitting in the auditorium. Sometimes you have the illusion of synchronicity, until the music breaks off and Carla opens her mouth wider. You can see that she is sometimes singing silently, sometimes speaking silently. You can understand her. In the elevated sphere in which the film moves there are no such concepts as idol, adoration, star, myth, ecstasy. Nothing exists but the ultimate sense, the highest meaning’ She also linked my film to Witold Gombrowiczs illuminating comment on “the divine silliness of operetta,” which pleased me tremendously.

On the surface, Neurasia is a film that could be described as an operetta, but in fact, is a dark film about repression and the attempts of society, embodied by Magdalena, Adamczewski, and Rita, who worship the demonic talisman, to crush any signs of freedom and joy, embodied here by Carla's pagan lifestyle. Society stands for law and order, the individual for freedom and independence. One is always in conflict with the other. The situation of a trans man or women in a heteronormative society is precarious and often dangerous. Femme men are particularly at risk. The early scene in Deux, where a sailor beats up a gay man who is cruising in a park at night, is a reminder that, even in 2002 (the release of the film), with the war for gay rights apparently won, gay men are never safe in a society where all mainstream images depict heterosexual men and woman coupling. This is one of Werner Schroeter’s most important early films, where all his mannerisms, theatricality, and love for music, are on full display.

Grundmann, Roy. “The Passions of Werner Schroeter.” In Werner Schroeter, ed. Roy Grundmann, 2-56. Vienna:

REPRESSION AND FREEDOM

Österreichisches Filmmuseum; Synema-Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2018.

Schroeter, Werner, and Claudia Lenssen. Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy. Translated by Anthea Bell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Ideality and Violence: On Werner Schroeter's Aggression (1968)

Werner Schroeter's 22 min. film, Aggression, shot in black and white on 16mm, opens with a close up of a woman's face (Heidi Lorenzo) holding a rose up to her lips, gently kissing it, and moving it across her cheek, as if immersing herself in its scent. The rose, of course, has a long and elaborate history, in literature and art, of representing the ideal in love and beauty; in Christian iconography it symbolizes heaven and the Virgin Mary. It is red, because Aphrodite wounded herself and stained the flower with her blood. The rose also has a long history in Iran and other surrounding regions; in the ghazel, the rose is associated with the sound of the nightingale, with its sound of longing. In the first image of the film, we see the young woman, who longs for the ideal of love. Instead, she is met with the aggressive force of a man she meets in the park. The man also appears in stairwells, entrances to bathroom, and turnstiles. The threat of violence is impersonal and everywhere in a male dominated world. In fact, in keeping with the mysterious nature of the man in the film, for many years the identity of the actor was not known. Over the years it been suggested that actors name was Knut Koch and this was later proven to be true.

The film is silent except for a voiceover, which may or may not be the woman. These texts speak of bucolic surroundings, the need for Christian values, and the destruction of immoral, depraved behaviors. Grundmann writes, that “this was conservative middle class cultures response to the sexual revolution and the advent of Womens Lib...other statements consist of petit-bourgeois platitudes against the counterculture” If we read these words as the woman's own, then it is as if she has internalized this ideology and become the victim. But ifwe read this as just the ideal of a conservative ideology spoken by someone other than the woman, then it is the man who has not respected a woman's right to freedom and the film becomes a feminist critique of male Aggression. And I think this also extends to the treatment of gay and trans men and woman. The women in Schroeter’s films often contain masculine features. Lorenzo has broad shoulders, a wide jaw, and is not conventionally feminine; her face seems to slip between genders as a result of the quick movements of her face and body.

The man is an aggressor both at the first meeting and later when he and the woman are having sex. The woman misreads the signals of his Aggression and lets him go to bed with her. Or perhaps she is raped. In either case, the sex is not pleasing to her nor to him, or rather his Aggression in bed may be the result of his conscious attempt to show that he virile. There is no tenderness or love. The man is dangerous and will kill her out of his own insecurity about his sexual identity. This film is also a critique of heterosexuality, and the coupling ofaman and woman. However, the difference between this film and Neruasia or Argila, and their similar treatment of the subject, is that here the outward aggressive nature of straight coupling and sex is obvious, rather than repressed.

In her book Reverse Cowgirl, McKenzie Wark writes,

As everybody supposedly knows, us faggots are even less than women. Plenty of straight women would agree, and, sad to say, so too would some lesbians. The non-straight world