The Death of Maria Malibran
Werner Schroeter mixes Stravinsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Maria Callas and Janis Joplin in this delirious biography of the doomed nineteenth-century mezzo-soprano.
Werner Schroeter
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Werner Schroeter
Schroeter’s film is a chronicle of Germany from the Nazi era until the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, centering on three women who search for a career as singers and dancers.
Three women retreat to a hacienda in the Mojave Desert and vengefully lure men to their deaths to the siren song of the Andrews Sisters' "Rum And Coca-Cola," in Werner Schroeter's sublimely strange fever dream of a film.
One of the most caustic and personal essay films ever made, Werner Schroeter's account of the 1983 Manila Film Festival, presided over by Imelda Marcos, chronicles the legacy of American and Spanish imperialism as it presents a "kaleidoscope of a ravaged country."
Werner Schroeter's stunning split-screen short deals with what the director called "archaic, fundamental themes" of love and mourning.
A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses.
Palermo or Wolfsburg (German: Palermo oder Wolfsburg) is a 1980 film by Werner Schroeter. It tells the story of an Italian immigrant who comes to West Germany in search of work.
A short film
With the ascetic grandeur of Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Schroeter evokes the visions of Saint Joan, partly through unused footage of Darling and Caven pantomiming in his 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran. - MoMA
Fusing Shakespeare‘s tragedy with the Verdi opera, Schroeter's Macbeth is a fascinating television experiment shot entirely in a studio with several electronic cameras. As Schroeter would recall, "I arranged the Verdi music for a quartet of violin, accordion, piano and oboe, but modeled the rhythms on Argentinian tangos and boleros. The actors sang with horrifying, shrill voices.... The use of video allowed me to produce extraordinary colors.... Of all my films, Macbeth was most unwelcome: Audiences don’t like their Shakespeare to be presented in this way, but I do not differentiate between kitsch and culture...". - MoMA