DC's

______________
Wade Marynowsky Black Casino (2013)
‘Black Casino involves five flying V guitars mounted atop a rotating spin wheel as used in popular game shows such as ‘The Wheel of Fortune’. The guitars form a five-pointed star – a pentagram, which conjures certain magical associations and is used today as a symbol of faith by many Wiccans and Neo-pagans. This pentagram, however, depicts Diabolus in musica: the ‘tri-tone’ musical interval that has been used since the sixtenth century as the signature of the Devil – an association exploited by many heavy metal bands.’

 

_______________
Torbjorn Rodland Infernus (2001)

 

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Alexander Binder Traum (2017)

 

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Jan Hakon Erichsen Obvious Art Work nr.12, Black Metal Art (2010)

 

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Bjarne Melgaard Kill Me Before I Do It Myself (2001)
‘For the uninitiated, Frost engages in a performance piece composed with Bjarne Melgaard that they call, “Kill Me Before I Do it Myself.” In a profoundly angry display, Frost, mere inches from the audience, engages in aggressive torching of the set, destructive stabbing of furniture and outright overt blasphemy. As viewers watch burning embers rapidly descend from the exhibit’s structure and experience Frost destroying a multitude of items, they have only seconds to prepare to watch as Frost uses a menacingly long knife to slit his arm vertically from wrist to elbow. He then follows suit on his neck. The audience, clearly in shock, is not entirely sure if they are witnessing an actual suicide and they stand in silence as Frost reclines down, eyes open, with blood oozing out of multiple sites in his body.’

 

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Harmony Korine The Sigil of the Cloven Hoof Marks Thy Path (2000)
‘Harmony did a show where he photocopied a bunch of pictures from Lords of Chaos, and blew up pictures of Fenriz and hung them on a wall in a gallery! He put a picture of Varg up there too, and this is in some bullshit gallery in Santa Monica, what do others think about him? Is he ripping off BM culture, does anyone care? I don’t but this show is funny, a bunch of pictures of Fenriz and some national socialist looking runic art, stuff that has been on Black Metal album covers for ages, put up in a gallery under his name.’

 

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Mickaël Sellam Black Metal Forever (2010)
‘Equipped with sound sensors that amplify the noises it makes while moving, the machine becomes a massive and worrying musical instrument that plays in a dramatic atmosphere. From the top of the picker, the operator directs and synchronizes the movements of the machine so as to produce a spectacular and wild soundscape, a mechanical black mass.’

 

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Joachim Hamou J’ai Froid (2014)
‘Tapping into the unrest and general neoliberalisation of the Scandinavian welfare-states, a new generation of artists’ interest in anarchistic expressionism and Black Metal has emerged. Their interest in this subculture lies perhaps in the promise of an oppositional position and the potential for expressing angst, distress and feelings of being overwhelmed.’

 

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Nader Sadek Re:Mechanic (2014)
‘Since 2009, conceptual artist Nader Sadek has been directing and producing an epic undertaking. The first phase of this project was the album In the Flesh released in 2011 (the band, a Death Metal supergroup brought together by Nader), the second phase involves videos based on the album’s tracks, and the final phase is a type of Metal opera—a magnum opus, if you will—which promises to be a spectacular fusion of art and music including sculptures, installations, and performances. Born in Cairo, Nader draws upon his direct experience with the use of Metal and art as a form of political protest, which he has written about here. He is currently based in New York City and has established an international reputation in the Metal community for his artistic collaborations with Attila Csihar, which have produced costumes and stage designs.’

 

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Juan Pablo Macías BSR Complete Stock #1 (Ratas – Zona roja) (2017)
‘Juan Pablo Macías devotes part of his work to the restoration of the Biblioteca Social Reconstruir (BSR), a libertarian and anarchist library founded in 1978 in Mexico City and now dismantled. For the sound installation BSR Complete Stock #1 (Ratas – Zona roja), shown in the exhibition Altars of Madness, he invited Mexican metal bands to record their music.’

 

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Nancy Pagan Animation Sons of Northern Darkness, Ep. 1 (2015)
‘In the fall of 1995, Black Metal band, ‘Immortal’, set out to make a string of music videos for their upcoming album. With little to no-budget, they walked into the woods outside their hometown of Bergen, Norway, never to be seen again. This is their story. Featuring King Diamond!’

 

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Vincent Como Paradise Lost 001 – 004 (2011)
Oil on Linen with Wood, Wax, and Fire

 

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Terence Hannum Further Desecrations (2017)
‘I think a lot of my friends and the initial people who turned me on to death metal were incredibly intelligent people who a lot of society had really written off. They had intelligence about books or electronics, or records, just this depth that I didn’t know. I know I am romanticizing it a bit, but I pulled a lot from my friends who I grew up with who were super smart but somehow got written off in school or by their families.’ — TH

 

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Per-Oskar Leu Vox Clamantis in Deserto (2010)
‘Vox Clamantis in Deserto (“The voice of one crying in the wilderness”) shows Per-Oskar Leu performing the aria Vesti la Giubba (“put on the costume”) from the opera Pagliacci (Ruggero Leoncavallo, 1892) in Black Metal attire.’

 

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Banks Violette Various (2008)
‘Death metal, ritual murder, and teenage suicide are mere starting points for Banks Violette; his gothic installations construct operatic analyses of the dark side of American culture. In works such as Black Hole, Violette aptly portrays this phenomenon of excess. Heavy-metal aesthetics become a mirror of youth culture anxiety, an adopted language compensating and empowering sensations of immense sorrow and despair. Citing examples where musical lyrics become instigating factors to real-life violence, Violette refers to an over-identification with fiction where artistic expression exceeds critical confinement, and fantasy and reality are blurred.’

 

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Tereza Zelenkova Various (2016 – 2019)

 

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João Onofre Box sized DIE featuring Sacred Sin (2007-2008)
‘Box sized Die featuring No Return, 2007-2011 is both a sculpture and a performance. It consists of a black metal cube with sides measuring 183 cm. Making a direct reference to the minimal sculpture work by Tony Smith, and in particular his piece Die, João Onofre explores the potential of this black box by getting a Death Metal band to play inside it. Activated, the work offers an invisible show contained in a closed space. Only the residues of the sound vibrations attest to the inner power. The length of the performance is variable since the musicians are putting their physical limits to the test in experiencing imprisonment and asphyxia.’

 

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Erik Smith Perfect is My Death Word (2007)
‘Perfect is My Death Word is a recreation of the James Lee Byars sound work of the same name. The original work was produced by Byars and the Neues Museum Weserberg Bremen in 1995 and exists as an edition on CD of twenty minutes of silence followed by Byars saying the sentence “Perfect is my death word.” Smith asked Dutch Black Metal band Sammath to recreate the sound work by adhering to the twenty minutes of “silence” format before launching into one of their original songs with Byars’ sentence as chorus. Sammath performed Perfect is My Death Word at the De Appel Contemporary Art Centre in Amsterdam on February 16, 2007 for the opening of Smith’s exhibition The Ghost of James Lee Byars Calling.’

 

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Seldon Hunt Various (2014 – 2019)

 

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Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert
‘Over the past few years, Luxembourg duet Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet have developed a multifaceted body of work at the crossroads of several media (video, photography, sound, etc.) and disciplines (visual arts, music, dance). In Metamorphic Earth, immense video projection and complex sound constructions plunge the spectator in a bewitching universe where he loses his physical marks and where fascination clashes with anxiety.’

Toward the Event Horizon (2011)

Tempestarii Video (2016)

Metamorphic Earth (2017)

 

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Analogue Black Terror (2019)
‘Between the late ’80s and 2000, a fringe of the extreme heavy metal youth culture decided to secede from the contemporary scenes to express their deep disgust and hostility towards organized religions, democracies, human rights, the modern world, and humankind in general. Driven by hatred, misanthropy, and Satanism, fueled by juvenile passion, and with very limited means, they produced myriads of homemade black metal recordings which left no room whatsoever for tolerance, mercy, or any kind of positive energy. Some were spoiled brats in search of a reason to rebel; some were convicted murderers, arsonists, grave desecrators, or rapist;, others were merely incredibly talented artists with a sincere will to put their work into the service of a greater evil.

‘Little consideration was given to sophisticated production, and given how much money was available in the scene, fancy options were not on the table anyway. Home-xeroxed duplicated tapes were spread hand-to-hand within local scenes, or worldwide, via snail mail, among a network of individuals all gathered around one idea: to remain an elite that stood alone against the modern world and prayed for its annihilation. A lot of them disappeared, a chosen few became legends… The author has an opinion of what happened to these bands since 2000, stating: “…before falling into disgrace to represent the embarrassing circus that black metal mostly stands for a quarter of century later.” Take that for what you will, there are definitely “cvlt” fans that want to return to the unrefined, raw sounds of the past, while others enjoy the progression. Either way, this book looks to be an incredible visual guide to history that is black metal.’

 

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Pavel Lyakhov
‘My favorite art subject: Sadness; latest autumn, winter, etc.; depressive music; ruins; abandoned places, etc. – such things inspire me to create my art. I get inspiration in my expeditions to Russian North, where I see snow-capped mountain sceneries. Survival in severe weather conditions gives me Inspiration for my art. My artwork is my world – it is frozen, cold world. And I feel comfortable in it.’ — PL

Живопись. Художник Павел Ляхов. Работа в мастерской

🎨🎨🎨 Shadows of the Past. Vol-V. BlackMetal version

 

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Death Orgone Various (2017)

 

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Konrad Smolenski One Mind in a Million Heads (2015)
‘Konrad Smoleński describes his work as a mix of “spectacular pyrotechnic effects” and “minimal punk aesthetic.” Smoleński’s works frequently have an audio component, which might take the form of noise, music, or noise music. Speakers and microphones are also frequent motifs in his installations, appearing in overwhelming configurations and quantities, often alongside combustible materials and flames. The artist has an openly anarchic disposition, which manifests in the works as a sense of anxiety, disorientation, and awe.’

 

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Grace Ahlbom Various (2018)
‘I don’t really listen to black metal, but I don’t think that’s the point. It’s more just about the fan culture and the overall––the props, the makeup, the whole theatrical performance behind it is what I’m interested in.’

 

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Aaron Metté On the Black Universe in the Human Foundations of Color (2017)
Text: François Laruelle

 

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Peter Beste True Norwegian Black Metal (2007)
‘In 2002, New York-based photographer Peter Beste packed up a bag of belongings and a camera and flew out to Norway with the idea of documenting the country’s most notorious export, Black Metal. Six years and seven trips later, his resulting film and book, True Norwegian Black Metal, hits the airwaves and shelves. While some of Beste’s photos take the classically ’grimm’ route, others gently pry behind the mask, capturing the likes of Gorgoroth, Carpathian Forest, and Darkthrone in more natural surroundings. Intimate, almost conspiratorial, they give the impression of being welcomed into a lair.’

Watch it here

Book version

 

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Grant Willing Svart Metall (2008 – 2011)
‘Grant Willing’s ongoing photographic series Svart Metall is a meditation on the ineffable qualities of an unsubtle musical subculture, Black Metal. Though its sonic qualities are challenging even for some metalheads, its Nordic atmospherics and paganistic themes are arguably evocative for a diverse range of artists. The photographs are allusive of the themes black metal culture treats, and presented in a surprisingly informal way—printed on bleached newsprint stock. On this ephemeral paper, the photographs retain a stately quality but gain a more disorienting sense.’

 

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Ben Lee Ritchie Handler & Mike Z Morrell Crystalnacht Watersports Grimoire (2016)

 

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Russell Nachman Various (2012 – 2917)
‘I like having big ideas and weird mysterious stuff in the universe. This is kind of a longing for that. Like maybe in a post-religious society after everything has collapsed, these drunken idiots just pick up all sorts of detritus from Western civilization and remake it in their own image. So I never think of this, even though theyʼre black metal guys with tattoos of upside-down crosses and all that, itʼs never anti-Christian for me. Itʼs kind of like a post-Christian homage.’ — RN

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Oh, that does sound amazing. I’m almost solvent again, so I think that’ll be my way back into my recently dormant gaming habit. Something else to live for. Thanks, pal. ** _Black_Acrylic, His stuff is mostly quite entertaining and very German. ** kenley, Yeah, I know, sorry for the to-do pile up, but I’m similarly beset over here if that helps. Skipping a party to watch Rohmer! You are my soul mate. Not to mention the sushi. One of the few drawbacks to Paris life is that it’s almost impossible to find good vegan sushi. No, haha, Diller and Pryor were separate events. Hm, pleasurable lately, almost anything that doesn’t have to do with my visa shit and my financial precariousness shit. Which doesn’t leave a lot. I think my pleasure is mostly anticipatory. There’s a Leonora Carrington retrospective and a big Georges Perec exhibition and even a possibly fun looking new haunted house attraction, so I think I’ll be okay. I like ‘Chilly Scenes of Winter’ for sure, but I don’t think that I’ve been as high on the other Ann Beattie I’ve read. Recommendation? Cool that you’re writing. Song lyric <-> novel. ** Steeqhen, I loved ‘Resident Evil 8’. The future always finds a way to slip through the obstacle course. At least during my lengthy-ish stint on earth. ** Carsten, I’ll start with the Southern curve, which makes sense. Thanks for the review of the Jarmusch. You’re the first flesh and blood person I know who’s seen it. I guess I won’t rush, but I’ll get to it. I actually liked ‘Broken Flowers’, but I really like Bill Murray when he’s committed to a role. ** Steve, Thanks for the Nirvanna’ fill in. Now I understand. Matt Johnson, right. Sounds maybe kind of missable, but that’s not my thing. But still. Of course I don’t know if the bug chasers are real. Some of them certainly seem to be. You can go check out one of the big sites where the poz guys hangout and pontificate and hook up and where Prep is treated like the enemy if you like — breedingzone — and see what you think. Everyone, Steve’s ‘overview of “Rendezvous with French Cinema,” covering four films, is out now.’ I don’t know the answer to your question, but … Everyone, one more thing, a question from Steve to any of you: ‘Every version of Anna’s Archive I know about is down right now. Does anyone know a link which still works?’ ** Charalampos, Glad the blog’s zeitgeist colluded with yours. I don’t know where David’s title originated. In the US when you’re going to see a film or any show later in the evening you say, ‘I’m going to the late show’, so I guess I assumed it came from that? Hi from P. ** HaRpEr //, Same here. To me Sunday’s just the day when a lot of stores and tabacs are closed. Nice about the ‘Castration Movie’ premiere. None of the ‘CM’s have played here yet, I don’t know why. I hope you can shake the doldrums off this week and hopefully early into it. Did I see ‘The Dirties’? I saw something of his whose title escapes me. ** darbbzz⋆｡°⋆❅*𖢔𐂂☃︎꙳, Nice audio visual combo. I was awake at 6:30 am, and I don’t think the moon was red, so maybe Paris got shut out. I’m obviously glad that the explosion has passed. Prosaic thoughts can be such a bitch. ** ANGUSRAZE, Hi! Sure, yes, great. Just hit me up when the time is right. I haven’t seen that video yet cos I’ve been in a life mess moment, but I’ll try to catch up with it today. Love from moi. ** Thom, Yay about the gig. Being a lofi guy, sloppy just sounds like an interesting texture. Major luck gathering everything you want and even need. Enjoyable day back to you. ** Nicholas., War will definitely do that. Or this one at least. When I imagine the world ending, I just imagine no more internet or cell phone signal. That’s as far as I can perceive. Which is plenty harsh enough. You certainly can still write. Put that worry to bed. Excellent ghosting there, whew. ** nat, As someone who forces a solid text blog on my blog readers every day, I should be able to handle it as a reader. I buy stuff from Asterism all the time, and I haven’t noticed an uptick in my toxic spam yet. I’m awfully glad you feel better! ** Okay. I seem to have decided on a whim to turn my previous Black Metals post into a franchise. See you tomorrow.

* (restored/expanded)
—-

 

‘Like his contemporaries Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, the late Werner Schroeter was one of the New German Cinema’s seminal figures, if far more marginal in terms of recognition. He started out as an underground filmmaker in 1967 before making a critical impact on the international festival circuit and winning a devoted cult following. His films, shot through with a predilection for operatic excess and artifice, defy categorization, and are infuriatingly obscure for some and entrancingly poetic for others. His cinema occupies a transitional space between avant-garde and art cinema, neither quite narrative nor quite abstract. In the second half of the Eighties he became widely known as a theater and opera director, staging a range of hyperstylized productions in Germany and abroad that outstripped even his films in their ability to provoke both intense admiration and hostility. His flamboyance and reputation for refusing to compromise with the mainstream attracted outstanding talents willing to work for little or no money, some of whom became his regular collaborators. Foremost among the performers was Magdalena Montezuma, the splendid German underground star and Schroeter’s muse until her death in 1985. Subsequently French stars such as Bulle Ogier, Carole Bouquet, and Isabelle Huppert gave him an additional art-house aura. Throughout his career and thanks to major retrospectives, including events in London, Paris, and Rome, Schroeter’s films kept garnering new, if select, audiences.

‘Schroeter’s stylized, performance-centered aesthetic draws on opera, pop music, stage melodrama, contemporary dance theater, and cabaret. His films consist of overt allegories and fables driven by the Romantic impulse, distilling moments of desire, loss, and death in all-consuming emotion. The central figure in Schroeter’s films is always the outsider—the mad person, the foreigner—and his major theme is ineffable longing for passionate love and artistic creativity. Although Schroeter was gay, homosexuality is rarely an explicit topic, though arguably the female protagonists who are foregrounded in his films become vessels for the displaced expression of gay subjectivity. Visually the characters are framed in sumptuous tableau compositions underscored by a highly manipulated post-synchronized soundtrack. Music is crucial to all of Schroeter’s films but more for the content than for the mood: it offers commentary and counterpoint, and one of his major strategies was the juxtaposition of classical and popular music. For example, he often puts the opera diva Maria Callas side by side with Caterina Valente, the German popular singer, blurring the hierarchical distinction between high and low culture, art and kitsch.

‘After attending the 4th experi-mental Film Festival at Knokke, Belgium, in 1967, the 22-year-old Schroeter started to make his first 8mm films, most notably Maria Callas Portrait (68), in which he animated stills of Maria Callas and overlaid them with a soundtrack of her singing. The figure of the diva, personified and immortalized by the voice and fate of Callas, became for Schroeter the embodiment of artistic creativity and intensity in his quest for the representation of emotions. In these early nonnarrative films, images, music, and sound are not synchronized; and their live performers mime to the lyrics or spoken words on the soundtrack in an exaggerated fashion.

‘Eika Katappa (69), a radical 147-minute camp appropriation of opera, is arguably as spectacular as a Hollywood epic and features more musical climaxes than even a 19th-century Italian bel canto opera. Schroeter paraphrases the climaxes from such operas as Puccini’s Tosca and Verdi’s La Traviata, alongside pop songs and orchestral music. The various episodes are driven mainly by the lyrics and sometimes by tableaux such as St. Sebastian’s ecstatic death. The film exemplifies the tendency in Schroeter’s early period toward incorporating explicitly dilettantish performances of the Western cultural repertoire, staging them in makeshift sets, and linking scenes through complex montage (for example, there is a kaleidoscopic replaying of previous scenes from the film in the final section).

‘Eika Katappa, which was self-financed, won the Josef von Sternberg prize (for “the most idiosyncratic film”) at the 1969 Mannheim Film Festival and enabled Schroeter to break into television. Ironically, his “total cinema” films, which work more through spectacle than narrative, were almost exclusively produced by Das kleine Fernsehspiel (“The Little Television Play”), a small experimental department of the German public-service station ZDF. During this period, Das kleine Fernsehspiel supported some of Schroeter’s highly controversial projects, beginning with The Bomber Pilot (70), a grotesque parody of Fascist revue shows, which was probably the first German film to engage with the “cultural myth” of Nazism. Similarly, Salome (71), Macbeth (71), and Goldflocken (Flocons d’or, 76) provoked strong and contradictory reactions: critic Eckhard Schmidt called Schroeter “one of the most talented young filmmakers,” while others dismissed his films as trivial ritualistic exercises in appropriation.

‘Sublime and bizarre, The Death of Maria Malibran (71) is considered by many, including Michel Foucault and Schroeter himself, to be one of his best films, but it’s also one of the most difficult. The tragic life of the eponymous 19th-century opera diva is merely a starting point for a dense network of references and allusions centered around the idea that artistic perfection is only attainable in death. The fragmentary and opaque narrative is conveyed through the intense stylization of gestures, poses, tableaux, and music. Malibran’s life is condensed into metaphorical and imaginary situations that reflect on an artist’s existence beyond the boundaries of a historical reality and gender identity. The life, or rather the death, of the singer is audiovisually refracted through prerecorded operatic arias, pop songs, literary citations, and romantic platitudes (ranging from Goethe and Lautréamont to Elvis Presley). Highlights include the passionate suicide of two female lovers, pastoral musical interludes, and performances expressing ineffable longing, despair, and madness.

‘With Kingdom of Naples (78) Schroeter shifted toward more plot-driven art cinema, maintaining his hallmarks of pathos and melodrama but with more obvious narrative and political intent. Schroeter commented about this change “that it is much more radical to play with the content than with the aesthetics of the image. The era of independence is over. Our society has not fulfilled the promises hoped for around ’68-’70.” Greeted with an unaccustomed consensus of critical acclaim, Kingdom won many prizes in Germany and internationally, and became his first commercial release. Shot on location by Aguirre, Wrath of God DP Thomas Mauch with several nonprofessional actors and using local dialects, the film is reminiscent of Italian neorealism in its approach, and on first viewing, its chronicle of a poor Neapolitan family and their community, spanning between 1944 to 1977, appears to be grounded in conventional melodrama. Yet it is highly stylized and constructed in the manner of a 19th-century serial opera with music being used not only for its emotional power but as a form of critical commentary.

‘Schroeter was a great globe-trotter who took advantage of invitations to film festivals or Goethe Institut presentations of his work to make films. Many who regarded him as a maker of fantastic fables were surprised at the politically hard-hitting if still associative and nonlinear documentaries that resulted. Smiling Star (83) is an extraordinary collage documentary on Marcos’s corrupt regime in the Philippines, shot clandestinely while Schroeter was a guest of the Manila International Film Festival, while For Example, Argentina (83-85) is a denunciation of Galtieri’s military dictatorship: “First we kill the subversive elements, then the sympathizers, then their henchmen, and last of all the weak.”

‘Schroeter’s gay sensibility is expressed as an aesthetic that could be described as high camp, since he insists on a Romantic and operatic vision of homosexuality. In The Rose King (86), an excessive and entrancing hallucinatory fable of perfect but doomed love, and his most explicitly gay film, the symbol of the rose is employed to signify love, passion, and perfection at the moment of death. The titular Rose King merges the ideal of the perfect rose with the body of his lover and at the sexually climatic moment grafts multiple roses onto him. This visceral scene of ecstatic mutilation, heightened by the rhythm of a Viennese waltz, is intercut with shots of fire, ink, water, and the sea washing over a nude male body. The juxtaposition of images and sounds is as horrific as it is beautiful.

‘After his theater and opera productions in the late Eighties Schroeter returned to filmmaking in 1990 with Malina, a relatively high-budget literary adaptation based on Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 novel. Scripted by Elfriede Jelinek, and featuring an original avant-garde score by Giacomo Manzoni, it stars Isabelle Huppert as an unnamed female writer caught between passion and creativity, and between her platonic love for the rational Malina (Mathieu Carrière) and her consuming desire for the sensual Ivan (Can Togay). This is represented not as a conventional ménage à trois but rather as a visual and sonic staging of (literally) burning passion and glacial voids that lead to the disintegration of the writer’s identity. On a psychoanalytic level Ivan is a projection of a desire for absolute erotic love, while Malina represents the rational male alter-ego that clashes with the female emotional ego and finally obliterates the female identity—suggesting that it is only possible to be a writer at the expense of femininity and desire. Huppert’s tour-de-force performance of exaltation and self-destructive despair is familiar from Schroeter’s repertoire, and so is the film’s nonlinear narrative with its operatic climaxes—albeit now psychologically motivated as nightmares and hallucinations. With its musical cadences and its mise en scène of ornate mirrors and consuming fires, Schroeter’s Malina transforms Bachman’s literary text into an idiosyncratic spectacle and aural feast. Despite receiving mixed reviews in Germany, the film won the German Film Award in Gold, but internationally this sumptuous but difficult film was considered too obscure to win much acclaim.

‘With Love’s Debris (Poussières d’amour, 96) Schroeter re-engaged with the cult of the diva—this time employing living, breathing, but aging opera divas. He invited a few of his favorite opera singers, young and old, to a 13th-century French abbey, in an effort to understand what gave rise to the emotional intensity in their vocal performance. The most affecting scene centers on the 65-year-old diva Anita Cerquetti, who gave up singing upon losing her voice at the height of her career, when she was barely 30 years old. We watch Cerquetti listening and lip-synching to an old recording of her sublime vocal performance of “Casta Diva” (“Chaste Diva”) from Bellini’s Norma. This apparent sonic synchronization becomes a hauntingly nostalgic experience through the accompanying visual mismatch: the aging body cannot anchor the youthful operatic voice. The fleeting restoration of Cerquetti’s full, rich voice is followed by her recognition of its irrecoverable loss. It is a moment of great poignancy.

‘Schroeter’s penultimate film, Deux (02), was written for Huppert, and she provides another virtuoso performance playing contrasting twin sisters, separated at birth and unaware of each other’s existence. This surreal fantasy, with its dreamlike associative editing, literary citations from the Comte de Lautréamont’s 1869 verse novel Les Chants de Maldoror, gay iconography, and periodic arias is reminiscent of the director’s earlier episodic films. In its engagement with the myth of Narcissus and the German Romantic concept of the doppelgänger, Schroeter claims that the film contains autobiographical episodes that transfigure his own memories and dreams into art. The film premiered at Cannes where it received some praise, but failed to find a German distributor. Although at the core extremely subjective, Deux also contains references to European art history and literature, and this balancing act, while doubtless intriguing for dedicated Schroeter followers, is likely too opaque for the uninitiated.

‘Schroeter’s swan song, Tonight (Nuit de chien, 08) was shot nocturnally on location in Porto (Portugal) while the filmmaker was enduring the debilitating effects of cancer. It is a dystopian fable about the failure of a revolution and a darkly luminous nighttime odyssey across a port city and its brutalized inhabitants. Christiane Peitz’s obituary of Schroeter describes the film as “a long journey into darkness, a hymn to life in the face of brutality and terror.” And Schroeter explained in his own posthumously published autobiography: “All my films, including Tonight, bear witness to my quest for a form that communicates vitality, the pleasure of creativity and beauty, which is a gift of our profession. In beauty, in recognition of beauty resides a hope—malgré tout, despite all. It expresses a hope even though the theme of the film deals with the darkest night aspects of existence . . . Without pain and a quest for truth there is no beauty.”

‘The nature of Schroeter’s lifelong quest is eloquently explored in the lyrical and elegiac 2011 documentary Mondo Lux: The Visual Worlds of Werner Schroeter by Elfi Mikesch, Schroeter’s close friend and collaborator. But a much earlier tribute was paid in 1979 by his friend and rival Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who welcomed the art-house release of Kingdom of Naples as Schroeter’s emergence from the underground. Fassbinder graciously acknowledged Schroeter’s decisive influence on himself and other German filmmakers, and suggested that the director’s very underground exoticism had kept him at the margins of film culture. Perhaps this continued detachment from the commercial mainstream makes Schroeter’s films that much more precious.’ — Ulrike Sieglohr

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Werner Schroeter Official Website
Video: ‘Werner Schroeter, l’inédit’ @ Arte
‘Gifts After Death: Werner Schroeter’s Photos’
Conversation entre Michel Foucault et Werner Schroeter
Werner Schroeter @ Senses of Cinema
Olaf Moller ‘But Farewell: Werner Schroeter’ @ Cinemascope
Gary Indiana on Werner Schroeter
DVD: ‘Werner Schroeter Collection’

 

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Extras

Young Werner Schroeter filmed by Fassbinder

Werner Schroeter speaks @ Venice Film Festival, 2008

In person: Werner Schroeter

 

_________
Interview
from Kulturchronik Magazine

 

You like the philosophy of Michael Foucault, don’t you?

Werner Schroeter: Yes, I find him highly intelligent, and one could devote a life just to his work. Around 1973 when two of my films were shown in France, THE DEATH OF MARIA MALIBRAN and WILLOW SPRING, about which Foucault wrote an article in a film magazine, I came across his books for the first time and his definition of the vital differences between love and suffering particularly pleased me. I read him and was impressed by how close he came to my feelings on the philosophical level.

What role does France play for you?

WS: After initial difficulties I find interesting the contrast between life and art and the way in which the French live.

You also love Italy and Mexico City.

WS: Yes, I was always attracted by the harsh contrast, here the North and there the South. I yearned for Italy because it was there that I first really fell in love. Then came the passion for opera. Verdi’s BALLO IN MASCHERA constitutes an opposite to Wagner’s TRISTAN which consists of an abundance of subtleties and superimpositions. The one is as beautiful as the other, but during my youth I felt much more attracted to this linear Latin music.

And Mexico City?

WS: There I felt very much at ease. Such wellbeing is important for my creativity since I’m not a masochist in that respect. It was the people there who filled me with life. I once said on Mexican television that I feel myself to be a European. From Mexico City Paris is just around a corner but Los Angeles is a whole world away. I think Mexicans wonderful with their clear-cut passion and sensuous lives, coupled with Prussian discipline.

You make no secret of your homosexuality. Do you comprehend your gayness as a chance to make less conventional art?

WS: Certainly that is one advantage, provided that one has the necessary personal constitution and has the wish and the will for such expression. The unconventional way is certainly more fruitful than what is already laid down. Baudelaire already asked, why do something in a straight line if you can do it crookedly. More happens. That’s obvious since one must be ready for much more resistance. One also operates out of much greater internal friction. That’s certainly the case with all outsiders. However for someone who cannot really express themselves or has no chance of putting it to creative use, that can certainly be a great problem because he allows himself to be intimidated. But I certainly don’t feel myself to be an outsider since I’m always integrated in more extended social contexts.

Did you experience something like a coming out?

WS: Homosexuality was never a concern in my family, and there was a time when I alternated girl and boy friends, whereby the erotic ties with the boys were greater than with the girls – and I also slept with them. My father, who liked most of my friends both male and female, was convinced by the human rather than the sexual qualities. That was quite normal. I turned up with a boy friend and that was that. On this level I couldn’t be forbidden anything. I was calm and gentle and quiet but had a certain strength involving a kind of non-violent authority. In addition my mother was a loveable and loving woman, full of faults like everyone else. She struggled greatly for her children’s love. My father was an exceptionally liberal man whose tolerance seemed almost indifference when I was a child. Only years later did I discover that this was his form of social acceptance. As far as influence and behaviour are concerned, I believe that we are much more influenced by the family than by whether we are gay or not.

You had a special relationship with your grandmother, didn’t you?

WS: My Polish grandmother was a dynamo of imagination who shared her fantastic world. In 1951, shortly after the war when I was five, we lived in a rapidly developed workers settlement outside Bielefeld. Everything I could see outside was so alien to my sensibility that my grandmother and her dreams became my world. She, who had neither experienced repression nor practiced it, translated everything into fantasy. I still remember very well how she once suddenly transformed the rails used by Bielefeld’s trams into an Indian trail. A chair became a palace and a flower pot a jungle. This freedom in dealing with things captivated me, and there was a place for us in strange daydream reality.

For her a sense of reality was completely present in a vital irony. With her fantastic dreamworld she prepared us for a life of resistance. After all imagination is resistance and the only thing that can turn upside down the unbearability of reality. Without it there would be no revolution, which involves not only mass dynamics but also the development of fantasy regarding something so as to surmount it. With her kind of flight from the world my grandmother created a new reality which could take place everywhere. That is certainly the source of my freedom vis-à-vis what people nowadays call realistic depiction or naturalism. For me it goes without saying that with determination and imagination mountains –imaginary ones of course—can be moved.

What themes initially attracted you as a maker of films and theatre?

WS: Initially the mystery of woman in society and my great closeness to women on the level of friendship. During my short marriage I also sussed out the identificatory aspect. I am interested in women in art as sensitive beings, even a membrane, since women have a great talent for self-mastery. Then something shifted and a larger context was established.

You make no secret of your homosexuality. Do you comprehend your gayness as a chance to make less conventional art?

WS: Certainly that is one advantage, provided that one has the necessary personal constitution and has the wish and the will for such expression. The unconventional way is certainly more fruitful than what is already laid down. Baudelaire already asked, why do something in a straight line if you can do it crookedly. More happens. That’s obvious since one must be ready for much more resistance. One also operates out of much greater internal friction. That’s certainly the case with all outsiders. However for someone who cannot really express themselves or has no chance of putting it to creative use, that can certainly be a great problem because he allows himself to be intimidated. But I certainly don’t feel myself to be an outsider since I’m always integrated in more extended social contexts.

Your productions seem wonderfully connected with your vital force and that of the actors involved. They work on the basis of improvisation, demanding that the actor relies on him or herself.

WS: That’s impossible without the intuition. Theatre is community work where I am the originator and director of the performance. The actor must provide at least as much creativity as me. In order to get things moving I come with a very strict concept even though I know from experience that it will be thrown overboard after some days of rehearsal. So I gradually give up this concept because what is involved in the encounter with the actors leads it to pale into insignificance. But things don’t work completely without a concept. You must allow yourself the freedom to abandon what you thought up. Only then does there come into being something that is more vital than the preconceived idea. Basically I offer my ideas as motivation. However at the end of this process the original basic idea is redeemed in a more beautiful, advanced, and essential form than it would have been in working according to routine. I must accept the play I have chosen with all its weaknesses and other characteristics. What matters is to find a way of doing justice to it.

Underlying what you do is curiosity about something completely other.

WS: Yes, since I know anyway what I want. If I were only to force my will onto another person and press him into my form, allowing everything to cool down, it would be completely dead. Only a few forms of theatre really touch me. For instance the theatre made by Tadeusz Kantor, who unfortunately died some years ago. This man, who worked on productions for two years, certainly utilized a similar work process. Only he went much farther than me. He worked until an organic experience had occurred between the actors.

 

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14 of Werner Schroeter’s 41 films

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Neurasia (1968)
‘NEURASIA is a silent movie with Carla Aulaulu and Magdalena Montezuma in the leading roles. “NEURASIA is a paradise of furious gestures. A Luna Park of emotions. On a black-gray stage-image-surface, infinitely repeatable particles of musical and melodramatic exaltations, extremely retarded gestures of adoration, love, despair, religion, insanity, and death are enacted.'” — Sebastian Feldmann

the entirety

 

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Maria Callas Porträt (1968)
‘Animated stills of Maria Callas and overlaid with a soundtrack of her singing.’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Eika Katappa (1969)
‘Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music – with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.’ — Letterboxd

Watch the film here

 

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Salome (1971)
‘Schroeter’s film Salome, 1971, is one of the most beautiful adaptations of the text to film ever made. Filmed at the ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, the decadent carnality of Gustave Moreau’s painting Salome is recalled in the jeweled costumes of Herod and Herodias, in the somnolent pallor of Salome’s face, in Magdalena Montezuma’s androgynous performance as Herod. Pans and zooms within long sequences, invisible cutting, Oscar Wilde’s hypnotic text, and a densely packed sound track form a seething tapestry of contradictory cues and visual blandishments.’ — Gary Indiana

Watch the film here

 

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Der Tod Der Maria Malibran (1972)
‘Werner Schroeter’s hyper-melodramatic films tend to provoke either intense admiration or outraged hostility. He is one of the most controversial filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema. Der Tod der Maria Malibran , sublime and bizarre, is considered by many (including Michel Foucault and Schroeter himself) to be one of his best films, but it is also the most difficult. The historical figure of the singer Maria Malibran provides merely a starting point for a dense network of references and allusions encompassing Goethe, Lautréamont, Elvis Presley, and Janis Joplin.’ — film reference

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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Willow Springs (1973)
‘This is the only film which Werner Schroeter has shot in the United States. The scene is a lonely, dilapidated house with a bar on the edge of the Mojave desert; the house, like the place in which it is located, is called “Willow Springs”. The three Amazons sit in their lair, waiting for men to rob, love, and kill. But in this “feminist” counter-world, “male” power structures continue to function: the “master thinker” and priestess Magdalena (Montezuma) dominates the ethereal Christine (Kaufmann), who, in love with herself, is the sterile embodiment of an art grown unsensual. At the very bottom of the hierarchy is Ila (von Hasberg), the maid who says next to nothing. She not only finds sexual contact with the stranger Michael (O’Daniels), but also love. The two contrive to flee, but the murderous Magdalena kills them. “Art” also kills herself, before she goes out into the desert as the Black Angel, the title of Schroeter’s next film, which was made in Mexico in 1973/74.’ — Filmmuseum

the entirety

 

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Regno di Napoli (1978)
‘A brother and sister, both of whom grew up in the slums of Naples, communicate with one another periodically over the years from 1944 to 1976 as they go their separate ways. Through flashbacks, and as they grow reacquainted during their meetings, the story of each is told. The girl struggles to study her way out of poverty, learns English well enough to become an airline stewardess, and discovers the limitations of her success. The boy joins the communist party early on, ardently serving as another body in the movement on the picket lines and at demonstrations. Despite his dedication, the best job the party can deliver to him is a menial one, and he too feels betrayed.’ — Ken Pasternak, FilmStudies

Watch the film here

 

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Die Generalprobe (1980)
‘An exhilarating, essayistic documentary about the 1980 festival of experimental theatre in the French city of Nancy. Werner Schroeter’s favourite of his own films. With Pina Bausch, Reinhold Hoffman, Pat Oleszko.’ — letterboxd

Excerpt

Excerpts

 

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Palermo or Wolfsburg (1980)
‘A french critic wrote that Schroeter was a great kept secret for cinephiles and it is true. Here you find clear traces of Pasolini and Fassbinder but the style is personal and never imitates. Schroeter also used to stage operas and you can see in the process how his baroque mannerism works – little touches of unexpected. In “Palermo oder Wolfsburg”, you never know what´s coming in the next shot and i love it.’ — Bilouaustria

the entirety

 

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Der Tag Idioten (1982)
‘In this non-story of the mentally and emotionally impaired inhabitants of a clinic for the insane, the medical profession along with humanity is distorted into a long, filmic exhibition of sado-masochism, urination, and ample nudity for its own sake. Critics that support the avant-garde might feel that the lack of apparent purpose in each “idiot’s” (the title is “Day of the Idiots’) physical and emotional problems is a form of high art. The viewers will have to decide for themselves.’ — Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Watch the film here

 

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Der Rosenkonig (1986)
‘Schroeter’s gay sensibility is expressed as an aesthetic approach that could be described as “high camp.” His conception has frequently been compared to and contrasted with (not always favourably) Rosa von Praunheim’s much more militant stance. Schroeter insists on the romantic version of homosexuality. In most of his films we get the gay historical subtext, rather than thematic treatment. Der Rosenkönig , an excessive and entrancing hallucinatory fable of oedipal and homosexual passion, is his most explicit gay film.’ — Ulrike Sieglohr

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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Malina (1990)
‘In this movie, a woman is going mad, literally, with frustration. Based on a novel by Ingeborg Bachmann, Isabelle Huppert plays the distraught woman who feels that the choice between her uninspiring husband and her indifferent lover warrants ever-escalating displays of rage, distress and loss of self-control. Eventually her self-indulgence leads to her setting her now-demolished Viennese apartment on fire and burning herself alive in it while the movie score plays songs from grand opera to celebrate her dramatic departure from life.’ –– Clarke Fountain, CinemaDeutsch

Trailer

Watch the film here

 

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Deux (2002)
‘Avant-garde director Werner Schroeter’s Deux (Two) is a willfully disjointed film about twin sisters played by Isabelle Huppert. As newborns, the two girls were separated. The film intercuts snippets from their lives. One of the sisters engages in some homosexual experimentation, while the other has ongoing conversations with a man (Jean-François Stévenin) who apparently resides in an opera house (opera being one of the director’s career-long obsessions). Bulle Ogier plays a woman who may or may not be related to the two women played by Huppert.’ — Perry Seibert, Movie Euro

Excerpt

Watch the film here

 

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Nuit de Chien (2008)
‘Werner Schroeter directed this dark and surreal tale of a man determined to save a lost lover from a grim fate at the hands of a violent mob. The city of Santa Maria is falling into chaos as an armed military faction is poised to take power in a coup d’etat. Ossorio (Pascal Greggory) used to call Santa Maria home, and he has returned in its darkest hour to find the woman he loves, hoping to rescue her from the violence that is lurks around the corner. As Ossorio searches for his love, he meets Victoria (Laura Martin) in a shabby hotel, who in turn introduces him to her father Barcala (Sami Frey), who for the right price is willing to take Ossorio and another passenger away on his boat. While Ossorio is willing to pay Barcala what he wants, can he find the mysterious woman before the ship sets sail? Adapted from Juan Carlos Onetti’s novel Para Esta Noche, Nuit de Chien (aka Tonight) received its North American premiere at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival.’ — Mark Deming, Rovi

Excerpt

Watch the film here
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*

p.s. Hey. ** Laura, Hi. Um, as a friend, Richard is complicated, passionate, a bit thin skinned, inspiring and generally a boon. Thanks for the panning out and dough hopes. Processing structure is a highlight for me, usually. Happy week ahead. ** Carsten, Andalusia is such a rich word. Especially the lusia part. Barcelona news good or bad when we get it. Soonish. I really need to go get Spain’s lay of the land one of these days. Serious gap. ** Thom, That guy Kevin Sampsell who runs Future Tense is a cool guy. He used to curated the readings for Powells. Cool if your gig is indeed videotaped and then made somehow accessible. Wait did it already happen? I forget. Big week! ** toni, Hi toni, good to meet you. Hm, I’ll probably to think about the photographer question as nothing is springing to mind. It wasn’t Rineke Dijkstra, was it. She shoots girls in the woods, but I don’t think when they’re running. ** Steve, Thank you. What the hell is that ‘Nirvanna’ thing? I keep seeing things about it, but I can’t figure out what it is. The Iran thing is extremely beyond disgust. Bug chasing is quite a big thing these days, at least in the online realms I seem to end up in. ** jay, Hi! Viktor Wynd’s … huh, I’ve never heard of that. I’ll go hunt. Thanks! No, I think they were indeed a rather scary bunch. New Mitski: just read about that. Okay, on it. I want that new ‘Resident Evil’ super bad. As soon as my finances get stabilised. Gimme a review if you start playing it please. Love back from this place and a hearty bonjour! ** kenley, I can’t even remember a party where I didn’t quickly find a friend and go outside and talk with them and smoke for the duration. But, so, how was yours, and how did you deal with it? Gods are dangerously subject to conspiracy theories. No thanks. I just don’t quite get stand-up. I don’t know why, since its pleasures seem pretty straight forward. I like your thoughts about it. I’d like to sit on your audience. I did go see Richard Pryor and Phyllis Diller do stand-up when I was young, and they were pretty amazing, it’s true. Thanks re: money. Oh, I ended up watching ’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’. For all its gore and violence, it sure was inert and disposable. I can see why it was a flop. And your eyes saw … ? ** Dominik, Hi!!! ‘Primate’, what a simple title. How was it? I watched ’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’, which I can not recommend. Otherwise my weekend was pretty standard fare. Love has the biggest cock on a pedophile u will ever see, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, If only we could get word to him. Whew, about your brother and family getting out of Dubai. I saw some footage of the bombing there and actually thought worryingly about them. ** Bill, I wonder if the album cover slave got any bites? Seemed like a novel and doable strategy to me. I’ve exchanged messages with Laura Vazquez, but we haven’t met yet. She lives in Marseilles. I’m glad her book started sneaking up on you. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. My weekend was … lukewarm, but mine at least rarely live up to the hype. Yours? Moving forward always. The previous things are always still there waiting for the right time to live. David Trinidad is wonderful, yes. One of a kind. And he’s kind of exactly what you imagine a person who writes about those things in the way he does is like. Nice, yeah, Kit Schluter and ‘Cartoons’ in particular, I agree. ** nat, Hi back from me and theoretically from the slaves. Oh, shit, I had a lengthy sickness recently, and it was gross and so boring. Glad you’re on your way to rightness. Yello’s ‘I Love You’ is one of those songs I have to remember to not think about because if I do it’ll be revolving in my mind for weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever been fortunate enough to ever be in the same room with a drone human. I need to befriend some drone owning master maybe. ‘Headless’. Nice! I’ve been bugging Benjamin to put together another book for, like, twenty years or something. I didn’t know Asterism was hacked. Yikes, I would probably sort of wilt and die if there wasn’t an Asterism. Don’t get ill! That’s an order, not that I give orders. But, I mean, seriously, you’ve long since paid your dues. So … do you feel … better? ** Okay. Today I decided to take the blog’s old Werner Schroeter Day and dust it off and give it a little upgrade and place it back in front of you, Have at it please. See you tomorrow.