*Attempts at Love – Werner Schroeter" ("Liebesversuche"), 65 min., WDR/arte © 2002. A film by Claudia Schmid & Birgit Schulz

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Synopsis

Shy, yet simultaneously provocative. His intense gaze reveals the depth of his approach to life. He is regarded as a nonconformist—visually striking, politically uncompromising—and he embraces grand emotions. Always clad in black, he possesses a penchant for dramatic self-staging and for kitsch. A deliberate eccentric who delights in transgressing boundaries and immersing himself in the fullness of life—including all its abysses: Werner Schroeter, 58 years old—theater, film, and opera director. As early as the late 1960s, he attracted attention with his experimental and uncompromising films, in which he fused elements of the trivial with the intellectual—works that appealed to only a small, select audience. During this period, he moved within the circles surrounding Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rosa von Praunheim, and Ingrid Caven.

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Love, violence, and death are the themes that move Werner Schroeter. A poetry of the unattainable—of the inability to truly connect—resonates throughout his work. His films and theatrical productions are profoundly shaped by a deep love for opera music. Grand gestures and the dramatic expressiveness of a silent-film aesthetic permeate his visual world. Imagination is resistance. In both life and work, death serves as a central pivot point for Schroeter: “People in my circle are dropping like flies. That is likely because I am surrounded exclusively by those at risk.” Werner Schroeter is a profound thinker whose physical presence frequently recedes into the shadows. He is an exceptionally articulate cosmopolitan who feels more at home in Italy, France, Portugal, and Mexico than he does in Germany. In his home country, his productions are often regarded as an insider tip.

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For a full year, Claudia Schmid and Birgit Schulz followed the director. The film approaches this complex figure through the dual lenses of his private life and his professional work. It explores what moves Werner Schroeter—and what he feels compelled to flee from—while plumbing the depths of his inner abysses, revealing his restlessness, and offering an entry point into his artistic oeuvre. “To save human expression is just as vital as saving human life. Otherwise, people turn into berserkers.”

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Alongside Schroeter, the film introduces artists with whom he has collaborated closely for many years—artists whose equally idiosyncratic works he interweaves with his own ideas. Thus emerges a kind of dialogue between Werner Schroeter, cinematographer Elfi Mikesch, his longtime stage and costume designer Alberte Barsacq, his friend Zazie de Paris, his dramaturge Monika Keppler, and the actress with whom he is able to work most radically: Isabelle Huppert.