Magdalena Montezuma

Love and death, madness and great opera are the themes which Werner Schroeter combines in this film which he once called his 'main work'. Der Tod der Maria Malibran is a musical and scenic reflection of the 19th century cult of genius and the myth surrounding the great singer (deutsche-in-london.net)

The scene is a large Portuguese estate. Still-beauteous widow Magdalene Montezuma lives in empty luxury on the estate with her son. This close familial relationship is shaken up, but ultimately strengthened, by the arrival of a low-born laborer. (AllMovie)

A woman purchases a one way ticket to Berlin-Tegel with the intent of leaving her past behind and starting a new life of passionate drinking.

Gudrun Landgrebe plays a housewife who abruptly leaves her husband for a life of prostitution. At first, she retains her staid, middle-class values, but before long she is one of the most sexually adventurous women walking the streets. Soon she has more business than she can manage, forcing her to learn highly advanced bookkeeping skills to keep her business in order. (allmovie.com)

In another avant-garde, underground film, director Ulrike Ottinger takes up the decadent, self-indulgent character of Dorian Gray (Veruschka von Lehndorff) and uses him/her to explore the seamier side of Berlin night and street life. (allmovie.com)

As Orlando (Magdalena Montezuma) enters the world of "freaks," the movie develops scenes from a mythological netherworld, the Spanish Inquisition, the Middle Ages, and a few other settings to focus on unusual characters with physical or mental oddities. By the time the various vignettes that take place in these separate periods are completed, each with their own points and counterpoints, the "freaks" seem much less odd than their physically normal contemporaries. (allmovie.com)

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. (tiff.net)

Werner Schroeter's rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films. (tiff.net)

The lives of three professional cabaret women in Nazi period.

Experimental short by Werner Schroeter.