Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy: A Memoir - Hardcover

Schroeter, Werner; Lenssen, Claudia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022601911X ISBN 13: 9780226019116

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Synopsis

Werner Schroeter was a leading figure of New German Cinema. In more than forty films made between 1967 and 2008, including features, documentaries, and shorts, he ignored conventional narrative, creating instead dense, evocative collages of image and sound. For years, his work was eclipsed by contemporaries such as Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Alexander Kluge. Yet his work has become known to a wider audience through several recent retrospectives, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Written in the last years of his life, Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy sees Schroeter looking back at his life with the help of film critic and friend Claudia Lenssen. Born in 1945, Schroeter grew up near Heidelberg and spent just a few weeks in film school before leaving to create his earliest works. Over the years, he would work with acclaimed artists, including Marianne Hopps, Isabelle Huppert, Candy Darling, and Christine Kaufmann. In the 1970s, Schroeter also embarked on prolific parallel careers in theater and opera, where he worked in close collaboration with the legendary diva Maria Callas. His childhood; his travels in Italy, France, and Latin America; his coming out and subsequent life as an gay man in Europe; and his run-ins with Hollywood are but a few of the subjects Schroeter recalls with insights and characteristic understated humor.

A sharp, lively, even funny memoir, Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy captures Schroeter’s extravagant life vividly over a vast prolific career, including many stories that might have been lost were it not for this book. It is sure to fascinate cinephiles and anyone interested in the culture around film and the arts.
 

About this title

About the Author:

Werner Schroeter (1945–2010) was a German filmmaker who made such films as The Death of Maria Malibran, Day of the Idiots, and The Rose King. In 2008, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his life’s work. In addition to his work in film, he directed numerous theatrical and operatic productions. Claudia Lenssen is a film scholar and critic who writes for numerous film publications. She lives and works in Berlin. Anthea Bell is an award-winning British writer and translator.

Review:

“Schroeter lived his imagination with implacable fervor, and gave the world some of the most complex, sensuous, enthralling, and sophisticated works of cinema, opera, and theater it has ever seen and heard. His art is subtle and outrageous, drastic in its emotional perplexity, and instantly seductive, a magnificent alloy of the sublime and the absurd. His ideas sprang from an unparalleled sense of life, a brilliant grasp of the human heart's perversity and grandeur, an unwavering focus on essential truths of the inner life and its fantastic outward display. This book is a portal into the mind and soul of a matchless artist and a truly unique human being.” (Gary Indiana)

“Schroeter was a fascinating and highly idiosyncratic figure in the histories of film, theater, opera, and the German avant-garde in the last quarter of the twentieth century. His life was packed with an astonishing range of collaborations, love affairs, professional disappointments, and triumphant accomplishments. This book reveals a consummate artist and a master raconteur at the top of his form."
  (Edward Dimendberg, University of California, Irvine)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 022601911X
• ISBN 13: 9780226019116
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368