Heavenly absurdity Creativity Werner Schröter typologically can be divided into avant-garde works, characterized by a free narrative structure (films of the late 1960s – the first half of the 1970s), realistic productions (late 1970s) and aesthetic decadent paintings, which he shot from the early 1980s to the end of his life. If the more famous representative of the “new German cinema” Werner Herzog in his monumental films ascended to the heights of the spirit, penetrated, like a thoughtful anthropologist, into other civilizations and cultures, then his namesake Schröter was like the dark side of romanticism. He was focused on his own fears, complexes, resentments, which prevented him from being as amazing an explorer of the incomprehensible depths of the human soul as Ingmar Bergman. On the other hand, he did not seek it. He realized his passion for opera and theater in the baroque colors of his late romantic-surrealist paintings. Perhaps for him, as for Oscar Pannitz, the author of the anti-religious play Love Cathedral, art also served psychotherapeutic purposes. He confessed to the viewer, purifying his soul from demons, the fruit of which often became dead-end films with some unhealthy energy, where the world is deformed, maximally alienated from the viewer, and the plot is like an obsessive nightmare.
“Love Cathedral” is largely the thematic successor to Werner Schroeter’s previous film “Day of Idiots”. If in that film the director showed modern reality to him in deliberately absurd colors, obsessively comparing the world with the “yellow” house, then in the “Love Cathedral” Werner Schröter demonstrates, if I may say so, Tolstoy’s vision of the church faith, from which, as L. N. Tolstoy wrote, “the absurd will not end after death, but will last forever.”
Because it is so bad on earth that heaven is full of madness, as an aesthetic director tells us, in his criticism of religion he is not afraid to fall into blasphemy. Werner Schroeter was completely disappointed, both in faith and in life, because the literary material of the same provocateur Oscar Pannitz balmed on his vulnerable soul.
Heaven is full of bedlam. God the Father has lost his mind and resembles a decrepit old man who can not even cope with his own body, let alone the world. The Virgin Mary is no virgin, but a licentious woman, whose lovers are the devil himself, represented by Schroeter with more love than the holy family. It is from him that Jesus may have been born, who looks like a high-aged child, truly not of this world, so that no longer figuratively, but quite literally, in a medical sense, the director portrays the god-son as an idiot. The characters are absolutely unable to understand their intricate family ties, which makes the film as if a scathing analogue of a typical melodrama or even soap drama, where clarification of relationships and a storm of feelings are deliberately hyperbolized.
Depicting the heavenly inhabitants as beings in the power of base passions, Werner Schröter peculiarly answers the question that is often asked by theologians - where is evil in the world, why is life unjust if God is good. According to Schroether, no one in the holy family cares about humans. Noticing their own vices, they punish humanity for its sins. Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, which means that the Creator himself is characterized by spiritual flaws.
For Werner Schroeter, a disillusioned romantic, there is no longer any ideal reality characteristic of romanticism. The Highlands are inhabited by evil beings like ours, there is no ascent of Jacob’s staircase, only the slow descent of the whole universe into hell. “Love Cathedral” only logically continues the anti-romantic pathos of Schroeter’s previous film, being perceived not as a mockery of biblical heroes sacred to many believers, but rather as a sign of the director’s complete disappointment in high Christian ideals. Schroeter appears as a misanthrope, for which there is only one refuge - art. Therefore, the director introduces into the narrative the figure of the author of the play, over whom the trial is carried out on earth for his blasphemous composition about the high world.
Schroeter, with romantic fervor, defends not only the abstract artist’s right to freedom of expression, even if it hurts someone, but above all his own right to speak about what he cares most about. During the filming of Idiots Day, Werner realized the meaninglessness of human existence in a non-free world. There is no freedom in the world—an illusion, as Luis Buñuel thought in The Ghost of Freedom. Only art helps a person to forget for a while and come to terms with the general absurdity of being.
It is not difficult to notice that Schroeter’s worldview in this radically differed from the search for his friends in the “new German cinema”. They believed in progress and the victory of sound forces, urged people to be kinder to each other and respond with unity to the triumph of death and lies. There may be no God, but there is a human sanctity that Ingmar Bergman, in particular, believed in, whose aesthetics were differently addressed by Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Eckhart Schmidt. Schroeter did not believe in man and certainly did not love him, so his decadent late films are things in themselves, if you remember Kant. Unbelief breeds despondency, and the desire for beauty is transformed into the Baroque-theatrical style of Schröter’s later films.
“Love Cathedral” is the most conventional film in this series, where the heavens are shown through theatrical effects – simple scenery, fog and white faces of the characters, symbolizing their supraworldly essence. Schroeter largely anticipates Lars von Trier’s experiments in the environment in such films as Dogville and Manderley. And the vaudeville plot unexpectedly resembles his “Dancing in the Dark”, which suggests that Trier, being the same gloomy romantic and misanthrope, must have been familiar with the unusual shape of Schroeter’s films and developed his experience in a more existential way.
7 out of 10