Screenplay
Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality. - Harvard Film Archive
Adaptation
Performance shot in 1977, in which emblematic actor Carmelo Bene, in the charming reconstruction of the ruins of a theater on fire accompanied by the disturbing notes of Vittorio Gelmetti, reads four poems of the Twentieth Century russian poets Vladimir Majakovskij, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Blok and Sergej Esènin.
Writer
Давно живет в Лондоне итальянец Антонио. Так давно, что и забыл, когда стал величать себя Энтони Уилсоном. И вот спустя много лет раздался телефонный звонок из Сицилии, моментально заставивший Энтони вспомнить, каковы его «корни». Дон Джорландо из Палермо сказал ему тоном, не терпящим возражений: «Встречай розу. И держи нос ближе к ней». Знатоки мафиозного жаргона объяснили Энтони: роза — значит девственница. Про нос — значит следи, чтобы она девственницей и осталась. А не то!..
Screenplay
An allegedly insane woman is allowed to finally leave the madhouse to see if she is capable of functioning normally…
Writer
Italian immigrant kidnaps a wealthy British woman, and they fall in love.
