Anguish & Ecstasy - The Cinema of Werner Schroeter
Retrospektive|Film Season as Part of the ICA 'Long Takes'
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ICA, London
Opening at London’s ICA on19 February 2026, Anguish & Ecstasy: The Cinema of Werner Schroeter is the first-ever comprehensive UK retrospective devoted to the director's work. We are pleased to support this three-month season which stands to reintroduce his cinema to London audiences, contextualised by specialist introductions, and presented through new restorations of rarely seen works, and 35mm presentations.
On Wednesday, 25 February, we will present Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Beware of a Holy Whore in dialogue with the retrospective. The film features Werner Schroeter and references his film Eika Katappa, which opens the restrospective on 19 Feburary.
Parallel to the ICA's programme, we will present a series of films by director and cinematographer Elfi Mikesch, who provided the camera work for a number of Werner Schroeter’s films and gave us wonderful insight in his life and work in her 2011 documentary Mondo Lux – The visual Worlds of Werner Schroeter. Please look out for more details to come.
Born in Georgenthal, East Germany, in 1945, soon before the end of the Second World War, Werner Schroeter grew up in a bohemian household in an industrial surroundings, close to a much-beloved grandmother and his mother’s opera-singer girlfriend.
As much has been made of his distance from as of his connection to the New German Cinema, though a contemporary and peer of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, with whom he studied (fleetingly) at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, he occupied an unclassifiable space in twentieth‑century cinema, leading to his cinema having been somewhat marginalised in comparison. Up until his death in 2010, across a huge corpus – twenty‑two features and numerous shorter works – Schroeter’s cinema has been nothing else if not particular. A cinema of emotionality, queerness, improvisation, and somatics. Utopian yet scuzzy, not straightforwardly political, yet radical in its heart of hearts.
From the outset, his early short and medium-length films, made in the late 1960s and early 1970s and most often on 8mm, demonstrated a fascination with theatricality, extravagant tableaux and transgressive sexuality, defined by early encounters with lifelong collaborator Magdalena Montezuma, artistic confidante Rosa von Praunheim, and Maria Callas (who never acts, but is nonetheless an ever-present star across his filmography). Through the 1970s and 1980s, with wider appreciation in festivals and cinematheques abroad, Schroeter’s cinema veered more ambitious, more of-the-world even, filmed across Argentina, the Philippines, Portugal, Italy, and Mexico.
The ICA likes to thank the collaboration of the Munich Filmmuseum, EYE Filmmuseum and to Paulo Branco.
Long Takes is the ICA’s continuing series of in-depth retrospectives exploring the work of cinema's great artists, both past and present.
On Wednesday, 25 February, we will present Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film Beware of a Holy Whore in dialogue with the retrospective. The film features Werner Schroeter and references his film Eika Katappa, which opens the restrospective on 19 Feburary.
Parallel to the ICA's programme, we will present a series of films by director and cinematographer Elfi Mikesch, who provided the camera work for a number of Werner Schroeter’s films and gave us wonderful insight in his life and work in her 2011 documentary Mondo Lux – The visual Worlds of Werner Schroeter. Please look out for more details to come.
What Schroeter does with a face, a cheekbone, the lips, an expression of the eyes [is a] multiplying and burgeoning of the body, an exaltation.
— Michel Foucault
Born in Georgenthal, East Germany, in 1945, soon before the end of the Second World War, Werner Schroeter grew up in a bohemian household in an industrial surroundings, close to a much-beloved grandmother and his mother’s opera-singer girlfriend.
As much has been made of his distance from as of his connection to the New German Cinema, though a contemporary and peer of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders, with whom he studied (fleetingly) at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, he occupied an unclassifiable space in twentieth‑century cinema, leading to his cinema having been somewhat marginalised in comparison. Up until his death in 2010, across a huge corpus – twenty‑two features and numerous shorter works – Schroeter’s cinema has been nothing else if not particular. A cinema of emotionality, queerness, improvisation, and somatics. Utopian yet scuzzy, not straightforwardly political, yet radical in its heart of hearts.
From the outset, his early short and medium-length films, made in the late 1960s and early 1970s and most often on 8mm, demonstrated a fascination with theatricality, extravagant tableaux and transgressive sexuality, defined by early encounters with lifelong collaborator Magdalena Montezuma, artistic confidante Rosa von Praunheim, and Maria Callas (who never acts, but is nonetheless an ever-present star across his filmography). Through the 1970s and 1980s, with wider appreciation in festivals and cinematheques abroad, Schroeter’s cinema veered more ambitious, more of-the-world even, filmed across Argentina, the Philippines, Portugal, Italy, and Mexico.
The ICA likes to thank the collaboration of the Munich Filmmuseum, EYE Filmmuseum and to Paulo Branco.
Long Takes is the ICA’s continuing series of in-depth retrospectives exploring the work of cinema's great artists, both past and present.
Location
ICA
The Mall
St. James's
London SW1Y 5AH
United Kingdom
The Mall
St. James's
London SW1Y 5AH
United Kingdom
Location
ICA
The Mall
St. James's
London SW1Y 5AH
United Kingdom
The Mall
St. James's
London SW1Y 5AH
United Kingdom
