Der Rosenkönig

Schroeter creates a dreamlike opera about desire and death, with a structure based on the pleasure from pompous images of a Baroque style and the intermingling of characters' ideas with reality. Although rather than reality existing within the film at all, the film itself seems to be merely an unraveling of its characters' fantasies. Schroeter thus put fantasy in the foreground over the story, much like "in the work of Georges de La Tour, space does not exist. His characters emerge from a black background." Similarly, all of Schroeter's characters emerge from the dark depths of unconscious and conscious desires. Additionally, they seem to appear directly from the depths of other characters: the son is merely the mother's desire, and the lover seems to exist only through and for the son... also, the dark and occasionally extravagant stylization naturally refers to Early Baroque painting in terms of aesthetics - the camera captures scenes of summer nights with twilights reminiscent of Caravaggio. In fact, Caravaggio's homosexually charged depiction of saints and mythical figures of boys and men not only offers a parallel to explicit and typical minority issues in Schroeter's work but also represents one of the themes of the film, i.e., the entangling of religious symbols with their sexual connotations. (2016.11.20)