By-Products of Love. The Beginnings of Werner Schroeter
Only insiders are familiar with the early works by Werner Schroeter. Among the first year of students at the University of Film and Television Munich in 1967, Schroeter quickly became disenchanted by the stuffy teaching atmosphere and turned instead to making his own 8mm films, which were shown in the 'underground', far from the more traditional structures of cinema theatres.
Stefan Drößler, director of the Munich Film Museum, uses rarely shown film extracts, documents and photos to trace the development of Werner Schroeter from his earliest days, his meeting with Rosa von Praunheim at the EXPRMTL film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, to the discovery of his superstars Carla Aulaulu and Magdalena Montezuma and his initial festival successes in Hamburg und Mannheim, which brought him international prestige and lucrative commissions from what at the time were still astonishingly experimental public broadcasters.