The best Magdalena Montezuma’s movies
We present our ranking of the best Magdalena Montezuma’s movies. Do you love cinema? Or are you looking for a movie of your favorite actor to watch tonight? Surely you have some to see or that you did not know yet about Magdalena Montezuma.
Palermo or Wolfsburg
6.8/10
An impoverished young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg, West Germany to find work. He takes a job in the Volkswagen factory after he travels through Northern Italy by train.
Taxi zum Klo
6.5/10
Frank Ripploh is a bit of a rascal: he's a bearded and shaggy-haired teacher, and he's gay with a very active sex life and an interest in making films. He keeps his personal life and teaching separate, but he sometimes corrects student papers in public toilets as he waits to score. He cruises constantly, and one evening, he meets Bernd. They become lovers. While Bernd is attentive and caring, Frank gets bored and continues his polymorphously perverse ways. For how long will Bernd and Frank tolerate each other's habits, and for how long can Frank keep his sexual orientation out of the classroom? Things come to a head during Berlin's annual Queen's Ball and the morning after.
Freak Orlando
5.9/10
FREAK ORLANDO is divided into five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman, played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises, and deformities, throughout.
Beware of a Holy Whore
6.6/10
Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.
World on a Wire
7.7/10
Cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller uncovers a massive corporate conspiracy involving a virtual reality computer project.
Day of the Idiots
6.2/10
A woman experiences psychic disintegration and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.
A Woman in Flames
5.9/10
Eva, an upper-class housewife, frustratedly leaves her arrogant husband and decides to enter the call girl business. She lets Yvonne, a prostitute, teach her the basics and both set out for prey together, until Eva starts an affair with Chris, who turns out to be a call boy, as well. Consequently, she moves into his penthouse, large enough for both to offer their services separately.
Ticket of No Return
6.7/10
A sartorially resplendent woman of few words arrives in Berlin with plans to live out the rest of her days as a drunkard.
The Rose King
6.5/10
A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses.
Rio das Mortes
6.2/10
Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's girlfriend, Hanna, humors their plan, but really just wants to get married.
Neurasia
6.4/10
In a dark and spare theatrical space, four characters use gesture, language, and movement to explore themes of desire and mortality.
Der Bomberpilot
6.4/10
Schroeter’s film is a chronicle of Germany from the Nazi era until the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, centering on three women who search for a career as singers and dancers.
Macbeth
6.6/10
Fusing Shakespeare‘s tragedy with the Verdi opera, Schroeter's Macbeth is a fascinating television experiment shot entirely in a studio with several electronic cameras. As Schroeter would recall, "I arranged the Verdi music for a quartet of violin, accordion, piano and oboe, but modeled the rhythms on Argentinian tangos and boleros. The actors sang with horrifying, shrill voices.... The use of video allowed me to produce extraordinary colors.... Of all my films, Macbeth was most unwelcome: Audiences don’t like their Shakespeare to be presented in this way, but I do not differentiate between kitsch and culture...". - MoMA
Argila
6.6/10
Werner Schroeter's stunning split-screen short deals with what the director called "archaic, fundamental themes" of love and mourning.
Eika Katappa
6.6/10
Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music - with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.
Liebeskonzil
6.8/10
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
Johannas Traum
7.6/10
With the ascetic grandeur of Carl Th. Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Schroeter evokes the visions of Saint Joan, partly through unused footage of Darling and Caven pantomiming in his 1972 film The Death of Maria Malibran. - MoMA
Willow Springs
6.4/10
Three women retreat to a hacienda in the Mojave Desert and vengefully lure men to their deaths to the siren song of the Andrews Sisters' "Rum And Coca-Cola," in Werner Schroeter's sublimely strange fever dream of a film.
Goldflocken
7.3/10
Werner Schroeter's rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films.
The Niklashausen Journey
5.9/10
Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Black Monk" suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary.
