Roberto Lerici

Z-movie actor Bruno Martel has hero syndrome, often quarrelling with directors. He meets fellow actor Doris, who is obsessed with Ophelia but cannot get any Shakespearean bookings. One day, during a nervous breakdown, Bruno 'rescues' Doris from the set, leaving town to encounter various absurd situations.

Anthony M. Wilson is an English gentleman. He has a string of restaurants in London plus a beautiful house decorated with all the trendy art he can get.

An allegedly insane woman is allowed to finally leave the madhouse to see if she is capable of functioning normally…

Disillusioned English banker's wife Mary meets troubled Italian immigrant Bruno, with whom she is captivated by and they set off on a voyage on which they meet a variety of society's dropouts.

Alien spirits from outer space land on earth and take over the bodies of the recently deceased--but their purpose isn't what it would appear to be.

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

Z-movie actor Bruno Martel has hero syndrome, often quarrelling with directors. He meets fellow actor Doris, who is obsessed with Ophelia but cannot get any Shakespearean bookings. One day, during a nervous breakdown, Bruno 'rescues' Doris from the set, leaving town to encounter various absurd situations.

Anthony M. Wilson is an English gentleman. He has a string of restaurants in London plus a beautiful house decorated with all the trendy art he can get.

An allegedly insane woman is allowed to finally leave the madhouse to see if she is capable of functioning normally…

Disillusioned English banker's wife Mary meets troubled Italian immigrant Bruno, with whom she is captivated by and they set off on a voyage on which they meet a variety of society's dropouts.

Alien spirits from outer space land on earth and take over the bodies of the recently deceased--but their purpose isn't what it would appear to be.

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