Werner Schroeter

I am looking for the vital forces of love, death and life through my cinematographic work, and partly through my theatrical work as well. In order to express them, I use multiple phantasmagoria and utopian forms. I was touched by Juan Carlos Onetti’s work, where I could find ideas that are close to mine. His, however, were filtered by the unbearable experience of war and of the male chauvinist temperament typical of SUR Argentine culture. His work leads us to the following question: What is this creature called the human being? Where does humankind’s energy come from, its sense of fatality, and above all, its Sehnsucht, its yearning and ardent desire for melancholia?

In my opinion, cinema must give us new answers to the depiction of these vital forces. There are never enough opportunities to express them. Electronic communication creates a sort of cutting down of the human being, a kind of destruction. Television is often incredibly banal. It repeatedly deals with suspense or action thrillers or sappy melodrama set in plots which are often simplistic and shallow. How can these fictional films possibly nourish our imagination? How can they help us build up complex utopias likely to explore our inner depth, the complexity of our nature?

Thanks to his artistic clarity and sensitive and keen eye, Onetti has managed to create a complex work. With his personal touch he is a precursor of the existentialism of Camus and Sartre, a touch which would later be followed by Althusser and Foucault. I had had numerous exchanges with the latter on this idea of passion, passion that keeps us going even though we are not ourselves impassioned. Foucault also often examined the links between sex and politics.

Our screenplay NUIT DE CHIEN takes up Onetti’s dramatic structure . In his work, as well as in ours, there is the question of man and war, a state of siege which bring us closely into Céline’s novel Voyage To The End Of The Night. A wounded person always has the choice of resisting violence, brutality or bestiality, but he too often gives in. And those who give in to this violence have lost all hope, hope which is the only peaceful weapon capable of keeping life, love and passion alive, hope which eventually allows us to accept death with dignity.

The dense atmosphere of the town of Santa Maria, which will be set in Porto, is likely to remind us of two cinematographic masterpieces whose ambiance I like quite a lot:
Touch of Evil by Orson Welles and Kiss Me Deadly by Aldrich.

Finally, one should not forget there is also Onetti’s sense of humor, a typically light Argentine-Uruguayan sense of humor, always present in his work, that deserves to be put on the big screen.

In the heat of battle, smile at disaster!