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.
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
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.
Max Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.
Two women, one from Boston and one from Germany, flee their empty lives to seek fulfillment in Mexico. The Black Angel is a transitional film; on one hand, it is a companion piece to Willow Springs, featuring two Schroeter regulars as characters far from home and in extremis; on the other hand, it...
