@

Love's Debris

@@Director: Werner Schroeter

1996 France/Germany 120' 35mm color in English,

French, German and Italian with Japanese and English subtitles


"Everything we express with our voice results from our desire to come closer to another person.
There is no voice without love, and the singing voice is the highest possible expression of love,"
says the celebrated German New Wave filmmaker Werner Schroeter, also renowned as a director
of opera and theater. Schroeter, who recalls that "hearing Maria Callas sing for the first time at
the age of fourteen changed my life," invited a number of his favorite opera singers to bringalong
the people they love and join him at a medieval monastery near Paris.
Gathered for this filmic retreat are such superstars of today's opera world as Laurence Dale and
SergeĽ LarĽn (along with their male lovers), and legendary divas including the "muse of
FurtwSngler"
Martha Msdl, and Rita Gorr accompanied by her (female) partner of many years.
Anita Cerquetti, the most hailed dramatic soprano since Callas, appears for the first time since
leaving
the stage at the height of her career at age twenty-nine after an illness. Together, they
speak--and sing--of love.

Love--the desire to come closer to another person--has many objects. There are as many forms
of
love as there are individual lives. What is certain is that all love is equal, and sacred. Love is the
supreme mystery, which is why its pursuit is never ending. Schroeter says of this film, his
offering
to the "beloved spirit" of Maria Callas, "it is me myself."

This film will be distributed in Japan by Cetera International, opening at Box Higashi-Nakano on Saturday June 13.


Director Profile - Werner Schroeter

One of the most influential filmmakers in German New Wave cinema, director Werner Schoeter has been stunning audiences internationally since the late 1960s with the lyrical decadence and near-baroque style of his films, a style whose overt operaticism and defiantly dramatic overtones betray his other career as a director of operas and plays.


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