German filmmaker and stage director Werner Schroeter died 12 April 2010, following an operation for cancer, which he had been fighting for three years. Born in Thuringia, Germany, on 7 April 1945, he won a slew of film festival awards, and was a major force in the New German Cinema of the 1970s.
After studying psychology at the University of Mannheim, and then briefly attending the Film and Television School in Munich, he began making experimental 8-millimeter films in 1967. He first feature-length film, Eika Katappa, came in 1969, and won the Josef von Sternberg prize at the Mannheim International Film Festival. As he grew, he developed what the New York Times calls a “flair for lush visuals and heightened emotions [that] introduced an operatic sensibility to the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s.” The Times has a nice, in-depth discussion of his main themes and styles in this obituary.
Schroeter was a director, writer, cinematographer, editor, and sometime actor in his more than three dozen films. In recent years, his film output decreased as he turned more to stage direction, but the Times notes that his “final film, Nuit de chien (2008, This Night), is a dark fantasy set in a totalitarian future.” His other genre, or genre-esque, films include: Malina (1991), Tag der Idioten (1981), Goldflocken (1976), and Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972). He also appeared, as an actor, in the 1973 tv-film Welt am Draht.