On Werner Schroeter

In this essay, artist Nick Mauss draws attention to the slippage between image and sound in Werner Schroeter's early films, proposing that the deliberate misalignment between song, speech, gesture, and affect opens a space of radical intimacies and unforeseen expressive potentialities that inflect Mauss' own work. Tracing Schroeter's influences through romantic and modernist literature, avant-garde film, philosophy, pop music, and, most importantly, through the advent of the lip sync as a performative resistance to interpellation, Mauss also addresses Schroeter's artistic debt to the filmmaker Edward Owens.