Liebeskonzil

Oskar Panizzas The Council of Love 1895 is a blasphemous play set in 1495 during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans As a result Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizzas work with a dramatization of his trial presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeters use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films On the eve of the AIDS crisis Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality Harvard Film Archive