Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy: A Memoir

His art is subtle and outrageous, drastic in its emotional perplexity, and instantly seductive, a magnificent alloy of the sublime and the absurd. This book is a portal into the mind and soul of a matchless artist and a truly unique human being.”. His ideas sprang from an unparalleled sense of life, a brilliant grasp of the human heart's perversity and grandeur, an unwavering focus on essential truths of the inner life and its fantastic outward display. “Schroeter lived his imagination with implacable fervor, and gave the world some of the most complex, sensuous, enthralling, and sophisticated works of cinema, opera, and theater it has ever seen and heard

Written in the last years of his life, Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy sees Schroeter looking back at his life with the help of film critic and friend Claudia Lenssen. A sharp, lively, even funny memoir, Days of Twilight, Nights of Frenzy captures Schroeter’s extravagant life vividly over a vast prolific career, including many stories that might have been lost were it not for this book. His childhood; his travels in Italy, France, and Latin America; his coming out and subsequent life as an gay man in Europe; and his run-ins with Hollywood are but a few of the subjects Schroeter recalls with insights and characteristic understated humor. Werner Schroeter was a leading figure of New German Cinema.  . In more than forty films made between 1967 and 2008, including features, documentaries, and shorts, he ignored conventional narrative, creating instead dense, evocative collages of image and sound. For years, his work was eclipsed by contemporaries such as Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Alexander Kluge. It is sure to fascinate cinephiles and anyone interested in the culture around film and the arts. In the 1970s, Schroeter also embarked on prolific para