DVD of the Week: “Palermo or Wolfsburg”

For the late German director Werner Schroeter (who died in 2010), the anchoring metaphor is opera, as seen in his 1980 feature “Palermo or Wolfsburg,” which I discuss in this clip. The movie opens in Sicily, where a local impresario is passionately but vainly at work, undermined by poverty and isolation, and it concludes in Germany, in a spectacular courtroom scene that moves from juridical naturalism to operatic spectacle. His subject is the effect of economic migration on people who uproot themselves midlife from their families, homes, and traditions to seek work in places where their exertions are needed but their presence is unwelcome. The clashes of culture—of a Mediterranean heartiness smacking into northern formality, of innocent sincerity wounded by abrasive irony—have both dramatic impact and historical resonance. The Italian immigrants don’t have much more sympathy for German ways than their hosts do for Sicilian traditions. The guest workers don’t come for a new life but just for a job, and those who’ve been on hand for a while have a choice to make: either silently bear imposed cultural contortions or struggle ruthlessly for a place of one’s own. The results resemble not Wagner but verismo.