Liebeskonzil

Liebeskonzil (1982)

Oskar Panizza’s 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 Panizza’s 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 Schroeter’s 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

Date of release
1982-03-12
TMDB
9.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Drama
Director
Werner Schroeter

Casting

Interesting facts

Liebeskonzil is a 1982 film by Werner Schroeter, based on an 1894 play by Oskar Panizza. It was banned by the Austrian government in 1985, on the grounds that it insulted the Christian religion. In 1994, in the case of Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria, the European Court of Human Rights held by 6 votes to 3 that the banning of the film was a justifiable limitation on the freedom of expression, because the film would offend Austrian Roman Catholics. Panzizzi's original work had also led its author to face blasphemy charges in the nineteenth century.

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