18th-century Werther is a sensitive, self-dramatizing youth who floats dreamily through existence, longing for ecstatic union with nature and man. He implicates himself in the relationship between 20th-century Albert and Charlotte, then develops a passionate friendship with Albert. The two men experience a rapturous idyll together, but Werther's love ultimately goes unrequited, and he declines into despair and destroys himself. Meanwhile, the director mirrors Werther with his own on-camera decline.

CHARACTER OF THE FILM

This film drama, stylishly re-imagined from Goethe's 1786 novella «Die Leiden des jungen Werthers», charts the peaks and depths of Werther's passions, yielding a fusion of nature imagery, vivid sounds, and spectacle. The viewer is immersed in rich sensorial expression with a fresh, personal film vision. It challenges convention by including the process of making it: actors auditioning, the writer-director as a visible participant who's committed to boldness in art, who acknowledges his love for his actor, and addresses the spectator in a direct, personal way. This makes explicit how fiction films are really documentaries about actors pretending.

I love playing with image, text, and sound, and film is the perfect arena in which to do this. Throughout "Werther," I use voice-over to create a hovering presence for myself as the director, describing my feelings about the characters and the filmmaking process, creating a collage with image-layering, voice-layering, and music. I construct time and space differently in this film. Rather than relying upon storytelling conventions, I search for a form that can accommodate the chaos without excessive taming. My style is characterized by complexity, peripeteias and transitions which may seem abrupt, and by a lack of conventional storyteller padding. Rather than the telling of a story, I emphasize the story of a telling. I show my process of filmmaking--with its hesitations, blocks, interpersonal messiness, improvisation, and serendipitous discoveries. I love ambiguity in art works, so I do not want to spell out everything. The viewer's own generation of meaning is a key source of pleasure and I don't want to block that. Viewers will produce their own meaning by filling in the gaps and organizing the disorder.

"Werther" contains several Goethe poems in German, and many references to his works. This line from his novella could be emblematic of the film: "Is it necessary--that what makes man's happiness should also be the source of his misery?" My film shows influences of Romantic artists, Expressionists, and many 20th-century writers and filmmakers. It has, perhaps, hints of the anti-convention experimenting of Godard and Syberberg, the visual panache of Greenaway, and the love for nature of Friedrich, Tarkovsky, and Dovzhenko.

BACKGROUND OF THE FILM

I spent several years preparing, organizing, and producing my film "Werther." Why? It began as an attempt to fill gaps in my life, and to preserve the memory of past, half-forgotten adventures. Years ago, an old flame of mine gave me his copy of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," urging me to read it as a classic in the garden of literary perennials. It sat unread on my bookshelf for years. When curiosity finally bade me to read it, I was captured by Werther's love for nature, his relationship with Charlotte and Albert, and by the sharp themes of longing and unrequited love...all of which I had experienced. For me, a moving work like that brings me back to myself. Perhaps there is a little Werther in me.

Several years before, my first full love was with Ron, an Italian-American, when I was 28. His wife was Glycia, a Brasilian, with whom I shared interests in the arts and in the same man. I never got over it. I could not bear his absence, as he formed for me a connecting link to the world and the experience of love. Soon, the three of us became boon companions in country and town. During the summer we lived through a true lovers' idyll.

Reading the novella reconnected me with my flame. Gradually I became intrigued with the possibilities of blending Goethe's story with my own, and with finding a cinematic echo of the German Romantic aesthetic. I am in love with German Romanticism's mix of beauty and strangeness, its unabashed tenderness and emotional extremity, its vignettes of meadows, flowers, craggy brooks, moonlight, its graveyard poetry, gnarled trees, and lonely places. It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. In "Werther" I play with love and intimacy vicariously, with my puppets Werther, Albert, and Charlotte...