Schramm (film)

Lothar Schramm is a seemingly polite and unremarkable taxi driver who lives alone. At the beginning of the film, he lies dying in a pool of blood and white paint after falling from a ladder while repainting the bloodstained walls of his apartment. His life is subsequently presented through disjointed flashbacks, memories and hallucinations.

Schramm murders a religious couple who visit his apartment to speak to him about Jesus, slitting the man's throat and striking the woman in the head. He strips and arranges their bodies in sexual poses and photographs them. Outside his murders, Schramm leads an isolated life and experiences disturbing sexual and bodily hallucinations, including visions involving mutilation and a toothed vagina.

His neighbor Marianne is a prostitute with whom Schramm has developed a friendship and for whom he has unexpressed romantic feelings. He listens to her encounters with clients through the wall while using a rubber sex torso. Marianne asks him to accompany her to an appointment with a group of wealthy older men at a villa outside the city.

Schramm later drugs Marianne in his apartment. While she is unconscious, he undresses and photographs her and masturbates beside her, but does not kill her. The following day she knocks on his door because she expects him to drive her to her appointment, unaware that he is dying inside.

At the villa, Marianne is shown dressed in a uniform resembling that of the Hitler Youth, bound and gagged in a chair before her clients. Meanwhile, Schramm's final visions include an encounter with Jesus before he dies.

• Florian Koerner von Gustorf as Lothar Schramm
• Monika M. as Marianne
• Micha Brendel as the male believer
• Carolina Harnisch as the female believer
• Xaver Schwarzenberger as older man
• Gerd Horvath as older man
• Michael Brynntrup as Jesus
• Franz Rodenkirchen as dentist
• Anne Presting as dentist
• Eddie Zacharias as lover
• Michael Romahn as suicide
• Volker Hauptvogel as waiter^[1]

Schramm was produced by Buttgereit and Manfred O. Jelinski through Jörg Buttgereit/Manfred O. Jelinski Filmproduktion in Berlin.^[1] Jelinski served as director of photography, with additional camera work by Buttgereit, Marcus Stein and Herr Laskowski. Buttgereit, Jelinski and Rodenkirchen edited the film.^[1]

The film was shot on 16 mm film and blown up to 35 mm for theatrical exhibition.^[1] Some sequences were shot on Super 8.^[2]

The music was composed by Max Müller and Gundula Schmitz.^[1] Müller was a bandmate of lead actor Florian Koerner von Gustorf in the Berlin rock band Mutter.^[3]

The film opens with a quotation attributed to American serial killer Carl Panzram. Reviewing a later collection of Buttgereit's films, Micah Gallo of DVD Talk wrote that Buttgereit and Rodenkirchen used a book about Panzram as a starting point from which they developed their own ideas for Schramm.^[4]

Schramm premiered at the Hof International Film Festival in October 1993 and received its German theatrical release on December 31, 1993.^[1]

Filmportal lists the original version as running 75 minutes.^[1] Later home-video editions have been listed at approximately 65 to 66 minutes; a 2016 Cult Epics release reviewed by DVD Talk, for example, ran 66 minutes.^[5]

In a contemporary review for the German magazine tip, Katja Nicodemus discussed the film's fragmented chronology and the way Buttgereit's editing merges Schramm's fears, fantasies and reality. She particularly highlighted the film's visual representation of Schramm's internal psychological world.^[6]

Michael Gingold of Fangoria regarded Schramm as an artistic advance over Buttgereit's earlier Nekromantik, noting that the film ranged from disturbing psychological material to deliberately grotesque imagery. He also praised the 16 mm photography and noted the film's limited-budget production methods.^[2]

Kurt Dahlke of DVD Talk described the film as a meditation on the loneliness and death of a serial killer and praised Florian Koerner von Gustorf's performance and Jelinski's cinematography. He rated the film "Highly Recommended".^[5]

Micah Gallo, also writing for DVD Talk, called Schramm the most visually ambitious and accomplished of the four Buttgereit features included in the 2016 Sex Murder Art collection, noting the film's use of circular camera movements and its focus on the mundane as well as the disturbing aspects of its protagonist's life.^[4]

• Kerekes, David (1998). Sex Murder Art: The Films of Jörg Buttgereit (2nd revised and updated ed.). Critical Vision/Headpress. ISBN 9780952328841.
• Koven, Mikel J. (2007). "Buttgereit's Poetics: Schramm as Cinema of Poetry". In Hantke, Steffen (ed.). Caligari's Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945. Scarecrow Press. pp. 185–197. ISBN 9780810858787.
• Stiglegger, Marcus (2007). "Good News From the Underground: A Conversation with Jörg Buttgereit". In Hantke, Steffen (ed.). Caligari's Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945. Scarecrow Press. pp. 219–226. ISBN 9780810858787.