Werner Schroeter went to the 1980 Experimental Theater Festival at Nancy, France with his own questions-and many of his own answers-already framed. Dress Rehearsal is less a performance film than a subjective reverie of Schroeter's: visually, in being the composition of a passionate colorist, and aurally, in incorporating an opera track (Maria Callas singing Puccini) drawn from Schroeter's own creative life as we have known it in The Death of Maria Malibran and other films. That being said, Dress Rehearsal sets off some extraordinary performances-most notably by the Pina Bausch Dance Ensemble; then 74-year-old Japanese mime and female impersonator Kazuo Oono (to whom the film is dedicated); and Sankai Juko-in a light that, while possibly not true to the performances, is true to the film. (It all comes together when Kazuo Oono notes that Callas and Puccini are "especially close to the Japanese," something we suspected from Schroeter's juxtaposition of sound and image.) Schroeter, despairing of the place of art in the eighties, has gone to Nancy looking for "love," something we can interpret to mean the kind of passion he finds in the expression of these particular artists and few others. In art, he is looking not for Heimat but for Sehnsucht-"the home of the soul." Still, art is a form of cruelty (witness Sankai Juko, artists of physical torment, or Pina Bausch's psychically painful compositions) and cruelty, a form of art: Schroeter frames his whole investigation with a theory of recent German history, planned by the "architect" Hitler with a grant from General Motors, as a dress rehearsal for a much larger, more frightening historical flow. Perhaps it is no accident that, in intermittent interviews with a local vagrant, the bearded, vaguely Slavic-looking fellow mis-hears the question, "Are you afraid of death?" as "Are you afraid of theater?"