Like Kingdom of Naples (shown November29), Palermo or Wolfsburg is deceptively naturalistic; what begins as adocumentary-style tale of a Sicilian guest-worker in Germany finallyreveals itself to be as surrealistic as the life of its hero, aninnocent who wanders into a pariah class and finds himself on trial formurder. The first panel of this triptych film is a landscape portrait:Nicola (played by the non-professional actor Nicola Zarbo) is setagainst the landscape and rituals of extreme poverty in his nativeSicilian town. Love among the ruins, life there is a passion play, thememory of which frequently returns to Nicola in the darkness of Germany.In the second panel, as Gary Indiana writes in Art Forum, "a hugeVW emblem glowering above the Volkswagen plant (in Wolfsburg) is thesign under which Nicola's tragedy plays out, a symbol of brutalizedpersonal relationships and unanimous exploitation. The town of Wolfsburgis used like a linguistic maze...The murder trial fills the third panelof Palermo, rendered as a Buñuelian nightmare. Witnesses offerimpertinent, partisan testimony in Sicilian and German...A replica of aPalermo church is carried into the court as 'evidence,' as the rowboatwas used against Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun. The reciprocalincomprehension of two cultures becomes the subject of thetrial...(Palermo or Wolfsburg) is a synthetic, intellectual restatementof the oppositions in Schroeter's films-heart versus head, Germanyversus Italy. It confirms his persistent longing for a resolution whichwill never occur; that longing is the impetus of Schroeter's work." Palermo or Wolfsburg won the Golden Bear at the1980 Berlin Film Festival.