On a crumbling estate off the Italian coast, filled with roses, a beautiful German woman, Anna, lives with her son, Albert, who is in love with an Apollonian farmhand, Arnold?.More than the outrageous, grandiloquent, ridiculous, or obscene images, it is music, the omnipresent, precise use of music, that sets Werner Schroeter's films apart. "In my films, music is an intrinsic part of the content. There isn't a single musical piece in which the words do not relate directly to theimage." It is music that orders his films-in The Rose King, a seemingly disparate collage of texts in a half dozen languages, Viennese waltzes, Arabic songs, operatic music intercut with waves breaking, sheep bleating, and assorted seemingly incongruous sounds. Music provides the exact link between images and between images and sounds. This does not mean that the resulting associations cannot be absurd, contradictory, or paradoxical. They often are, but they are all intended. In The Rose King, as in his earlier films, the sumptuous visual track is methodically controlled by a disturbing soundtrack-as if Schroeter intended to display the autonomy of cinema by using its most impure element.-Bertrand Augst