Order direct from Tenement here.

(31.07.24)

For further word on Schneewittchen,
see here.

The first instalment in a series of ‘talking books’—of collaborative ‘in conversation’ publications— named Harry Caul, a release to mark, signal and commemorate the domestic and international premiere(s) of Schtinter’s feature.

Brick & mortar bookshops /
order via asterism.


(Praise for Schtinter’s Schneewittchen.)

‘Rather than look, I’d rather hear,’ says Snow White. ‘I’m speechless,’ replies the prince, ‘imageless at such an image.’ ‘Woe unto me that I must hear,’ says Snow White. ‘Woe unto us that I must see,’ replies the prince. In his third-order reenactment of the Grimms’ tale, Schtinter joins Monteiro and Walser in questioning our compulsion to endlessly repeat the same story, forever draw on the same details. In such a state of exhaustion, it might be better not to see or hear anything at all. But the film is not a plain negation, a repudiation of the cinematic culture of the remake, and although it participates in what might appear to be the degradation of its sources, it’s not parody. Schtinter remakes with careful ambivalence. He finds for us a place between speechlessness and imagelessness, between empty speech, exhausted image, and the new. In Walser’s text, Snow White ultimately accepts the queen and the hunter’s story. ‘Say what you want. I believe you.’ Refusal or affirmation? Snow in a silent winter world. 
        —Alec Mapes-Frances, 
        The Paris Review

Also on [Stacy Martin’s] CV is Stanley Schtinter’s 2024 film Schneewittchen, in which she played Snow White. Except it’s not on the literal CV on her agency’s website, and its Letterboxd page vanished shortly after a 35mm print was screened at the BFI. (On the Wayback Machine, the top Letterboxd review goes: ‘This just pissed me off.’) Martin explains, ‘It’s an unconventional film in the sense that Stanley didn’t seek to put it in cinemas, or give it to a streamer. It was about the experience of seeing it, almost like a play, where you go and see it, and when it’s done, it’s done.’ 
        —Stacy Martin
       in interview with Nick Chen
       Dazed & Confused

Schtinter’s newest moving-image work is Schneewittchen, 2025, a feature-length, palimpsestic retelling of Snow White. The film features almost no footage and is instead centred on an English-language audio recording of the Swiss writer Robert Walser's titular German play (published in 1901), itself a reworking of the Brother’s Grimm fairy tale (published in 1812). Schtinter’s film, with its minimal visual content composed largely of a black screen, interspersed with seemingly unrelated shots of passing clouds, is formally also a remake of the Portuguese director João César Monteiro’s feature film, Branca de Neve / Snow White (2000), which performed the same feat with a Portuguese-language version of Walser’s play. A remake of a remake of a remake, then. While on the surface another puckish engagement with cultural production, Schtinter’s film nevertheless functions as both a challenge to the culture industry’s amnesiac thirst for endless remakes of commercial dross and as a kind of Brechtian confrontation with the spectacular expectations imposed on a patronised viewing public (the two are intimately bound up with each other). The project further frustrates the conventions of easy access required of moving image works, which must now be available for dissemination in a myriad of digital forms, many of which make it at least feasible for the viewing public to watch works as isolated individuals in their own homes. Schtinter's film will, according to the artist, ‘only ever show in analogue format, so it will always be an event to travel to and never streaming or screening digitally.’ For Schtinter, the political power of collective viewing is something worth fighting for.
        Talk of Brechtian distanciation, critiquing the culture industry, anti-capitalist stances, anti-spectacular image making and so on connects Schtinter to a critical tradition that may, in some ways, seem classically modernist. That is to say, there is an intention behind all of the work and a belief in something better for audiences and artists alike.

[...]

The ultimate agenda across Schtinter’s work, it seems, is an attempt to create a form of critical awareness regarding the destruction of certain intellectual and volitional faculties that humanity has fought to preserve over centuries—namely, the autonomy of thought and action.
       —Morgan Quaintance,
       Art Monthly (No.483, February 2025)

Schneewittchen serves as a salutary reminder that Disney’s creative drive has for almost a century been extricable from the way it mines its own art for merchandising purposes. 
        —Arjun Sajip, Sight & Sound

Stanley Schtinter has been described by writer Iain Sinclair as ‘the last accredited activist, the last avant-garde.’ He recently presented the premiere of his ‘endless’ video-work, The Lock-In, at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and exhibited the work as a solo presentation at the Barbican Centre in London during July 2022 (reviewed for The Guardian by Jonathan Jones as ‘an epic film [...] spellbinding, Warholian’). From May 2021 until May 2022 he presented Important Books (or, Manifestos read by Children) at Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2021, he published the edited collection, The Liberated Film Club and, in 2023, Last Movies (respectively, the second and tenth titles in Tenement Press’s ‘Yellowjacket’ series). Schtinter is the artistic director of purge.xxx; an ‘anti-’ record label (‘anti-’ everything) wherein he curates and publishes a catalogue of sound-works, soundtracks, and collaborations.

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film and event curator, producer, host and documentary mentor. He works on special projects for the London Review of Books and curates their ‘Screen at Home’ series. From 2012 to 2023, he was the Adjunct Moving Image Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery. He has written many catalogue essays and articles on place, culture, artists and the moving image, including an extensive text for Radiohead’s KId A MNESIA catalogue.  

Joshua Bonnetta is a Munich based interdisciplinary artist working with sound and image across installation, performance, and traditional cinema exhibition. His current works explore environmental sound through acoustic ecology and conservation bioacoustics frameworks. His work has been shown at The Berlinale, BFI London Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, and at various festivals, museums, and galleries internationally. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, Sight & Sound, Cinemascope, The Guardian, and the New York Times. His sound works are published by Shelter Press, Canti Magnetici, and Senufo Editions.

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