Stanley Schtinter’s Schneewittchen (2025) is a triple adaptation, twice refracted from João César Monteiro’s Branca de Neve (2000), a Portuguese adaptation of Robert Walser’s play Snow White, which is, of course, a retelling of the original fairy tale. At the BFI London premiere of Schneewittchen, Schtinter claimed that his own work was an “Americanization” of Monteiro’s film. Schneewittchen fittingly arrives in New York just as Disney ushers in its newest remake of Snow White (2025). Criticizing the contemporary Hollywood production chain that has become increasingly reliant on remakes, Schtinter’s own reproduction of Monteiro’s film provocatively questions the purpose of new images in an oversaturated landscape.
Walser’s text, too, is interested in the corruption at the heart of reproduction, opening where the fairytale ends, with the eponymous princess returning back from the dead. Snow White struggles with the awful history of her stepmother’s betrayal, and in an effort to return to her prelapsarian, pre-death innocence, she does not forsake the Queen. Instead, she begs for her forgiveness. Both Monteiro and Schtinter’s works presciently examine the corruption of truth and faith in a postmodern world. They are almost entirely imageless, leaving the audience ensconced within the darkness of the cinema, save for a few shots of a cloudy sky that act as scene dividers. Branca de Neve is haunted by a series of arresting images at the beginning of the film: four photographs of Walser lying dead in the snow, a literal representation of the death of the author. Fitting for Schtinter, whose previous book, Last Movies, concerned itself with the last images people saw before they died. However, in Schtinter’s Schneewittchen, he recreates the images of Walser’s death with himself in the role of Walser. Where Monteiro’s film depended on the solemnity of these images to examine the death of the author, Schtinter goes further, suggesting that there is only death’s reproduction left with a staged image that is almost cruel in its glossy perfection.
There is a deliberate pop feel to Schtinter’s remake, as the film boasts a bona fide celebrity cast that includes Stacy Martin as Snow White, Julie Christie as the Queen, Hanns Zischler as the Huntsman, and Toby Jones as the Prince—not to mention Sean Price Williams’s cinematography. It is a fitting joke that we never see our British national treasures. The “radio-play” atmosphere of the film often falls flat. Martin’s voice could not be more lackluster, while Jones’s voice betrays his old age. Schtinter seems to have given little direction to his actors, such that the aural space of his narrative remains oblique and undefined, without the precise silences that structure Monteiro’s film. Yet, perhaps this weightlessness is a deliberate gesture toward the rote nature of remakes? With Schtinter, it often feels that we are nestled within multiple layers of reflexive gags, without ever fully knowing what his own intentions are beyond a desire to corrupt.
Schneewittchen screens this evening, March 20, and until March 23, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of “Schneewittchen (Snow White).”
