A woman experiences psychic disintegration and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

Set in Hamburg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it. He becomes a small-time pimp, sending his naive girlfriend out onto the streets thinking she is financing their middle-class future. When he becomes involved with an old pal, Nil, he increases his criminal portfolio. But when he steals Nil's girlfriend and things heat up, he leaves for his sister's middle-class home in Berlin, where his attempts to fit in are doomed from the start. Returning to Hamburg, he starts a rapid decline that delivers him into the waiting arms of Nil, whose revenge is merciless.

Max Taurus, a sort of amateur detective, pursues the traces of general omni-present crime back to a partially demolished house. There, the remaining tenants try to gain pleasure and power from progressive abandonment in order to tear down their own conventionalities.

A sartorially resplendent woman of few words arrives in Berlin with plans to live out the rest of her days as a drunkard.

Five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises and deformities throughout.

Living together in an isolated house, three women go to murderous lengths to keep strangers out of their private retreat.

In a dark and spare theatrical space, four characters use gesture, language, and movement to explore themes of desire and mortality.

Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music – with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.

Schroeter's virtuosic staging of the Oscar Wilde tragedy is a complex montage of image and sound, filmed on the grand steps of Baalbeck, the ancient Roman temple in Lebanon, and interweaving Lebanese and German folk songs with the music of Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Mozart, Bellini, and Donizetti. Elfi Mikesch, the cinematographer of Schroeter’s later films, designed the film’s sumptuous costumes. A contemporary critic for Le Monde wrote admiringly of Schroeter’s depiction of "the deadly struggle between dark Christian morality and luminous paganism.“

A series of tableaux illustrating the life and death of a celebrated 19th century German opera singer.