The filmmaker on her eightieth birthday. By Daniel Kothenschulte
When Margarethe von Trotta was honored with the Adorno Prize in Frankfurt in 2018, it seemed a bit like a correction by the philosopher himself. Although he respected auteur films, he despised the culture industry that surrounded him. For the best-known director of New German Cinema, however, this was never a contradiction in terms. Again and again she found a wide audience with her personal works. Like only a few representatives of the German auteur film, she gained a worldwide following.
Even her first directing work, which she produced together with Volker Schlöndorff, was extremely successful without making any artistic concessions. “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum”, released in 1975 just one year after Heinrich Böll’s novel, can today be considered to be the best film adaptation of the Nobel Prize winner.
A straightforward film language corresponds to the bitter fatalism of the systematic destruction of the protagonist by the tabloid press. If the audience ended up clenching their fists in their pockets, it wasn’t the product of cinema convention. At the time, Wolfram Schütte wrote in the “Frankfurter Rundschau”: “The viewer may and should leave the cinema more irritated, annoyed, disturbed than in the knowledge that he has watched a smooth and moving tragedy or a merely sentimental melodrama.”
First as an actress
In Margarethe von Trotta’s best films, emotionality arose from intimate acting, which she brought to bear particularly well in chamber plays. She herself had initially made a name for herself as an actress, including in Frankfurt’s Kleines Theater am Zoo and in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Herbert Achternbusch. In her documentary “In Search of Ingmar Bergman” from 2018, she names the art of the Swede as a great inspiration for her film style.
In fact, with her political drama Die leadene Zeit, she even created one of Bergman’s declared favorite films. Her award of the Golden Lion at the 1981 Venice Film Festival was one of the first major awards ever given to a female filmmaker and marked a breakthrough in the recognition of feminist cinema. In it, Trotta processes the biographies of the sisters Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin into an individual discourse on finding identity in politicization and social changes. Only at the age of forty, after the death of her mother, did the filmmaker find out that she had a sister herself. After a television documentary, a woman 15 years older than her contacted her; this experience later became the Trotta film “The Lost World”. Shortly before this encounter, she had just finished her important film Sisters or the Balance of Happiness (1979). In it, Jutta Lampe plays a successful executive secretary who supports her sensitive younger sister (Gudrun Gabriel) without really understanding her. After her suicide, she replaces her place with a strange woman. Only late does she allow grieving. With her special fondness for sister dramas, von Trotta appropriates a motif that was already popular in classic Hollywood cinema. But the jealousy that is so popular there, aimed at materialistic or physical aspects, plays no role in her films.
Don’t stand in a niche
There have been more aesthetically radical positions among female filmmakers who have been encroaching on the male domain of cinema since the late 1960s, but von Trotta’s films did not want to be niche. In her large biopics, she passionately conveyed the life’s work of Rosa Luxemburg, Hildegard von Bingen and Hannah Arendt. The fact that these cinematic monuments did not solidify in marble was also due to Margarethe von Trotta’s special talent as a screenwriter.
She is celebrating her 80th birthday today with uninterrupted productivity. Her latest film is currently being shot – and it looks like two of her specialties are being combined: “Bachmann & Frisch” is not only a biopic about great personalities in literary history, but also an intimate character study. Vicky Kriebs and Roland Zehrfeld play the lovers. Perhaps Margarethe von Trotta’s life would also be worth a biopic, then Volker Schlöndorff, with whom she was married for two decades, would also have a place in it. A worldwide interest would probably be certain. This great filmmaker is not only admired but loved for her perseverance, consistency and loyalty to herself.
