The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975)

Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta's Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum / The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), spotlights the main character, Katharina Blum, in a way that underscores the exuberance of mid-70s feminism. 

Found chart courtesy of the internet. 

Combine global male resistance to independent women with fear and panic over security and terrorism, and voila, you've got a film ready-made for the 21st century. 

The movie is based on Heinrich Böll's darkly satirical 1974 novel, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann /  The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where it can Lead. 

The almost absurdly intrusive surveillance and media system depicted in the film might seem beyond belief were it not for a series of similarly themed dystopian science fiction works -- and actual historical developments still being played out. 

Angela Winkler is key to the success of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. As she would later do playing "the eel-eating woman" in Volker Schlöndorff's Academy Award winning The Tin Drum (1979), she delivers here with total commitment.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.  

  

Margarethe von Trotta: 'Vision - Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen' (2009)

Margarethe von Trotta's Vision - Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (2009) gives us a pretty good idea of what life was life in a cloister in the Middle Ages. It also brings into view the very interesting life's arc of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179).

Vision also brings in Brother Volmar, Hildegard's fellow Benedictine buddy and scribe. 

Hildegard von Bingen was just sainted in 2012 -- some 833 years after her death. She has also been designated a Doctor of the Catholic Church. 

By way of comparison, Hildegard was like a mix of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She was a Renaissance Woman well before the Renaissance. Botany, music, art, writing, and leading a social cohort -- she did it all. 

Meanwhile, the USA has yet to elect its first woman president. 

Vision: nuns with books in the woods. 

Vision: nuns on horseback. Hildegard was very aware of the greater world of and before her time. At one point in Vision, she laments that she has only 400 manuscripts in her library, whereas the Caliph of Córdoba had access to 400,000 volumes. "Can you imagine?" she askes Brother Volmar. She could and she did. The Feast Day of Saint Hildegard? September 17.

Today's Rune: Journey.   

Volker Schlöndorff's 'Der Fangschuß' / 'Coup de grâce' (1976): Take II

Volker Schlöndorff's Der Fangschuß / Coup de grâce (1976) works on several levels. Visually, it's strong yet low-key, shot in black and white. Dramatically, conflict drives plot, albeit in a somewhat eerie way because it seems so matter-of-fact. There is intense but shifting tension between German Freikorps officer Erich von Lhomond (Matthias Habich) and Sophie de Reval (Margarethe von Trotta); and there are matters of war and revolution. The latter combo is starkly brought out by showing the German-Latvian "nationalists" based in a fortified estate vs. their Latvian-Bolshevik-allied challengers, traditionally the poorer workers and crafts-people based in and around Kratovice, the nearby village. The estate or chateau compound seems much like a Mexican or Spanish villa, with an almost Medieval social system being rent apart at the time of the story, post the Great War of 1914-1918 and into the 1920s.

Coup de grâce is based on a 1939 novel by Franco-Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), but the movie is considerably more detailed in its depiction of warfare and daily life. 

What we see is a strange and disconcerting mix of protocol, decorum, regimentation, and gallows humor punctuated by bursts of emotion and violence -- the latter, however, is often carried out with what seems like no emotion at all, such as the routine killing of prisoners on both sides.

Valeska Gert as Tante Praskovia -- a bizarre character, as you may imagine by this image. Gert actually performed in the 1920s, so the time period covered by the film is something she'd personally experienced. Her role is as a sort of Cassandra, or slightly barmy yet keen observer.

The fate of Sophie's dog "Texas." 

Schlöndorff has made a series of intense, heavy-hitting films, ranging from Die Blechtrommel / The Tin Drum (1979) to Un amour de Swann / Swann in Love (1984), The Handmaid's Tale (1990) to Diplomatie / Diplomacy (2014). 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.   

Volker Schlöndorff's 'Der Fangschuß' / 'Coup de grâce' (1976): Take I

Volker Schlöndorff's 1976 film Der Fangschuß / Coup de grâce (1976) is outstanding, a solid A bit of work. I just saw a crisp Criterion Collection DVD version of this great movie. Yes, there are subtitles -- the language spoken is mostly German, with some French tossed in. Learn something new -- not a big deal (especially if you're already German).

Take five other similarly-themed films, mix them together in a black & white cocktail and boom, there you have an idea of Schlöndorff's vision. The other films?

Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers (1963).

David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965).  

Aleksandr Askoldov's Комиссар / Komissar / Commissar / The Commissar (1967/1988). 

Luchino Victoni's La caduta deglis dei / The Damned (1969).

Olivier Hisschbregel's Der Untergand / Downfall (2004).

Come on, now: how many films are you going to get to see that deal with the Latvian Wars of Independence, or any of the wars that convulsed the Baltic States after the Great War of 1914-1918? Bolsheviks! Germans! Latvians! 

(It could just as easily stand in for the Syrian Civil War today, or the nasty bit of business going in in Ukraine as of this post, or Somalia and Yemen). 

And there are strong women characters! 

But what could be more (almost comically) serious and stern as these two German officers? 

What a film! More details to follow.

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

Margarethe von Trotta: 'The Second Awakening of Christa Klages' (1978)

Margarethe von Trotta's Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages / The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978) is a beautiful gem of a film. First, it captures the Zeitgeist of the 1970s -- the spirit of the times: think Patty Hearst and the Baader-Meinhof, for example. This spirit pervades a crisis framework for the characters to move within, but the more surprising aspects of the film arrive through interdependent character development and social interaction that is refreshingly different from the more typical "buddy movie." 

Barely before The Second Awakening of Christa Klages is underway, two young men and the title character rob a bank in a most foolhardy manner; their ill-conceived notion is to help fund a sort of hippie school for little kids where Christa worked and has left her daughter for safekeeping. 

From this strange beginning, everyone is figuratively off to the races. One of them makes it to an idealistic collective in Portugal, but things don't end there. 

The strongest and more interesting characters in The Second Awakening of Christa Klages are three women and one man. Christa (Tina Engel) befriends the kind and thoughtful Pastor Hans Graw (Peter Schneider) and she also finds solace with Ingrid (Silvia Reize), a friend from the past. Finally, the mysterious Lena (Katharina Thalbach) works at the exchange bank Christa robbed and appears to be stalking her. 

Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages was director Margarethe von Trotta's first feature-length contribution to Der Neue Deutsche Film / the New German Cinema movement. The film print of the version I saw was washed out; it would be nice if this movie could be added to the Criterion Collection and given full honors. This is a cool indie film, different from most up to its time because of its special consideration of female characters. 

Today's Rune: The Self. 

Margarethe von Trotta: 'Hannah Arendt' (2012)

Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2012) focuses on the deep 20th century thinker (pronounced more like "Errant" or "Aren't" than "Ah-Rent") around the time (early 1960s) of Adolf Eichman's trial -- and execution -- in Israel. 

With her articles on the Eichmann trial and the resulting book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Arendt's ideas at the time aroused heated controversy because of their multilayered complexity. Specifically at one point, she argues that some Jews were complicit in facilitating the evils of the Holocaust through their cooperation with Nazis. The movie covers all of this ground very well, including the hatred from others which she had to contend with.   

Many people nowadays know at least some of Hannah Arendt's ideas, with or without her name attached to them, such as "the banality of evil:" evil acts made easy by a widespread, bureaucratic, impersonal evasion of responsibility. Pass the buck. It's not my department. I didn't know. I was just following orders, rules, protocol. Sorry, I cannot recall . . .   

It took me about twenty minutes to get into sync with Hannah Arendt's pacing and field of characters; once in, I was all in. 

The meticulous 1960s details of a working intellectual and her circle of friends, assistants and critics -- plus her living and working spaces -- are all excellent, as are the actors: especially Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt and Axel Milberg as Heinrich Blücher, Hannah's anti-Stalinist communist philosopher-poet professor husband. 

Among several other important characters, keep an eye out for Martin Heidegger, the philosopher -- an early paramour and, for at least a time, Nazi sympathizer -- and American writer-friend Mary McCarthy. 

Today's Rune: Partnership.