It was Seyrig’s star power which made Jeanne Dielman possible. The budget was small, and the crew was almost entirely made up of women. Chantal Akerman was just twenty-four years old at the time, working outside of any studio system, pushing the boundaries of film format and length. The movie premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim, with the New York Times calling it the “first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema,” and it has since become a cult classic.
After that success, Akerman said she felt she had to escape her own mastery and avoid repeating herself. She moved away from studying the effects of time in film and began making movies across all genres—musicals, comedies, and documentaries. Her final film was No Home Movie, released in 2015. This was a documentary featuring conversations between herself and her mother just before her mother passed away in 2014. Chantal Akerman suffered from grief and depression following her mother’s death, and was briefly hospitalized. On October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, Akerman took her own life.
Her life was short, but Chantal Akerman’s legacy lives on, with filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul citing Jeanne Dielman and Akerman as a powerful influence.
Considered a masterpiece of feminist cinema, Jeanne Dielman was released during “second-wave” feminism—a time when women staying at home doing domestic tasks had begun speaking up about their feelings of isolation. This film tapped into the sense of alienation women were feeling at the time, which are present in Jeanne’s anxiety and melancholy as a character. Jeanne Dielman has also been praised for the way it elevates a woman’s domestic work to art by using long takes and a still camera which was purposely not voyeuristic in nature. Also, Akerman chose not to show Jeanne’s other work as a prostitute, and the film does not shame her for it.
★Chantal Akerman made more than forty films during her career, filming in Belgium, eastern Europe, the US, Israel, Mexico, China, and more.
★She was a multitalented artist. In addition to her films, Akerman wrote a play, published two books, and worked in the art world creating a series of video installations.
★In the 1970s, while living in New York, Akerman was inspired by the video work of avant-garde artists such as Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol. She started to experiment with some of the techniques used by these artists, but turning her lens onto the daily life of women.
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
Bioskop Film, 1975, Germany | Color, 106 minutes, Drama/Thriller
A young woman’s life is ruined after she is accused of aiding a terrorist.
Director: Margarethe von Trotta
(with Volker Schlöndorff)
Producer: Eberhard Junkersdorf
Cinematography: Jost Vacano
Screenplay: Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, based on a novel by Heinrich Böll
Starring: Angela Winkler
(“Katharina Blum”), Mario Adorf (“Kommissar Beizmenne”), Dieter Laser (“Werner Tötges”), Jürgen Prochnow (“Ludwig Götten”)
“I am always attracted by a woman who has to fight for her own life and her own reality, who has to get out of a certain situation of imprisonment, to free herself. That is perhaps the main theme in all my films.”
—Margarethe von Trotta
In the early 1970s, a bank in West Germany was robbed. The following day, and without any evidence, the nation’s biggest newspaper, Bild-Zeitung, attributed the robbery to the Baader-Meinhof gang. That gang, sometimes known as the Red Army Faction, was a far left-wing militant group. At the time, the country was gripped by fears about terrorism, and the newspaper seemed to be focused on fanning the flames of paranoia. Nobel-winning novelist Heinrich Böll wrote an essay condemning Bild-Zeitung for the news magazine Der Spiegel, and the paper responded by calling him a terrorist sympathizer. Böll and his family started to receive hate mail, were subject to wire taps, and encountered other police harassment. Eventually Böll turned this harrowing experience into The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: How Violence Can Arise and What It Can Lead To, a novel about a young woman whose life is ruined by the press. The book was a bestseller, but even before it was published two politically minded filmmakers had decided to turn it into a movie.
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was directed by Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, starring Angela Winkler in the title role. At the beginning of the film, Katharina is a beautiful, hardworking young woman who meets an attractive man, Ludwig Götten (Jürgen Prochnow), on a rare night out with friends. Their chemistry is immediate, and Blum leaves the party with him, taking him back to her place. In the morning she is startled by the police, who burst into her apartment looking for him. They claim that Götten is a terrorist and take Blum into custody on suspicion of aiding him.
At the police station, Blum is subjected to hours of questioning by Kommissar Beizmenne (Mario Adorf) and his team. They taunt her for sleeping with Götten so soon after meeting him, but she refuses to flinch or play their games. As a form of punishment, Beizmenne leaks details about the case to a brash reporter from The Paper. Based on these scant details, Werner Tötges (Dieter Laser) begins to publish scathing articles about Katharina’s love life, each becoming more sensational by the day. Blum starts to receive hate mail, obscene phone calls, and unwanted sexual advances. Her safety is threatened, her friends distance themselves from her, and she loses her job. All the while, The Paper prints more and more articles about Blum and her life, ruining her reputation and placing her under severe psychological stress.
Though this is a movie made over forty years ago, it feels as timely as ever. Watching it again, I was reminded of the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson, which explores the type of glee people seem to experience from watching and participating in online trolling and the devastating effects on the person targeted. Katharina’s experience could also be likened to the invasive level of surveillance some individuals were subjected to following 9/11, or to how hate has been stoked by fake news posts and conspiracy theories circulated via social media.
In case von Trotta and Schöndorff’s intentions were not sufficiently clear back in 1975, the film included a scathing epitaph which reads, “Should the description of certain journalistic practices bear any resemblance to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, this is nether intentional, nor accidental, but unavoidable.” It was a brave action on their part to speak up against such a powerful media company.
The press in the The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum have zero regard for civil liberties, and the police are portrayed as morally bankrupt. There is little nuance on either side, with their actions exaggerated to make a point about the erosion of civil liberties and the dangers involved when authorities begin acting as if they are above the law.
Angela Winkler grounds the film with a singularly powerful performance. Her steadfast silence enrages the police, who expect her to be a “good girl” and cooperate—or at the very least, to be ashamed for having a one-night stand. It’s not personal, they insist, but then decide to destroy her through the media. In this they are helped by the misogynistic Tötges, who is the type of person who believes any fame is good, even when it comes with vicious slut-shaming from members of the public. “You are news,” he tells her proudly. Soon, it doesn’t matter why the police questioned her in the first place. In the eyes of her community, Blum is guilty—her biggest crime being that