Margarethe von Trotta was born at a tumultuous time: the year 1942 in Berlin, Germany. After going through the war and graduating from high school, she studied business, art, philology, and drama. But in the early 1960s her world was changed by a visit to Paris, where she saw films by Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and the directors of the French New Wave. As she later explained, “I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies. Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, all of the sudden I understood what cinema could be. I stood there and said, ‘That is what I’d like to do with my life.’ ”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be easy. There were few female directors working in the industry, so von Trotta started taking on small parts as an actress. She caught the attention of several directors, including Volker Schlöndorff, who later became her romantic partner and creative collaborator. She cowrote with Schlöndorff on several projects before getting the chance to prove herself as a director alongside him on The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Because that film went on to be such a success, von Trotta was given more opportunities as a director and proved herself by making movies centering on women. She made The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, released in 1978, based on the true story of a kindergarten teacher who robbed a bank to keep the school open.
And then, beginning in 1979, Margarethe von Trotta made her famous trilogy of films about sisters. With Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness, Marianne and Juliane (sometimes known as The German Sisters), and Three Sisters, von Trotta became an important feminist director and one of the leading filmmakers in New German Cinema.
Throughout the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s, and to this day, von Trotta continues to make films about the struggles of everyday women. Her stories are sensitively told and depict complex, three-dimensional female characters, delving into their psychology, emotions, and inner life. Comparisons have been made between her work and the films of Ingmar Bergman, who Margarethe von Trotta has cited as a huge influence. She explored this personal connection in a documentary called Searching for Ingmar Bergman, which played at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Despite her focus on the stories of women, the title of “feminist” or “female” filmmaker is one from which Margarethe von Trotta has shied away. As she explained in an interview with The Observer, this was more due to the reaction of a paying audience than her own views. “When I started to make films,” she said, “I wanted to tell something about me and about us and about my experience and my knowledge. I felt also a little bit like a duty to speak about women, like I was a voice for other women who didn’t have this possibility to speak. I have nothing against feminism, and surely I’m a feminist, but the word is used now mainly by men, in an ironic way. They say, ‘Oh, that’s just a women’s film. You don’t have to go in, it’s not interesting for you as a man.’ I’m very much against this.”
And indeed, to view von Trotta as only a great female filmmaker would be to reduce her immense talents. With her remarkable body of work, unique perspective, and skills in telling engaging stories, there is little doubt that Margarethe von Trotta is one of the most important German directors in history and that she deserves to be talked about alongside the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Volker Schlöndorff.
Katharina Blum is treated very differently than if she were a man. When she doesn’t display the appropriate amount of shame at sleeping with someone she has just met, the male-dominated police force and a male reporter go out of their way to ruin her reputation—and show no remorse when she begins to receive anonymous hate mail calling her degrading names and threatening to ruin her life.
★The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was one of the biggest hits of any German films in the 1970s and was released the same year as another political thriller, Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford.
★On set, Volker Schlöndorff looked after the technical side of directing, while Margarethe von Trotta took care of the performances—the aspect most praised by critics.
★The success of this film led to a 1984 made-for-television remake called The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck, starring Marlo Thomas and Kris Kristofferson.
★In 1992, the great director Ingmar Bergman was asked by the Göteborg Film Festival to list the films that had most impressed him. Among names like Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa, he included Margarethe von Trotta. He particularly admired her film Marianne and Juliane and told her it had given him courage during a time of depression.
★When Margarethe von Trotta won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for her film Marianne and Juliane, she was the first director to win that top prize since Leni Riefenstahl’s win for Olympia in 1938.
Seven Beauties
(Pasqualino Settebellezze)
Medusa Distribuzione, 1975, Italy | Color, 114 minutes, Comedy/Drama
An Italian man joins the army during World War II to avoid a murder conviction, only to end up in a concentration camp after deserting his unit.
Director: Lina Wertmüller
Producer: Arrigo Colombo
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Screenplay: Lina Wertmüller
Starring: Giancarlo Giannini (“Pasqualino”), Fernando Rey (“Pedro”), Shirley Stoler (“Prison Camp Commandant”), Piero Di Iorio (“Francesco”)
“What I hope to express in my films is my great faith in the possibility of man becoming human.”
—Lina Wertmüller
When Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties was released in 1975, it caused quite a bit of controversy. This was nothing new for Wertmüller, who was already one of the most talked-about filmmakers in Italy thanks to her scathing and provocative critiques of life there. But Seven Beauties asked the audience to do two unthinkable things: to follow the story of a man who murders, rapes, and is cowardly; and to laugh while being shown the horrors of World War II.
Right from the opening credits, we know we’re in for an unconventional war film. Seven Beauties starts with a series of newsreel images from the war, set rather incongruously to the song “Oh Yeah” by Enzo Jannacci. The lyrics include: “The ones who vote for the right because they’re fed up with strikes. Oh yeah. The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty. The ones who never get involved with politics. Oh yeah.”
This sets the tone for what we are about to see—a study of the contradictions of the people involved in World War II and how those who stood by and did nothing are as guilty as those who committed the atrocities.
And the central character of Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is certainly guilty. We are introduced to him at the very moment he deserts Mussolini’s army, running through a dark, rainy forest in Germany. He boasts to fellow Italian soldier Francesco (Piero Di Iorio) that he stole bandages from a dead man in order to fake an injury and escape. When they later come across Nazi