Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum From book

Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum From book to film

New German Cinema • 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto • 26 filmmakers declare death of ‘Papas Kino’ • Opposition to ‘Heimatfilm’ & other entertainment genres • 1965 foundation of Kuratorium junger deutscher Filme e. V. – govt. loans to young fillmakers • Becomes most influential cinema development in Germany from late 60 s to early 90 s. • Decline in 1980 s with rise of new wave of commercial film production (e. g. Bernd Eichinger)

Directors • • Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Maria Braun, Lola) Wim Wenders (Alice in den Städten; Paris, Texas) Werner Herzog (Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo) Volker Schlöndorff (Die Blechtrommel, Homo Faber) Helma Sanders-Brahms (Deutschland, bleiche Mutter) Margarethe von Trotta (Schwestern, Die bleierne Zeit) Alexander Kluge (Die Patriotin, Die Macht der Gefühle) Edgar Reitz (Heimat-trilogy)

Volker Schlöndorff • Born 1939 • Internationally & commercially most successful director of New German Cinema • First Oscar for a German film for Die Blechtrommel (1979) • Specialises on adaptations from literature (e. g. film version of M. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990)

Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum • Film adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta, 1975 • With co-operation from Heinrich Böll on script

Literature vs. film Individual production Individual reception Low cost Narrator(s) Narrative perspective Language Literary techniques (focalisation, perspective, rhetorical devices, irony, plot devices etc. ) • Time (reflection) • • Collective production Collective reception High cost No visible narrator Visual narrative Image Filmic techniques (editing, mise en scene, framing, sound, etc. • Technology • Immediacy (immersion) • •

Adaptation novel into film: issues • • • Inner mind Language based Narrator and point of view Tenses/Time Focus not on action but character

Film adaptation • • Translation Fidelity vs. interpretation Critical language often moralistic: Infidelity, betrayal, deformation, vulgarisation, violation

Critical prejudices against adaption • Anteriority equals superiority (older = better) • Dichotomous thinking that presumes rivalry between literature and film • Iconophobia – superiority of writing over images (from ancient Greece to 20 th ct. ) • Logophilia – valuation of written word over image • Anti-corporeality – distaste for unseemly embodiedness of filmic text. • Myth of facility of film making vs. writing • Class prejudice • Parasitism (adaptations feed off literary model)

(Post)-Structuralist criticism • Inter-textuality (e. g. Julia Kristeva) • Semiotics (e. g. Roland Barthes) • Dialogism (Mikhail Bakhtin)

• What would be the greatest difficulties of turning Böll’s novella into film? • Issue of narrator: what is the function of Böll’s narrator? What is the role of narrator in story? • How important would you say is narrator for message of Böll’s book? Why?

Films with non-linear plotlines • • • Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) The Killing (Stanley Kubrick 1956) Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1962) Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) The usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry/Kaufman, 2004)