“When I started directing, my idols were men,” acknowledges the German director and pioneer of feminist cinema, who this Friday collects the Mikeldi de Honor de Zinebi
Margarethe von Trotta (Berlin, 1942) changed her life when she was 18 years old when she saw Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ in Paris. That day she understood the possibilities of cinema and decided that she would be a director, something that would take twenty years to achieve. Daughter of the painter Alfred Roloff and the aristocrat Elisabeth von Trotta, who kept another daughter hidden whom the filmmaker only knew as an adult, her beginnings as an actress under the command of the heavyweights of New German cinema – Fassbinder, Herzog, Wender and Schlöndorff, her second husband – gave way to a filmography as a director that exceeds twenty titles.
The author of ‘The lost honor of Katharina Blum’, ‘The second awakening of Christa Klages’, ‘Madness of a woman’, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’, ‘I am the other’ and ‘Hannah Arendt’ will receive this Friday, November 12, the Mikeldi of Honor of Zinebi from the mayor of Bilbao, Juan Mari Aburto. The next day she will star in a special session at the Museum of Fine Arts with the screening of ‘The German Sisters’, a film for which she won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1981, being one of the five women to achieve it (the other four are Agnès Varda, Mira Nair, Sofia Coppola and Chloé Zhao). Afterwards, he will answer questions from the public and chat with Navarra director Helena Taberna.
At 79 years old, Von Trotta is a smiling and charming woman, who accepts her status as a feminist icon. “I love seeing that the director of this festival is a woman,” he compliments Vanesa Fernández, while trusting that the day will come “when we will not talk about a female director, but about a director without more.” Filming will begin in March on a film about the love story of the poet Ingeborg Bachmann and the writer Max Frisch. In their relationship he sees echoes of the one she had with Volker Schlöndorff. “I’m still looking for someone to protect me, but to let me be creative and free at the same time,” she is sincere. Von Trotta has brought the lives of Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt and Hildegard Von Bingen to the cinema. In Germany they often ask him if he would do the same with Angela Merkel. I would have to wait until she was dead to feel free and add my look. And she is younger than me », he ironizes. “In Germany they call Merkel ‘mommy’, something that has not happened with Kohl or Schmidt. You see? Women are treated differently than men.
– He claims that a Bertolt Brecht maxim has guided his life: “Better to do shit than to do nothing.”
– I would speak better of two phrases that marked me before being a filmmaker and gave me courage, the idea that perhaps I could become a director. That one you mention and another quote from Goethe, our great poet: “Desire always precedes ability.”
Margarethe von Trotta on the set of one of her films.
– The past in your cinema is crucial, especially the history of your country, Germany.
‘I belong to a generation of Germans who were not taught their recent history in the classroom. Nazism, Hitler … We did not study any of that, there was total silence about that past. Neither our parents nor our teachers told us anything about it. We began to understand it in the 1960s, when the student riots occurred. It was a shock when we learned of the crimes of Germany during Nazism. I wanted to know everything about Germany, not only in Hitler’s time but in previous years. ‘Rosa Luxemburg’ speaks for example of the Weimar Republic.
– Is it still necessary to remember that past, now that the far-right parties are re-emerging throughout Europe?
-Yes, but perhaps it is not my turn to remember it, but to the young generations. It is terrible to see the return of National Socialism, it scares me and makes me feel angry, it is as if the seeds that were buried are sprouting again. It seems that people have not understood what that past was like and that we cannot go back to it. In France and in other countries a new form of nationalism has emerged that is gaining strength. But in our country it is special, more worrying, because we committed all these crimes in the past.
– Do you consider yourself a pioneer of feminist cinema? Do you agree with that very definition of feminist cinema?
-In the beginning it was fine and I accepted it, because we were very few directors and we had to fight to get our films out. But if you see my work, it goes beyond talking about feminism. When I started directing, my idols, my references, were men: Bergman, Hitchcock … There was a director in France, Agnès Varda. And Liliana Cavani in Italy. Even in Germany it was not easy to see his films. Now, on the other hand, there are many women directors, the younger generations can look to us as an example.
Margarethe von Trotta at the Arriaga Theater in Bilbao. /
– In your next film, you will look at the poet Ingeborg Bachmann.
–In the late 50s, women were looking for a man to protect and support them. Bachmann was ahead of her time, something exceptional. As a woman, I can identify with her today. Think that still in the 70s, in Germany a woman had to ask her husband for permission to work outside the home and have a bank account. And that lasted until 1977. Today it seems incredible.
–The dream of a united Europe, which is cracking, is also present in your cinema.
– The idea of a united Europe has been very important to me. When I was young, before my first marriage, I was stateless, I could only be a German citizen when I got married. Understand me, I loved him and stuff, but he was a free thinker and could live without being married. I did it above all to obtain German nationality and be able to travel freely to France and Italy, without the need for recommendations and obtaining visas. When the European Union emerged I felt fulfilled, it was a great achievement. Now it makes me very angry to see how so many countries want to leave and return to nationalism. I can’t understand England or the rise of these nationalist parties.
– What has the cinema given you?
– Life, cinema has become my life. At the age of eighteen, I saw my first Bergman film in Paris. Before I had gone to the opera, to the theater, to exhibitions, because cinema in Germany at that time, the 1950s, was just pure entertainment, it was not art. And then I saw ‘The Seventh Seal’ and, aahh, I understood all that cinema could be. At that precise moment I knew that I wanted to be a director. It took me twenty years to be. Cinema truly became my life.
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