Volker Schlöndorff (; born 31 March 1939) is a German film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was a prominent member of the New German Cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s, often collaborating with his then-wife and fellow filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. His 1979 film The Tin Drum, based on Günter Grass' novel of the same name, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d'Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.
His other notable films have included The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975, co-directed with von Trotta), the documentary Germany in Autumn (1978), Swann in Love (1984), Death of a Salesman (1985), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Voyager (1991), The Ogre (1996), and Diplomacy (2014). He is also a Professor of film and literature at the European Graduate School, and a founding member of the Deutsche Filmakademie.
Early life
Volker Schlöndorff was born in Wiesbaden, then part of Nazi Germany, to the physician Georg Schlöndorff. His mother was killed in a kitchen fire in 1944. His family moved to Paris in 1956, where Schlöndorff won awards at school for his work in philosophy. He graduated in political science at the Sorbonne, while at the same time studying film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, where he was friends with Bertrand Tavernier and met Louis Malle. Malle gave him his first job as his assistant director on Zazie in the Metro (1960), which continued with the films A Very Private Affair (1962), The Fire Within (1963), and Viva Maria! (1965). Schlöndorff also worked as assistant director on Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad and Jean-Pierre Melville's Léon Morin, Priest (both 1961). During this time he also made his first short film, Who Cares?, about French people living in Frankfurt in 1960. He collaborated with filmmaker Jean-Daniel Pollet on the 40-minute documentary Méditerranée, released in 1963. The film is highly regarded, gaining praise from Jean-Luc Godard and consistently appearing in the popular book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.
Career
Early works Schlöndorff returned to Germany to make his feature film debut, Young Törless (Der junge Törless, 1966). Produced by Malle and based on Robert Musil's novel The Confusions of Young Törless, it debuted at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. Taking place at a semi-military Austrian boarding school, Törless witnesses the bullying of a fellow student but does nothing to prevent it despite his superior and mature intellect. He gradually begins to accept his personal responsibility for the abuse through his inaction and runs away from the school. The analogy to prewar Germany is obvious and the film was highly praised upon release, winning the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes.Wakeman, John. World Film Directors, Volume 2. The H. W. Wilson Company. 1988. 983–987.
The New German Cinema movement unofficially began in 1962 with the Oberhausen Manifesto, calling new young German filmmakers to revitalize filmmaking in Germany, much like the French New Wave of the previous few years. Although not among the initial group of filmmakers involved, Schlöndorff was quick to align himself with the group and Young Törless is considered one of its most important films.
Schlöndorff's next film was Degree of Murder (1967), a counter-culture-saturated film with a musical score by Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. The film stars Jones's then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg as a young waitress who accidentally kills her boyfriend and hides the body with the help of two male friends. The film was very popular upon release among "swinging sixties" youths.
He then made another film that spoke to the counter-culture generation, Man on Horseback (Michael Kohlhaas – Der Rebell, 1969), set in medieval Germany. Michael Kohlhaas is a horse trader who has been cheated by a local nobleman and nearly starts a revolution to get revenge. The film starred David Warner, Anna Karina and Anita Pallenberg, and was made in both German and English versions.
Schlöndorff then worked on Baal (1970), an adaptation for West German television of Bertolt Brecht's first play, and cast Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the lead role, along with Margarethe von Trotta, whom Schlöndorff married in 1971. Schlöndorff adapted the story of a self-destructive poet to modern-day Munich. He then made another TV movie, The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1971), also starring Fassbinder. The film depicts seven peasants in 19th-century Germany who rob the local tax collection cart but are so conditioned by their poverty that they cannot handle their newfound wealth.
The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972) examines a group of people who have lost their sense of morals and co-stars von Trotta. Von Trotta both starred in and co-wrote Schlöndorff's next film, A Free Woman (Strohfeuer, 1972). The film took a feminist look at the condition of modern women in Munich. Von Trotta plays Elizabeth Junker, a recently divorced woman who must struggle to live her life independently as her husband has everything come easily to him, including the villa and son they shared together as a married couple. The film is loosely based on von Trotta's experience of divorcing her first husband.
Schlöndorff then completed the TV movie (Übernachtung in Tirol, 1974); directed his first opera in Frankfurt, a production of Leoš Janáček's Káťa Kabanová, in the same year; and adapted the Henry James novella Georgina's Reasons as Les raisons de Georgina (1975) for French TV.
International success
Schlöndorff (and the New German Cinema movement as a whole) had his first financial hit film with The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). Based on the novel by Heinrich Böll, Schlöndorff co-wrote and co-directed the film with von Trotta, in her directorial debut. The film stars Angela Winkler as Blum, who after falling in love and spending the night with a young army deserter becomes the victim of a corrupt police investigation and predatory tabloid newspaper, which cast her as both a terrorist and a prostitute. The newspaper is based upon the real right-wing German tabloid Bild-Zeitung, whose publisher Axel Springer was the inspiration for the character Werner Tötges.
In Schlöndorff's view, West Germany had fallen into political hysteria over the activities of a terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. The police and journalistic activities in both Böll's novel and Schlöndorff's film portray the Red Army Faction era as reminiscent of McCarthyism in the 1950s U.S., including illegal police raids, phone tapping and tabloid smears. Böll was heavily attacked after the publication of the novel, but both it and the film were hugely successful in West Germany.
After directing his second opera, We Come to the River, in 1976, Schlöndorff followed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum with the equally political Coup de Grâce (1976). Based on a novel by French author Marguerite Yourcenar, the film stars von Trotta (who co-wrote the script) as Sophie von Reval, a young left-wing aristocrat who sides with the Bolshevik Revolution after being rejected by a young German soldier preparing to fight the Red Army in 1919. The film depicts the same time period and subject matter that von Trotta revisited in the film Rosa Luxemburg (1986).
A supporting actress in Coup de Grâce was Valeska Gert, a former cabaret dancer, circus performer and silent film actress who had worked with Greta Garbo and G. W. Pabst. This led to the documentary about her life, Just for Fun, Just for Play, in 1977.
Schlöndorff then contributed to the anthology film Germany in Autumn (1978), in which nine German filmmakers (including Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Böll) made short films about the hysteria and political chaos in West Germany during the German Autumn of 1977.
Schlöndorff's next film was the most successful and ambitious of his career: The Tin Drum, released in 1979. The film was based on the novel by Günter Grass, who for years had rejected proposed adaptations of his book until giving Schlöndorff his approval (and assistance) to make the film.Volker Schlöndorff at European Graduate School. Biography and bibliography. (Retrieved 14 May 2010)
The Tin Drum stars David Bennent as the protagonist Oscar Matzerath, who, after receiving a tin drum on his third birthday, makes the conscious choice to stop growing and remain a three-year-old for the rest of his life. He hurls himself down a flight of stairs so as to give the adults around him a rational explanation for his handicap, and later discovers that he has the ability to tactically shatter glass with the power of his high-pitched scream, which he produces whenever anyone attempts to take his tin drum away from him. The film co-stars Angela Winkler as Oscar's mother, and Mario Adorf and Daniel Olbrychski as the German and Kashubian (Pole) who may both be his biological fathers. It mostly takes place from the end of World War I to the end of World War II (when Oscar is 20) in the city of Danzig, a Free City under League of Nations protection. It was also the site of the first battle of the war, at the Post Office, in which Oscar takes part.
The film was widely hailed as a masterpiece and shared the Palme d'or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival with Apocalypse Now, as well as winning the 1979 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Schlöndorff collaborated with Stefan Aust, Alexander Kluge and Alexander von Eschwege on the documentary The Candidate (1980), a film about the political campaign of the CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor Franz Josef Strauss. He next made The Circle of Deceit released in 1981. Based on the novel by Nicolas Born, the film concerns the politics and moral struggles of war photographers. The film stars Bruno Ganz and Jerzy Skolimowski as photojournalists covering the Lebanon Civil War in Beirut in 1975.
Hollywood phase Schlöndorff's first English-language film was Swann in Love (1984), an adaptation of the first two volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The film was shot in France and financed by Gaumont, and stars Jeremy Irons, Ornella Muti, Alain Delon and Fanny Ardant.
Schlöndorff then went to the United States to make a TV adaptation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman and John Malkovich as Biff. Both actors won Emmys for their performances and Schlöndorff was nominated for an Emmy for his direction. The film premiered on television in 1985 and was released theatrically throughout Europe over the following years.
Schlöndorff followed this with another TV movie in the US, A Gathering of Old Men, based on the novel of the same name by Ernest J. Gaines. The film stars Richard Widmark, Holly Hunter and Lou Gossett Jr. and concerns racial discrimination in 1970s Louisiana.
Schlöndorff returned to theatrical films with the Hollywood science fiction film The Handmaid's Tale (1990). The film's story takes place in a dystopian near future in which most women are sterile due to pollution. Kate (Natasha Richardson) is arrested after attempting to flee to Canada and forced to become a "Handmaid". Handmaids are fertile women who are enslaved by the state and put in the households of wealthy men – who have "ceremonial" sex with them in the hope of conceiving a child. She becomes the Handmaid of the Commander (Robert Duvall), Fred, who is married to Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway). To save herself from execution, Kate – renamed "Offred", since she now is attached to Fred's household – allows the Commander's driver (Aidan Quinn) to impregnate her and falls in love with him. The film was in competition at the 40th Berlin International Film Festival.