Oscar-winning German director visits Leitrim film festival

Oscar-winning German director Volker Schlöndorff warned of the growing power of social media and mass communication during an appearance at the Adaptation Film Festival in Manorhamilton.

The acclaimed filmmaker spoke following a screening of his 1975 political drama The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, co-directed with Margarethe von Trotta and adapted from the novel by Heinrich Böll.

The film follows a woman whose life is destroyed after she spends the night with a man suspected of terrorism. What begins as a relatively small incident rapidly escalates through aggressive police action, surveillance and sensationalist reporting.

Speaking to the festival audience, Schlöndorff said the atmosphere of fear and paranoia depicted in the film intensified as violence grew in Germany during the 1970s.

“There were shootings, there were deaths, there were bombs being thrown, kidnapping and whatnot,” he said.

“It was like true hysteria and paranoia. But it could have been prevented, could have been stopped probably, had one followed Heinrich Böll’s advice somehow to de-escalate through a public debate rather than to respond with the maximum of police force.”

The director said the methods used to publicly persecute people have changed considerably since the film was released.

“I don’t say history repeats itself, but in different ways the mobbing through the internet nowadays offers even worse possibilities to persecute people than it was then with just the press,” he said.

An audience member drew parallels between the film and present-day Germany, including the response to public criticism of Israel and discussion of Gaza. The conversation also explored the continuing influence of the press and social media on political debate.

Schlöndorff said there had been a significant change in how audiences consume films and other forms of media.

“My own daughter, when she occasionally sees a movie of mine, she would say, ‘Why is it so slow?’ And we felt this was pretty fast,” he joked.

“There is such a change in the perception of anything on media.”

However, he said people did not have to accept these developments without resistance. “We are not bound to be passive victims. We can react,” he said, pointing to debates about prohibiting mobile phones in schools and regulating technology.

He also believes political awareness is returning among a new generation after a long period during which many appeared uninterested in the influence politics has on everyday life. “Until five or maybe even ten years ago, for a long time there was no interest in politics and no awareness even of the influence politics has on our daily lives with young people,” he said.

“I think they are coming back to that awareness now.” Schlöndorff also discussed the film’s powerful score, composed by Hans Werner Henze, who was better known for operas, symphonies and concert works than film music.

He said Henze believed the violence within the story extended beyond the behaviour of the police, press and wider society. “It was also the violence of the architecture,” Schlöndorff explained, referring to the stark modern building in which Katharina lives. The director recalled that The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum initially faced resistance when it was released in 1975, with some cinema owners refusing to screen it.

“They said, ‘No, this is a terrorist movie. This is a movie in praise of terrorists,’” he said. However, the cinemas soon “surrendered to the demand of the audience”, and the production became the first major popular success for the filmmakers.

Schlöndorff, whose adaptation of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum won the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, said literature has remained central throughout his career. More than half of his films — and possibly as many as two-thirds — have been based on novels.

“I find a freedom in submitting to the novel I’m adapting,” he said. “I don’t do it to prove that I’m more original than the writer or that I’m going to give a better reading of it than anybody else.” Instead, he said he adapts books because he believes more people should encounter them.

“If they don’t read, well, they’ll have to come to the movie and I’ll show them it is not as difficult as they think,” he said. The supposedly “unadaptable” novels are often the ones that interest him most. “That’s where the fun is — the challenge,” he said. “If you have to work on it for a year or longer, it’s good if there is a certain resistance.”