Volker Schlöndorff

Born in Wiesbaden, Germany, on March 31, 1939, and coming from a family of doctors, he studied in Paris where he graduated in Political Economy. After studying Cinema at the IDHEC, in the fifties he began as a producer of news reports on the wars in Algeria and Vietnam for television. However, he learned his professional trade together with Louis Malle and Alain Resnais , and also as an assistant director to Jean-Pierre Melville . Then, linked to the Oberhausen Manifesto, he launched into making films in his native Germany.

With his contemporaries Alexander Kluge , Peter Schamoni , Edgar Reitz , and Jean-Marie Straub, among others, he made films that renewed German cinema, as proposed in the aforementioned 1962 Manifesto: “We intend to create a new German cinema. This new cinema needs new freedoms: freedom from the usual conventions of the industry, freedom from the protection of certain interests. We have, in relation to the production of the new German cinema, concrete ideas of an intellectual, formal and economic type. The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new”.

Schlöndorff was therefore the head of the ranks of that New Wave that offered the other side of the “economic miracle” on the screens, with his first feature film The Young Törless (1965), a masterful adaptation of the work of Robert Musil and which was recognized him with international awards. Despite being discussed by his subsequent films, Murder and Homicide (1967) and The Rebel (1969), he would establish himself among the best authors in his country and on the European continent. Associated with his colleagues Peter Fleischmann and Reinhard Hauff , he even became an independent producer, with the Halleluyah and Bioskop labels. The main successors of that Young German Cinema were Rainer Werner Fassbinder ,Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders .

Volker Schlöndorff’s cinema presents certain creative characteristics: man’s struggle against the system, resistance to oppression and a coercive or veiled authoritarian regime, as seen in Katharina Blum’s Lost Honor (1975), written and directed in collaboration with with his wife, Margarethe von Trotta , who is also a filmmaker. Likewise, the complaint against any totalitarianism becomes the latent background of his film work, but without transcending the materialist sphere in those years. Influenced by Bertold Brecht ( Kombach’s The Sudden Riches of the Poor, 1970), is a deep connoisseur of the language of cinematographic art and has a refined calligraphy, with a great command of black and white. His novel films tend towards a classicism that is embedded in German culture and tradition.

With a romantic temperament, his rigorous and austere style ( Tiro de grace (1976) ) is tremendously conceptual, on an ethical and aesthetic level, not devoid of coldness, simplicity, crude exposition and internal violence, although he has been accused of sometimes incurring , in certain concessions. Thus, in his subsequent attempt to combine popular and commercial cinema, he again worked for television, without abandoning the Marxist dialectic, questioning the past of his country ( Der Kandidat , 1980), with a clear analogy to the political situation of the moment, as evidenced in the collective film Deutschland im Herbst (1978), or in his harsh Circle of Deceptions(1981) which, in some latitudes, takes quite universal overtones. This is especially the case in The Tin Drum (1979), based on the novel by Günter Grass , for which he won the Hollywood Oscar and the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Subsequently, Schlöndorff would leave his country to make two literary adaptations: in France Marcel Proust ‘s work El amor de Swann (1983) and in the United States Arthur Miller ‘s Death of a Salesman (1985), but with little success. His latest productions denoted an author who was perhaps in a certain “impasse” as a filmmaker. However, his masterful films on Nazism, The Ogre (1996) and The Ninth Day (2004), where he abandons historical materialism to approach Christian humanism, show a great creator, of enormous artistic category.