TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES
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© Tamasa
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta
1975 - - 1h40
After spending the night with a man on the run, a young woman's life is picked apart by the police and then thrown to the mercy of the gutter press.
Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), the first major success of the new German cinema, evokes the overtly slanderous practices of the Bild-Zeitung. Inspired by a short story by Heinrich Böll (a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature that the right-wing press had no scruples in describing as an intellectual terrorist), the film depicts a German society in a state of hysteria and was made in an explosive political context (in particular with the treatment of the Baader-Meinhof case). Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta reflect on a democratic system betrayed by its institutions and portray a sensationalist press that drives public opinion to hatred and exasperation through exaggerated and truncated information. The directors responded in their own way with this film against the powerful, which also reminds us how much cinema in the 1970s was a medium for public debate.
CAST AND CREW
Cast : Angela Winkler, Mario Adorf, Dieter Laser, Jürgen Prochnow, Heinz Bennent, Hannelore Hoger, Rolf Becker, Harald Kuhlmann.
Screenplay : Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta
Cinematography : Jost Vacano
Sound : Klaus Eckelt, Wolfgang Löper, Willi Schwadorf
Editing : Peter Przygodda
Music : Hans Werner Henze
Production : Bioskop Film, Paramount-Orion Filmproduktion, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)
French distributor : Tamasa Distribution