Margarethe von Trotta as Filmmaker: Biographical Retrospectives

Abstract

Margarethe von Trotta as Filmmaker: Biographical Retrospectives Hehr, Renate. Margarethe von Trotta. Filmmaking as Liberation. Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 2000. 128 pp. $58.00 hardcover. Wydra, Thilo. Margarethe von Trotta: Filmen, um zu uberleben. Berlin: Henschel, 2000. 287 pp. euro25.00 hardcover. The current scholarship on film director Margarethe von Trotta consists of approximately 60 substantial articles and entries in books, journals, and film lexica and numerous feuilletonistic reviews on each of her 15 filmic works. This secondary literature was dramatically enriched in 2000 with the appearance of the two biographies under discussion here. While this corpus still seems relatively small for one of the most prolific European women filmmakers, all other contemporary female moviemakers of her age fare even less well. For a long time most monographs on film as well as major publications on cinema made scant mention of any women directors. The most reputable German cinematic histories each devote only a few pages to Trotta (Thomas Elsaesser: New German Cinema, 1989; Timothy Corrigan, New German Film, 1994; Marc Silberman: German Cinema, 1995). In American global film histories she does not receive any mention (Robert Sklar: International History of the Medium, 1993; Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell: Film History, 1994; David Cook: A History of Narrative Film, 1996). Even British scholarship has little mention of her (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1997; John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., World Cinema: Critical Approaches, 2000). This lack of inclusion documents a very gender-biased critical condition, for women film directors are still a highly under-represented and neglected group of media artists in academia and the movie industry as a whole. While most film critical scholarship has been written by men about male film directors, women's film scholarship in the last decade has tried to make up for much of the exclusion of female directors (Sandra Frieden, Rick McCormick, Vibeke, R. Petersen, Laurie Melissa Vogelsang, eds., Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, 1993; Renate Fischetti, Das neue Kino: Acht Portraits von deutschen Regisseurinnen, 1993; Anette Kuhn with Susannah Radstone, eds., Women in Film: An International Guide, 1990; Amy L. Unterburger ed., The St. James Women Filmmakers Encyclopedia: Women on the Other Side of the Camera, 1999). Of course, women filmmakers represent a much smaller production group, maybe 250-300 worldwide in recent decades, but they have established a body of significant films that deserves to be treated as a very distinct and distinguished Women's Cinema. Margarethe von Trotta turned sixty in March 2002. The second wave or generation of mostly European women filmmakers were all born around 1940, signaling a demographic group that is entering its senior years. As evidenced in the critical literature, their work has never gained mainstream recognition or equal status next to their German, French or British male colleagues. European new, nouvelle, orindependent cinemas became predominantly known through male directors, such as the French with Resnais, Malle, Godard, Rivette, and Marker, the Germans with Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, or the British with Greenaway and Jarman. While most of these male filmmakers have obtained more name recognition, they share with their female colleagues the limited distribution of their film work; their films remain within the boundaries of festival circuits, museum retrospectives and the academic arena. Women filmmakers, at least the European ones, usually belong to the contingent that makes up "Independent Cinema." This characterizes those who script, cast, shoot and edit their films mostly themselves, resort to demanding film topics, have the hardest time finding funding for their films, work on minimal budgets with most rights signed away, have the least promotional assistance, and gain very little access to distribution. …