Margarethe von Trotta's Sisters : Interiority or Engagement?

Abstract

Anna K. Kuhn Margarethe von Trotta's Sisters : Interiority or Engagement ? Margarethe von Trotta is well known to followers of the New German Cinema. Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder , von Trotta has had a multifaceted cinematic career . As an actress, von Trotta worked with Fassbinder, Reinhard Hauff, Claude Chabrol, and Volker Schlöncbrff. Under the tutelage of Schlondorff, whom she married in 1971, von Trotta has also developed her directorial skills. To date she has coscripted five films with Schlondorff: The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (197l7T"~A Free Woman (Strohfeuer, 1972), Tïïë Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), Coup de Grace (1976) , and Circle of Deceit" (1981) ; she also codirected Katharina Blum. Since her debut as sole director of The Second Awakening of Christa Klages in 1977, von Trotta has become the leading woman filmmaker of contemporary German cinema. Christa Klages portrays female solidarity between two unlikely candidates : the rebellious critic of bourgeois capitalist society, Christa Klages, who robs a bank in order to rescue a kindergarten threatened with financial ruin, and a prototypical servant of capitalist society, a bank teller, witness to the robbery. In Christa Klages, von Trotta uses paradigms of the suspense thriller to generate audience expectations which she then disappoints. The surprise conclusion , in which the bank teller's obsession with Christa , her stalking of her prey, is shown to arise out of admiration rather than out of a sense of reprisal, shocks both the audience and Christa. The bank teller's refusal to identify Christa to the police reveals her as an unexpected ally. The solidarity evinced on the part of the teller underscores the feminist message of the film. Von Trotta's third film, Marianne and Julianne (Die bleierne Zeit, 1981), also has an explicit political theme: terrorism. But this film, while it also explores the relationship between two women, does so from a different perspective. The two women of the title are sisters, one who rebels and one who does not, and the film treats their relationship as much as the politics of terrorism. 77 Sisters or the Balance of Happiness (1979), von Trotta's second film, initially appears to be a personal family history, the story of a relationship between two women which is essentially devoid of social and political resonance. Here, as in Christa Klages, von Trotta works with inversion. By playing with motifs of German Romanticism, she creates expectations of the extreme subjectivity devoid of political ramifications which characterizes this most subjective literary movement. But here again, expectations are overturned, and what seemed exclusively personal takes on broader political meaning. Instead of being an anomaly in her work, Sisters shows on closer examination the same sets of concerns , in a different constellation, as her two other films. Sisters, a portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between the siblings Maria and Anna, is reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman's introspective studies of feminine interaction. The opening sequence of the film, the progressively darkening approach shot of a forest, immediately establishes the introverted tone of the film. Having both an expositional and symbolic function, the forest shot, inextricably linked to the figure of Anna, helps furnish the personal history of the sisters. The initial mute image of this forest (which occurs again after Anna's suicide, thus essentially framing her story) is soon augmented by the voice-over of the young Maria. Cutting to a shot of the two children in bed, the camera shows a self-assured Maria sovereignly reading from a book of fairy tales to a cowering Anna, who hangs on her every word while writhing in fear at her side. The content of the fairy tale Maria is reading, the story of children lost in the woods, clearly has significance for the sisters as well: it serves as a metaphor for their psychic states. Thus this sequence establishes the experiential communality of the siblings and articulates the power relationship so crucial to the film's subtitle The balance of happiness is sustained as long as both siblings retain the big sister, leader-protector (Maria) and the follower, admirer-protected (Anna) roles paradigmatically shown in the opening sequence. When, however, the leadership role of the older sister, natural...