Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum

1. Die verloreneEhre der Katharina Blum From book to film

2. New German Cinema • 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto • 26 filmmakers declare death of ‘Papas Kino’ • Opposition to ‘Heimatfilm’ & other entertainment genres • 1965 foundation of KuratoriumjungerdeutscherFilmee.V. – govt. loans to young fillmakers • Becomes most influential cinema development in Germany from late 60s to early 90s. • Decline in 1980s with rise of new wave of commercial film production (e.g. Bernd Eichinger)

3. Directors • Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Maria Braun, Lola) • WimWenders (Alice in den Städten;Paris, Texas) • Werner Herzog (Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo) • Volker Schlöndorff (Die Blechtrommel, Homo Faber) • Helma Sanders-Brahms (Deutschland, bleiche Mutter) • Margarethe von Trotta (Schwestern, Die bleierneZeit) • Alexander Kluge (Die Patriotin, Die Macht der Gefühle) • Edgar Reitz (Heimat-trilogy)

4. Volker Schlöndorff • Born 1939 • Internationally & commercially most successful director of New German Cinema • First Oscar for a German film for Die Blechtrommel(1979) • Specialises on adaptations from literature (e.g. film version of M.Atwood’sThe Handmaid’s Tale, 1990)

5. Die verloreneEhre der Katharina Blum • Film adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta, 1975 • With co-operation from Heinrich Böll on script

6. Literature vs. film • Individual production • Individual reception • Low cost • Narrator(s) • Narrative perspective • Language • Literary techniques (focalisation, perspective, rhetorical devices, irony, plot devices etc.) • Time (reflection) • Collective production • Collective reception • High cost • No visible narrator • Visual narrative • Image • Filmic techniques (editing, mise en scene, framing, sound, etc. • Technology • Immediacy (immersion)

7. Adaptation novel into film: issues • Inner mind • Language based • Narrator and point of view • Tenses/Time • Focus not on action but character

8. Film adaptation • Translation • Fidelity vs. interpretation • Critical language often moralistic: • Infidelity, betrayal, deformation, vulgarisation, violation

9. Critical prejudices against adaption • Anteriority equals superiority (older = better) • Dichotomous thinking that presumes rivalry between literature and film • Iconophobia– superiority of writing over images (from ancient Greece to 20th ct.) • Logophilia– valuation of written word over image • Anti-corporeality – distaste for unseemly embodied-ness of filmic text. • Myth of facility of film making vs. writing • Class prejudice • Parasitism (adaptations feed off literary model)

10. (Post)-Structuralist criticism • Inter-textuality (e.g. Julia Kristeva) • Semiotics (e.g. Roland Barthes) • Dialogism (Mikhail Bakhtin)

11. What would be the greatest difficulties of turning Böll’snovella into film? • Issue of narrator: what is the function of Böll’s narrator? What is the role of narrator in story? • How important would you say is narrator for message of Böll’s book? Why?

12. Films with non-linear plotlines • Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941) • Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) • The Killing (Stanley Kubrick 1956) • Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1962) • Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) • The usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) • Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) • Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) • Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) • Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry/Kaufman, 2004)