Margarethe von Trotta (German: [maʁɡaˈʁeːtə fɔn ˈtʁɔta] ; born 21 February 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, and actress. She has been referred to as a "leading force" of the New German Cinema movement. Von Trotta's extensive body of work has won awards internationally. She was married to and collaborated with director Volker Schlöndorff. Although they made a successful team, von Trotta felt she was seen as secondary to Schlöndorff. Subsequently, she established a solo career for herself and became "Germany's foremost female film director, who has offered the most sustained and successful female variant of Autorenkino in postwar German film history". Certain aspects of von Trotta's work have been compared to Ingmar Bergman's features from the 1960s and 1970s.
Von Trotta has been called "the world's leading feminist filmmaker". The predominant aim of her films is to create new representations of women. Her films are concerned with relationships between and among women (sisters, best friends, etc.), as well as with relationships between women and men, and include political settings. Nevertheless, she rejects the suggestion that she makes "women's films".
She is a recipient of one Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival, two David di Donatello Awards, Gold Hugo Award at Chicago International Film Festival, Lifetime Achievement Award at European Film Award, Lifetime Achievement Award at German Film Awards, two Palme d'Or nominations at Cannes Film Festival, and numerous other awards and nominations.
The child of Elisabeth von Trotta and painter Alfred Roloff, Margarethe von Trotta was born in Berlin. She and her mother moved to Düsseldorf after the end of World War II. Von Trotta shared a strong bond with her mother in the absence of her father. She has spoken about how her relationship with her mother gave her a sensitivity for friendships and solidarity between women, a theme that is seen in most of her films.
Von Trotta relocated to Paris in the 1960s, where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films.
In her early career, von Trotta was an actress, appearing in the early films of directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. In one of many interviews, von Trotta said: "I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies. Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, I saw several films of Ingmar Bergman, and all of the sudden I understood what cinema could be. I saw the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the French Nouvelle Vague. I stood there and said, 'that is what I'd like to do with my life.' But that was 1962, and you couldn't think that a woman could be a director. In a way, as an unconscious act, I started acting and when the New German films started, I tried to get in through acting." Through her acting career, von Trotta was able to create an initial name for herself before becoming a director.
Her first input on a film, before making a solo-career out of it, was on Volker Schlöndorff's The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach(1971), which she also acted in. In 1975, they proceeded to co-write and co-direct The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) which was based on an adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel that dealt with "political repression in the Federal Republic". Within this first film of von Trotta's, one can see the conflict "between the personal and the public" that resonates throughout her early film career. The female characters within the story must occupy suffocating spaces that von Trotta uses to represent the confinement that women are subjected to in a world run by men. Von Trotta was in charge of supervising the performance aspect while Schlöndorff dealt with the film's mechanics. As a director, he was not considered to be very audacious, while von Trotta's strong suit was in how she directed the film's actors "through whom she creates her story". Thus the two were able to complement each other. Their film was considered to be "the most successful German film of the mid-1970s". The couple collaborated on one more film, Coup de Grâce (1976), where von Trotta helped to write but not direct the work, before she branched off into her own career.
Trotta's first solo film was The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages) in 1978, which focused on "a young woman's political radicalization." This film presented multiple subjects that von Trotta's films would be known for in the future: "female bonding, sisterhood, and the uses and effects of violence". The film's script used real-life information about the seizure of school teacher Margit Czenki from Munich.
Throughout her years of filmmaking, von Trotta has addressed many points of special concern to women: "abortion, contraception, the situation of women at work, spousal abuse, and [the] traditional female role".
In 2001 she was the president of the jury at the 23rd Moscow International Film Festival.
She is a professor of film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and remains an important personality of German cinema.
Margarethe von Trotta's second feature film was Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (Schwestern oder die Balance des Glücks, 1979). Unintentionally, she created a "trilogy of sister films" with her succeeding works: Marianne and Juliane (Die Bleierne Zeit, 1981) and Three Sisters (Fürchten und Lieben, 1988). Barbara Quart, author of the book Women Directors, commented on the three works: "It is the quest for wholeness that is the preoccupation of von Trotta's entire sister series." The women in these films are born into a traditional time (late 1940s and '50s), but they reject the positions that society has established for women. As well, the topic of suicide plays an important role in the first two films and how the live sister connects to the dead one. These three films investigate sisterhood and their bonds within a world that is falling apart all around them; this matter places von Trotta's work into New German Cinema.
Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness delves into bonds, both physically and mentally, between sisters Maria and Anna, along with a third party. The siblings are close before Anna commits suicide, but hidden behind her facial expressions is a desire to escape this feeling of frustration between following what she wants and what Maria asks of her. Maria faces post suicide trauma, coping with her devastation by transplanting the memory of her sister onto her co-worker, Miriam. This ultimately leads Maria to deal with her inner issues so she can try to move on with her life in a peaceful manner. This film garnered the Grand Prix Award at Créteil International Women's Film Festival in 1981.
Marianne and Juliane (also known in English as The German Sisters) (1981) also deals with losing a sister and learning how to handle the grief. Marianne and Juliane grow much closer after Marianne is put behind bars for her radical, terrorist activities. After unexpected news of Marianne's death, Juliane becomes obsessed with finding out the truth behind the supposed suicide, which she does not believe to be true. The characters are based on the real-life Christiane and Gudrun Ensslin, which made "feminist critics" give extra notice to this work in comparison to all other films that von Trotta has done. Critics question the way von Trotta structured the plot and why she positioned it from that of Christiane's character, Juliane, instead of from Gudrun (Marianne). The film is characterized by the use of multiple flashback sequences, jumping between present day to childhood and everywhere in between, breaking any chance of a linear structure. In this film, it is predominantly the Nazi era that influences Marianne and Juliane, albeit in different ways.A theme within Marianne and Juliane that von Trotta uses throughout her works is that of "the personal is political". In Marianne's jail cell, the sisters come to terms with "their personal and political differences". One take on this theme is that Marianne's personal past has fostered her political, terrorist present. In the story's present day, her political actions effect her personal life: she is sentenced to prison and dies in her cell, her husband takes his own life, and her son is put in danger. Not surprisingly, this film was the subject of much debate from conservatives who believed that Marianne's character as a terrorist was given too much understanding. This film won the AGIS Award, FIPRESCI Prize, Golden Lion Award, New Cinema Award, and OCIC Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1981, along with a few more listed in the awards section. Von Trotta winning the Golden Lion was a true achievement for women in film, for an honor of this stature had not been awarded to a female director since Leni Reifenstahl received "the Mussolini Cup" in 1938 for Olympia. In 1994 Ingmar Bergman listed it as one of his favorite 11 films of all time.