Volker Schlöndorff
photo: vs archive

At Plus Camerimage 2009, the 17th International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography a special Lifetime Achievement Award to Director will be presented to Volker Schlöndorff. This award is annually presented to directors who make their films with a great aesthetic sensitivity and consciously adjust the technical and formal means to serve the purpose of an emotional impact of the story.

Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich, Death of a Salesman

Volker Schlöndorff and Sven Nykvist A Free Woman

The Oscar winner for The Tin Drum, was born in 1939 in Wiesbaden. His father was a doctor and his mother died when he was still a child. He spent most of his youth in France where he went as a teenager scholarship student (Brittany Jesuit boarding school and studies at the faculty of political sciences in Paris). Already during his studies he started learning the craft of filmmaking from the best French directors - Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais. His directorial debut Young Törless, won him the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes Films Festival in 1966, and his The Tin Drum - Golden Palm in 1979 and the before-mentioned Academy Award.

David Bennent, The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum

He made a number of acclaimed films like The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Germany in Autumn, Swann in Love, Death of a Salesman, Homo Faber, The Ogre, The Ninth Day, Strike. While working on these movies he collaborated with many respected cinematographers including Sven Nykvist, Michael Ballhaus, Jost Vacano, Pierre Lhomme, Igor Luther, Edward Lachman, Franz Rath, and also some DOPs of the young generation: Andreas Höfer, Tom Erhart or Tom Fährmann.

Volker Schlöndorff, Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti, Swann in Love

Bruno Ganz and Jerzy Skolimowski, Circle of Deceit

Almost all his films are adaptations of the world literature. Knowing the political involvement of Volker Schlöndorff and his then spouse, well known German director Margarethe von Trotta, writer Heinrich Böll encouraged them to bring his novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum to the screen. First Schlöndorff’s films were made during so called "new wave", but the director did not follow the trends and remained faithful to classical patterns of telling a story in a film. He become engaged in bringing literature to the screen and achieved both artistic and commercial success. Although Schlöndorff creates a fictional world, his films do not lack the autobiographical elements. Each of them bears a trace of director’s life experiences starting from early childhood, growing up and studying in France through political involvement in the 60s.

John Malkovich, The Ogre

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

The time when he lived and worked in France was of particular importance to Schlöndorff’s filmmaking. On one hand it has shaped his artistic sensitivity and cultural awareness and on the other hand it was in France where he found his own identity. In postwar Germany the recent past was not talked about; in France he was seen as a German, a representative of the nation that gave birth to Nazism. All his works, from Young Torless to The Ninth Day are an attempt to find an answer to a question he was being asked by his schoolmates in the French secondary school after the screening of a film on Holocaust (Night and Fog, dir. A. Resnais): "How was it possible"?

Andrzej Chyra, Strike

Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall, The Handmaid's Tale

A review of the director’s films will be inaugurated at Plus Camerimage Festival. This retrospective is a common undertaking of Tumult Foundation, the organizer of the Festival, Goethe-Institut in Warsaw and the Polish National Film Archive. Goethe-Institut and the Polish National Film Archive have already presented several profiles of some great German directors but it’s the firs time Schlöndorff’s films have been presented this way. During the forty years of his professional work in the film he often addressed various important issues from a point of view of both Germans and Poles which has substantially contributed to the German-Polish communication. Volker Schlöndorff Retrospective will be presented in several Polish cities in 2009 including Łódź, Warsaw and Lublin and will be accompanied by a catalogue with the in-depth information about all Schlöndorff’s films and various essays by film experts. Also this autumn the Polish translation of director’s autobiography Licht, Schatten und Bewegung (Light, Shadow and Motion) will be published by Propaganda publishing house.

Legend of Rita

As a part of the series of books on directors, the Tumult Foundation, the organiser of Plus Camerimage Festival will additionally publish an album about the life and work of Volker Schlöndorff. Untill now the books on Krzysztof Kieślowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Alan Parker and Ken Loach were issued. The album on this year's laureate will the next one.

Albums on Krzysztof Kieślowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Alan Parker and Ken Loach



Schlöndorff’s album cover

It is worth mentioning that during his visit at Artistic Confrontations organized by TUMULT Foundation in Toruń in 1991 Volker Schlöndorff suggested Marek Żydowicz, that one needs to have an original idea while organizing an international event rather than copy from other 2000 film festivals in the world. This conversation inspired Marek Żydowicz to create a festival of cinematographers; and that is how the one and only Camerimage Festival came into being.


SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY:

• Ulzhan, 2007, cin. Tom Fährmann
  
• Strike (Strajk - Die Heldin von Danzig), 2005, cin. Andreas Höfer
  
• The Ninth Day (Der neunte Tag), 2004, cin. Tomas Erhart
  
• Legend of Rita (Die Stille nach dem Schuss), 2000, cin. Andreas Höfer
  
• The Ogre (Der Unhold), 1996, cin. Bruno de Keyzer
  
• Voyager (Homo Faber), 1991, cin. Pierre Lhomme
  
• The Handmaid's Tale, 1989, cin. Igor Luther
  
• Death of a Salesman, 1985, cin. Michael Ballhaus
  
• Swann in Love (Un amour de Swann), 1983, cin. Sven Nykvist
  
• Circle of Deceit (Die Fälschung), 1981, cin. Igor Luther
  
• The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), 1979, cin. Igor Luther
  
• Der Fangschuß, 1976, cin. Igor Luther
  
• The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum), 1975, cin. Jost Vacano
  
• Morals of Ruth Halbfass (Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass), 1971, cin. Klaus Müller-Laue
  
• The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach), 1970, cin. Franz Rath
  
• Man on Horseback (Michael Kohlhaas - der Rebell), 1969, cin. Willy Kurant
  
• Baal, 1969, cin. Dietrich Lohmann
  
• Young Törless (Der junge Törless), 1965, cin. Franz Rath
  

Photos courtesy of Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main

The Partners of the review are: