VOLKER SCHLÖNDORFF IN POLAND

national retrospective - meetings with the director - autobiography in Polish




At this year’s Plus Camerimage Festival a Lifetime Achievement Award to Director will be presented to the German director, the recipient of the first Academy Award in postwar Germany - Volker Schlöndorff. On this occasion, Plus Camerimage Festival, Goethe-Institut in Warsaw and Filmoteka Narodowa are organizing a series of events presenting the work and profile of the director.

During Plus Camerimage Festival in Lodz, as well as at screenings in Warsaw, Cracow, Katowice, Wroclaw, Lublin and Gdansk, the audience will have a chance to see many films from Volker Schlöndorff’s over 40-year-long artistic output, including some cinema classics, rarely to be seen in Poland, like Young Törless (1965) or Death of a Salesman (1985).

The retrospectives will be accompanied by a series of publications, dedicated to both the private and artistic life of the director. The Tumult Foundation is preparing, as a part of an exclusive ‘Lifetime Achievement’ series on famous directors, an album on Volker Schlöndorff’s life and artistic output, including, among others, archive photographs from his private collection. Propaganda Publishing together with Goethe-Institut will release the directors’ autobiography Light, Shadow and Movement. My Life and Films, translated by Ryszard Turczyn. The profile of the artist will also be presented in a catalogue by Krzysztof Stanislawski that includes critical texts on Volker Schlöndorff’s life and artistic output, as well as a complete filmography.

A series of special open-to-public meetings with the director will take place as a part of autobiography’s promotion in empik bookstores. The director will read fragments of the book and talk about his experiences of working and living in Germany, France and the United States, as well as the behind-the-scenes of making movies and Polish motives in his work.




RETROSPECTIVES

Łódź, 28.11 - 05.12.2009

28.11 - the opening of the Festival and Volker Schlöndorff’s Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony
29.11 - the opening of the retrospective

Plus Camerimage Festival Center
Grand Theatre
1 Henryk Dabrowski Square
90-249 Lodz

Polonia Cinema
67 Piotrkowska Street
90-422 Łódz

Silver Screen
ul. Piłsudskiego 5
90-368 Łódz

For a detailed list of films please go here HERE



Warsaw 30.11-13.12.2009
30.11, 8pm - the opening of the retrospective, Multikino Cinema, Zlote Tarasy Mall
01.12-13.12 - the retrospective, Iluzjon Filmoteki Narodowej Cinema, 213 Niepodleglosci Street
for a detailed program visit www.fn.org.pl

Lublin 14.12-20.12.2009
Chatka Zaka Art House, 16 Radziszewskiego Street
for a detailed program visit www.chatkazaka.kina.lublin.pl

Katowice 08.01-14.01.2010
Rialto Theater, 24 Sw. Jana Street
for a detailed program visit http://rialto.katowice.pl

Wroclaw 08.01-14.01.2010
Warszawa Cinema, NOT screening room, 74 Pilsudskiego Street
for a detailed program visit http://www.odra-film.wroc.pl

Cracow 15.01-21.01.2010
Pod Baranami Cinema, 27 Main Square
for a detailed program visit www.kinopodbaranami.pl

Gdansk 18.01-24.01.2010
Klub Zak Cinema, 195/197 Grunwaldzka Street
for a detailed program visit www.klubzak.com.pl




MEETINGS WITH THE DIRECTOR - AUTOBIOGRAPHY PRESENTATION

November 29th, 5pm
empik Lodz, Manufaktura Mall, 5 Karskiego Street

November 30th, 5pm
empik Warsaw, 116/122 Marszalkowska Street

At the open-to-all meetings, the director will present his autobiography ‘Light, Shadow and Movement. My Life and Films’, translated by Ryszard Turczyn. The Polish edition of the autobiography will be released by Propaganda Publishing, with the financial support of Goethe-Institut in Warsaw.
The presentation will be a chance to discuss the director’s unusual biography, who lived and worked, among others, in Germany, France, Italy and the United States, as well as the behind-the-scenes of making movies and the cooperation and friendship with such outstanding directors and actors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andrzej Wajda or Dustin Hoffman. The artist will also talk about the Polish motives in his works, about The Tin Drum (1979) shot in Gdansk, The Ogre (1996) and, above all, the movie Strajk- Die Heldin von Danzig (2005), telling the story of the Polish fight against communism in the early 1980’s.





PUBLICATIONS

• An autobiography Light, Shadow and Movement. My Life and Films
  Propaganda Publishing, Warsaw 2009
  
  (‘Licht, Schatten und Bewegung. Mein Leben und meine Filme’, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munchen, 2008)
  
  

Volker Schlöndorff’s autobiography Light, Shadow and Movement. My Life and Films, translated by Ryszard Turczyn, will be released by Propaganda Publishing, with the financial support of Goethe-Institut in Warsaw.
In his autobiography, that was well-received by the German press (Die Zeit, Suddeutsche Zeitung), Volker Schlöndorff tells the story of his early life in Hessen and the later emigration to France, Italy and the United States. In a figurative and expressive way he talks about his private experiences and work with Maks Frisch, Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boll and he paints warm portraits of his friends, including Brigitte Bardot, John Malkovich and Angela Merkel.

The recounts of movies and books that inspired him, women and countries that influenced his life, mixed with the anecdotes from the world of film, add up to a thrilling story of a private and professional life of an artist. But the book is much more than just a factographic-humoristic portrayal of a biography of a famous filmmaker. The pretext to write an autobiography was an unexpected break in shooting the movie Pope Joan. Free time gave the director the opportunity to reflect on his own identity- the process of searching, the necessity and possibility of restating his own ‘I’. ‘To become who I am now, I had to travel for a long time’ - in his book, Volker Schlöndorff takes us for a ride across Europe and America, film sets and backstages, times long gone and current reflections.

• ‘Lifetime Achievement’ Album, Plus Camerimage 2009
  
  

An album dedicated to Volker Schlöndorff’s life and work is a very precious publication. What makes it so valuable are over 440 photographs illustrating the text, taken mainly at film sets. A substantial amount of the photos are family pictures that come from the director’s private archive. The book, besides Schlöndorff’s own text, includes also the recollections of his close friends and collaborators: Margarethe von Trotta, Bertrand Tavernier, Julie Delpy, Michael Ballhaus, Igor Luther and others, as well as critical texts by an outstanding Polish film critic and historian, Jerzy Plazewski and an American critic F.X. Feeney. This English language publication will be a chance to present the portrait of an extraordinary German director to the international audience that will come to the Festival from all over the world. Fifth of the publications dedicated to outstanding directors (in previous years, Tumult Foundation prepared the albums on life and work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Ken Loach, Jerzy Skolimowski and Alan Parker) is a fruit of a year-long work of the organizers of Plus Camerimage Festival and is a special emphasis of the rank of this years’ award to the director, in the recognition of the oeuvre of his work.

• Monography/Catalogue ‘Volker Schlöndorff’, NOTORO, Warsaw 2009
  
  

The monography Volker Schlöndorff was prepared by Krzysztof Stanislawski (NOTORO) together with Filmoteka Narodowa and Goethe-Institut in Warsaw as a publication accompanying the retrospectives of this director- it can be treated both as a catalogue and a separate publication. The book is a vast (124 pages) critical monography dedicated to the work of Volker Schlöndorff. It contains detailed information on all 40 feature, TV, documentary and short films by this artist from the years 1960-2007. Most of them are discussed, many analyzed, with the utterances by both Schlöndorff and German, Polish and international critics taken into account. The book also includes an introductory essay and a full biofilmography of Volker Schlöndorff as a director, assistant director, actor, producer, member of other TV and documentary projects and, finally, opera director. The entirety is complemented by a bibliography and indexes. The book is well illustrated and precisely graphically designed by a painter and filmmaker Zbigniew Maciej Dowigallo. It is then also a film album.

On the author: Krzysztof Stanislawski focuses on the topic of German cinema for over 20 years; he was, among others, the curator of the Germany in Autumn retrospective in Kwant and Hybrydy film societies in 1983/84, he published, among others, New German Cinema 1962-Today. Accompanied by the Director’s Lexicon, Sopot 1968. He published his first text on Schlöndorff’s movies in 1978.



BIOGRAPHY

Volker Schlöndorff, the director of over thirty movies and TV productions, opera shows and theater plays, for his work presented the most important awards both in Germany and abroad, including the Academy Award for the movie The Tin Drum (1979). He was born in Wiesbaden in 1939. He lost his mother at an early age. He spent most of his youth in France where he went as a teenager due to a scholarship (Jesuit junior high in Bretagne, political science studies in Paris). While still at the university, he started studing filmmaking alongside best French directors - Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais. Together with Fassbinder, Klug, Herzog and Wenders he created a group of young German directors, that overnight made obsolete all the hitherto German cinema. For his first movie, Young Torless (1965) he got the film critics award in Cannes, for The Tin Drum (1979) - the Golden Palm and the previously mentioned Academy Award. He is the author of such movies like The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), Germany in Autumn (1978), Swann in Love (1983), Death of a Salesman (1985), The Voyager (1991), The Ogre (1996), The Ninth Day (2004) or Strajk-Die Heldin von Danzig (2005). Shooting these, he worked with outstanding cinematographers, including Sven Nykvist, Michael Ballhaus, Jost Vacano, Pierre Lhomme, Igor Luther, Edward Lachman, Franz Rath, as well as the younger ones: Andreas Hofer, Tom Erhart and Tom Fahrmann. Currently lives in Berlin.



WORK

The work of Volker Schlöndorff is one of the most important chapters in the history of German cinema. He shoot his first movies at the time of the ‘new wave’, but the director did not succumb to the new trends and remained faithful to the classic ways of film storytelling. His debut Young Torless (1965) instantly brought him publicity. Despite the fact that most of his movies are adaptations of world literature, thanks to the masterly directing and extraordinarily precise visual aspect, these films add new, independent substance to the problems discussed in the literary works. He focuses on the breakthrough moments - in the life of a community (The Tin Drum, 1979), in the life of a man (The Voyager, 1991). Heinrich Boll, the author of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum novel, knowing the political commitment of Volker Schlöndorff and his partner at that time, outstanding German director Margarethe von Trotta, encouraged them to shoot the movie.

Despite being placed in a fictional world, the movies of Volker Schlöndorff are full of autobiographical elements and reflections based on personal experiences: childhood in a postwar reality and early death of the mother, years of education in French boarding schools, political commitment of 1968 and the memories of living in Germany, France, Italy and the United States.

Living and working in France had a crucial meaning to Schlöndorff and his work: on the one hand it shaped his artistic sensitivity and cultural consciousness, on the other it allowed him to form his own identity. Contrary to the situation in postwar Germany, where the recent World War II past was not discussed, in France Schlöndorff was seen as a representative of a nation that gave birth to nazism. Schoolmates from the French junior high, after the screening of the movie on Holocaust (Night and Fog by Alain Resnais), asked him: ‘How was it possible?’- his whole later work, from Young Torless (1965) up to The Ninth Day (2004) is an effort to find an answer to that question.



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
  

ORGANIZERS
Plus Camerimage Festival - Tumult Foundation
Goethe-Institut in Warsaw
Filmoteka Narodowa

WITH THE SUPPORT OF
Fundacja Współpracy Polsko-Niemieckiej
Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Wroclaw
Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Gdansk
Goethe-Zentrum Lublin, Dethloff Deutschschule, Partner Goethe-Institut

PARTNERS
Goethe-Institut in Cracow
Multikino
Empik
Iluzjon Cinema in Warsaw
Chatka Zaka Art House in Lublin
Rialto Theater in Katowice
Odra-Film, Warszawa Cinema in Wroclaw
Pod Baranami Cinema in Cracow
Propaganda Publishing
Notoro Publishing

MEDIA PARTNERS
Dziennik - Gazeta Prawna
KINO Magazine
Stopklatka.pl