AN: INTERVIEW WITH MARGARETHE VON TROTTA

The following is translated in a shortened and edited version from an interview between Margaret he von Trotta, German filmmaker, and Alice Schwarzer, of the I/Vest German feminist monthly 'Emma'. The unabridged version in German in Emma No I, Jan. 1982. (Emma, Zeitschrift fur Frauen von Frauen, Kolpingplatz 1 a, 5000 Kdin 1, Germany).

The mistake is to believe that anyone can fight from the experience of weakness. Anyone who fights has known her own strength somehow, somewhere, sometime. Otherwise
she wouldn't fight, she wouldn't have seen the need. Gudrun Ensslin.

Films: The second awakening of Christa Klages,' 1977. 'Sisters,' 1981. 'Years of lead,' 1982. She was the first woman director in 39 years to receive the coveted 'Golden Lion' of Venice.

Margarethe von Trotta. Born 1942, woman, German, wellliked. Half the articles about her begin by praising her for not being an 'angry fighter for women's rights', for being beyond 'feminist puritanism'.

Born the illegitimate child of emigre Russian aristocrats in Berlin. Her mother was then 40 and getting by on office jobs, although she spoke four languages fluently. They were so poor that Margarethe sometimes had to go begging for food.

" I remember it only too well. We always lived in a small room crammed with odd bits of furniture. We cooked and slept in the same room. And because I couldn't sleep with the light on, I used to put up a big black umbrella."

Still, her mother was a cheerful person who didn't feel humiliated by her social decline. "She trusted me. When I was little, for example, I used to go up to people in the street, take was touching, but a bit annoying too. But my mother never tried to stop me."

After working her way through school, with jobs in shops and on the production line, she found her way to Paris and saw 'real cinema' (Bergmann) for the first time. Having taken her degree in German and Romance languages, she began to act but married, had a child,gave up her work and was a house wife for four years. She left her husband and married again but lost the child by her first marriage.)

1968 was important for her, as was the women's movement. Sharing in the action.She had an abortion,participated in the women's actions against sexist images in the German media. "We all felt that we wanted to live differently. But we didn't know how to find or articulate the new life."

It wasn't easy, but she was lucky too. Her life is the stuff of  which rebels are made. She is estranged and uprooted from society in many ways, a marginal character, a bastard. In the wrong class with out nationality until she married her first husband, a single-parent child. That kind of experience either destroys you or else you start questioning " normalit."

Her childhood was working class, even lumpenproletarian, but her consciousness was middle class, even aristocratic. She was not made to accept everything life offered her. She doesn't have to reject her past in order to be able to hold her head high. That's what struck me most about her: a mixture of vulnerability and revolt.

Even in their trrast sparkling moments, her films have an underlying mood of melancholy. The times she has lived through contribute as much to this as her personal history. And 'Years of Lead' chronicles those hard times.

There are two main themes in her films: women's identity and their relationships with one another; and the effects of the divisions between people, or between women. In her serious, careful way, she rages against the polarisations between outer/ inner, masculine/feminine, power/powerlessness, reason/ emotion, fitting in/breaking out, functioning/dreaming. Her characters always have both sides, yet suffer from being too one-sided.She goes a long way towards exploring this type of categorising which reduces the human in us.

T: It's not that I've never been concerned with men. I'm married, I have a son, male friends, but exploring men in film... for me, that's not poetic. I've hardly ever met a
man who moved me to lyricism.

S: What do you mean?

T: I always have the feeling that men don't value themselves very highly, don't know themselves. And yet they're so open. Women are nfiore mysterious, more labyrinthine.
That's what makes me curious.

S: If there is one basic law in the men's world, it is that women must be interested in men. You break this rule. And yet you protect yourself too. Your marriage must
protect you to a certain extent.

T: You think so?

S: Yes. You're daring, but you avoid thin ice. That's understandable. It struck me that your three films are all about relationships between women. In all sorts of different
patterns. But you never describe an open love relationship. I'm aware that in 'Christa Klages' you leave the nature of the relationship between the two women open.
It's logical and subversive there, but in 'The Sisters' I find it illogical. The 'sisters' are only a pretext. Really they're a couple, they sleep in the same room, have scenes of
jealousy and bed scenes...

T: There's certainly eroticism there too. But it's only hinted at. Anything else would be too crude. I can't at the moment imagine myself showing an open, lesbian  relationship. Not because I haven't experienced one. On the contrary. But because I think it's another cliche. It's just what they need to write us off. Then they can say: 'Oh,
you know what sort she is, she's one of them, and that's what it's all about.'

S: I'm sure you're right. I also find it a legitimate strategy for survival. But it isn't consistent, and generally you are very consistent. For me that's a balancing act, one more proof of how much this society forbids women to be interested in each other.

T: It's true that what interested me in 'The Sisters' wasn't really the question of sisters. I wanted to show the dependencies of people who have those additional patterns
of shared childhood which are so difficult to lose.

S: There's a kind of moderation in your work, both in form and content. Sometimes that stands in the way of creative madness, of genius.

T: That's a nineteenth-century idea, that genius always has something to do with madness, something to do with being asocial, narcissistic and egoistic.

S: Perhaps there's something in it?

T: Absolutely! It's because artists always have to be against their own society. We women are in any case far more opposed to society: as artists and as women. But at the same time, I'm always interested in other people.

S: Doesn't that cause you conflict?

T: Sure. When I'm working, I have so much love and sympathy for the people I'm working with that I don't allow myself to indulge in the madness I sometimes yearn for.

S: You have a reputation for working together as part of a  team with your actors and actresses. That's one of your main strengths as a director: you get a lot out of the people you work with. But what happens when the actress has different ideas?

T: I don't ever use force, by being authoritarian or loud. I try to persuade them. Seduction, not force.

S: Do you feel you should put more passion into your work ?

T: Sometimes. But on the other hand, I'm so vulnerable by nature. If you are that vulnerable, and open about it, and even see it as a strength, that always acts as a provocation to other people. So in everyday life, I'm more inclined to try to be moderate, to find some degree of calmness.

S: To find your own way as a director you had to emancipate yourself three times: as a woman, as a housewife and as a director's wife. (Margarethe von Trotta is married to a well-known German film dirertor, Volker Schlondorff.) When you made your first film, a German paper headlined its review 'Mrs.SchlorKdorff emancipates herself.

T: Yes, but Voker gave me a lot of support. If he hadn't given German TV a sort of guarantee for my first film, it would have been a lot harder to get the money to make it.

S: Schlondorff got an Oscar for 'The Tin Drum' in 1980. In 1981 you got the Golden Lion for 'Years of Lead'. So now you've caught up with him in public acclaim. More
than that, your last film was extremely popular, while his was harshly criticised. Does that cause problems between you?

T: Naturally, I wish his last film had been better received, because I really think it's good, and also because I don't like one of my films being more popular than his — he's
used to it being the other way around. I don't IBreversal. I can't bear it.

S: And how did he bear it before?

T: Well, he'd never known it any other way. But now he has to cope with it. The other day he said he was just beginning to understand how I must have felt for the past ten
years... I found it hard at times. But what could he have done about it? He couldn't change the imbalance from his side. And when we were alone, we were always equal.
Still, it does depress me. I wish we were back where we were before. Perhaps that sounds generous, but it's not. I don't need the success. I live much more from my own
inner resources, he's much more dependent on recognition from other people, because he doesn't see himself as a writer-director.

S: It's clear from every scene in your films that you are a woman. You're right to fight against being pigeonholed under 'women's films'. T: I hate being fixed in a genre, stuck back in the kitchen. From the budget point of view, women are still making home movies. But gradually we're getting better recognition, there's less pressure to restrict us to the 'women's world'. In Venice it was irrelevant that I was a woman. There was no such category. My film was simply judged alongside men's films. And I think that's a
step forward.

S: You nearly always talk about how important the womens movement has been for you, and describe yourself as a feminist. And it's clear to me that your work has
a feminist commitment. How about the next film?

T: It has the provisional title 'The Women Friends'. As usual, I start from people and not from the theme. I imagine the characters and develop the story from them. I ask myself how these people might meet. What might happen to them? What might they go through together? My problem is that I can never write an outline beforehand
to raise money: the story is only clear once the screenplay has been written. Even the characters only come clear to me as I write. I have a rough idea of them
to start with, but they become more complex and contradictory as I go. Then I sit down and write it scene by scene.

S: But the result is very analytical, not just intuitive.

T: Yes, taken as a whole. My films are often more precise than my descriptions of them.

S: Sure. That's why you chose film as a medium. Are you willing to reveal the plot of 'Women Friends'?

T: Again, it's about the relationship of two women. One is a worrier who has little contact with other people. She sits in her flat copying colour pictures in black and white.
Her husband is sympathetic, one of those men who always say: If only my wife would be more liberated! He wants her to be friendly with the wives of the men he works with, to be more open and independent. But as soon as she takes the first step, gets to know a woman he has practically brought to her, then everything changes.
He becomes jealous, feels that his wife doesn't need him any more. He can't bear it, and turns against the other woman as well as his wife. In one terrible argument, he
almost strangles her.

S: Does the story draw on your own life?

T: Yes, but on my many women friends' lives too. I have known so many men who admire me as a strong, active woman and complain that their wives are not like that.
But if you look closer at the situation, you find they stop them from doing it. Many men are suffering at the moment, and making us suffer too, because they can't
bear the new sort of friendships between women. S: They have a lot to lose.

T: Exactly.

S: And how does 'Women Friends' end?

T: The wife is like Anna in 'The Sisters'\l the way through the film, you expect her to commit suicide. But then she turns all the self-hatred and self-destructiveness against
her husband. She kills him.