L'Honneur perdu de Katharina Blum

"The Lost Honor of..." not only tells an interesting story with powerful writing, acting and cinematography, but is also a must see for those disturbed by the power

authoritarian governments (communist, fascist, and everything in between) possess to exploit individual human rights. I wish we could view this film as a well made relic of the past, but unfortunately its subject matter is as relevent today as it was in 1970's West Germany. As in Katarina's world, terrorism is again the favored epithet of the day as the U.S.'s social and political climate moves away from a conversation between differing individual view points and towards an 'on message' insistence on absolute conformity.

Katarina is a young maid with little money, who sleeps with a man she barely knows, a man who is under surveillance as a suspected terrorist. Because she was seen with the supposed terrorist, her life is torn apart by police interrogators and a press that only reports "facts" which support its particular ideology, even if the details must be fabricated. Although those who know Katarina tell the press and police of a bright, sweet, and quiet girl, her reputation is run through the gutter by the men who translate her private life to the public world. Eventually, Katarina takes on the attributes of a stereotypical terrorist because the state has given her no choice but to become radicalized. Simply because Katarina will not give up her dignity and privacy, she becomes an enemy of the state.

For Katarina, her private life becomes glaringly public, and the public judges her based on both the fabricated evidence presented by her accusers (both press and government) as well as their own assumptions about how a woman should behave. In the society that surrounds Katarina, the state functions through conformity, and those who do not conform instantly become the enemy. As a woman, Katarina bears the brunt of this brutality, as her sexuality becomes both exploited and demonized. The young maid becomes a media fixation, a beautiful sexual terrorist.

Although much of this might sound familiar, the film relates these political and social paradoxes on an individual, personal level. As in Katarina's case, sensational news stories rarely investigate the cogs which make them front page headlines-they only reinforce easy reactions of judgemental outrage. "The Lost Honor of ..." shines a bright light on the lives that are trampled beneath the broad strokes of an unyielding and inhuman militarized state and the press and public which supports it.

I read before the novel I saw the film (in my german class) and I have to say this adaption is way better than the book. The book by Heinrich Böll is not easy to read, it's actually very boring and sometimes you just want to throw it at the wall because Böll often just philosophies about some unimportant things. The film concentrates on the "real" story of Katharina Blum and creates an intense portrait of a young woman who becomes a victim of the tabloid press. It's really good and Angela Winkler gives us a superb performance. 7/10.

Angela Winkler isn't much of anything, but when she has a brief affair with a man who turns out to be a terrorist, the police investigate her, and the press crucifies her.

Distrust of news organizations is not a phenomenon that arose in the 21st century; 'gutter press' is recorded as of 1845, and 'yellow journalism' in 1881. This collaboration between Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta from the novel by Heinrich Boll is an outright polemic, almost as savage as the attack on Miss Winkler's character. It's hard to qualify it, since the entire situation creeps up on the audience, just as it does on Miss Winkler. One day she's going to discotechs and dancing to 'Spanish Flea', the next the police are talking to her calmly, and a few days later, her name is all over the papers.

In a society where 'news' has become some sort of addictive drug that stresses out anyone who looks at it, and maddens anyone who doesn't -- and no, I haven't looked at the election results, and don't tell me -- here's a movie as bitterly prophetic as NETWORK.

This film is as prescient about the abuses of the so-called liberal media, as another film made the same year: NETWORK. Though the political agendas of the two films run somewhat different tracks, they arrive at the same station. One's private life, passions and convictions are reduced to fodder for the lowest common denominator of the semi-literate whenever it suits the status quo's purpose.

If you're about to see "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" for the first time, attempt to avoid thinking of it as an old film; As with Network, the passing decades have proved it more a documentary.

A mild-mannered divorced woman Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) meets a nice guy called Ludwig (Jürgen Prochnow) at a party and spends a night with him. The next morning, she is shocked to wake up to see a special police unit storming into her apartment, seeking to arrest Ludwig to no avail as he has already left. It turns out Ludwig is a highly wanted criminal involved in anarchist activity and Katharina is arrested as well as a potential associate. Her name and pictures are published in trashy tabloids and particularly an almost caricature-like journalist called Tötges (Dieter Laser) is completely unashamed of dragging her whole life through dirt by selling fabricated stories to his magazine.

The film examines the effects of the witch-hunt caused by the press and was inspired by writer Heinrich Böll's own experiences. The atmosphere of anxiety is created subtly with some avant-garde music and bleak photography. Some of the scenes during Katharina's imprisonment have Kafkaesque loneliness written all over them in an effective, distressing manner. Angela Winkler shows all these feelings naturally without much dialogue.

Even though the exploration of Katharina's emotions during the media spectacle is interesting, the slow-paced film feels a little too long at times and could have benefited from being trimmed down a bit in the middle. On the other hand, in the beginning I would have liked to see more of Katharina and Ludwig's short relationship as it could have explained her fondness for him better. Now it doesn't seem all clear why she wants to protect him despite all the troubles it causes her. Also, the film is understandably completely on Katharina's side but the ending comes across as a little heavy-handed, partly due to the overwrought performance of the priest in the epilogue.

In spite of minor complaints, I think Katharina Blum is a good and still highly relevant film and I recommend it to anyone interested in slow-paced character studies and bleak dramas. Those interested in the power of the Press and the hypocrisy of the public should also check it out.