L'Honneur perdu de Katharina Blum

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.

This is one of a handful of German productions of the 1970s critically acclaimed by world cinema. "Die verlorene Ehre der Katerina Blum" tells of the seemingly innocent love affair of a young woman with a man who turns out to be a fugitive bank robber. Twisting and turning the story to make it more "readable" a tabloid reporter shamelessly destroys the woman's reputation, even leading to her arrest as an "accomplice" to the crimes committed by her "boyfriend".

The film shows in detail how the situation impacts many people, including Katerina's employers, neighbors, family memebers. All speak highly of her, yet the newspapers always manage to print distorted facts, embellishments and outright lies. The ending, though unexpected and shocking, will satisfy the viewer, who by now completely empathises with the title character who had been "railroaded" by the press for no other purpose than to sell more papers. A five star classic.

Apart from its general and still (i.e. now more than ever) valid attacks on the scrupelous tactics of tabloid journalism, this movie is also very valuable as a time piece about German society in the 1970's, when the country was shaken by fear of terrorist assassinations and everything considered anti-Democratic (meaning left-wing). In this way, the film not only takes into question the missing morality of tabloid journalists, but also the loss of human rights in a society bothered with questions of homeland security (parallels to the current situation in the U.S. are obvious). Katharina Blum is not only destroyed by the merciless press abusing her for sensationalist journalism, but also by a police and judicial system that doesn't value an individual's right of privacy anymore, and even less the principle of innocent until proven otherwise.

A film of exceptional quality (even though the acting isn't convincing at some times), "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum" is strongly recommended to every thinking movie fan with an interest in the abuse of power in our not-so-democratic society.

"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.

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.