After days of jury duty for the Taipei Film Festival (台北電影節), which ended on Sunday, Helma Sanders-Brahms showed up promptly to our interview on Friday morning of last week, elegantly dressed, and looking bright and lively. The 69-year-old German director jokingly called her visit to Taipei the last stop, after Shanghai and Tokyo, of her Asian tour to promote her new film Beloved Clare, about the love triangle between Clara Schumann, her husband Robert Schumann and the much younger composer Johannes Brahms, whom Sanders-Brahms is distantly related to on her mother’s side.
A key figure of the New German Cinema movement in the 1970s, Sanders-Brahms has built a career of making films reflective of contemporary Germany that give voice to the exploited and deprived.
Her most notable works include The Beach Under the Pavement (1974), a story of two Berliners wrestling with the aftermath of the 1968 student movement; Shirin’s Wedding (1976), which addresses the problems faced by Gastarbeiter, foreign migrant workers in Germany, through the experiences of a young Turkish woman; and No Mercy, No Future (1981), about the schizophrenic daughter of a wealthy family who sees the essence of Christ in the people she meets while wandering the streets. One of her most renowned pieces, Germany, Pale Mother (1980) was lauded as the best film about the devastation of wartime and postwar Germany ever made.
Sanders-Brahms’ relationship with Taiwan began when the Women Make Waves Film Festival (女性影展) organized a retrospective program of her works in 2003, which she attended. She made a television documentary, Black Butterfly (黑蝴蝶), about Taiwanese dancer Chuang Shih-hsien (莊士賢) in 2005, partially in cooperation with the Public Television Service (公共電視).
Taipei Times: What was your earliest experience with cinema?
Helma Sanders-Brahms: I had an outstanding experience when I was 10. My parents used to send me to see fairy-tale films on Sunday mornings because they wanted to be alone [laughs]. I didn’t want to go to church. Cinema was the other church to me.
I didn’t like the fairy-tale films. But one day I saw one so beautiful that I went to the box office and demanded my money back for all the bad films I saw [laughs]. I told them that I didn’t want to pay for bad films anymore and I wanted all films to be like that one.
It was a famous film by Jean Cocteau, Beauty
and the Beast, one of the greatest films in the history of cinema.
TT: When did you decide to become a filmmaker?
HS: It was right at that moment, more or less. I thought if there were so few films that I liked, I need to make some [laughs]. I was 12 when I went to work at a film club so that I could see all these special screenings of movies for film buffs.
After finishing my bachelor degree [in German and English literature at the University of Cologne], I went to study acting. My professors told me that I would become a director, not [an] actress. They encouraged me to make further study. They said to me: “As a woman, you have to be especially qualified in order to be accepted, to be taken seriously.”
I was later asked to take up a job as a television announcer for a film program. I became a celebrity, you know, the kind that smiled and looked pretty. But I used the chance to learn more about cinema.
TT: How did you come to know Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1969?
HS: There were two European countries that made beautiful films at that time: France and Italy. In Italy, there were two successful kinds of films. On one side of the spectrum, there is art-house cinema and Pasolini. On the other side, there are spaghetti westerns.
I went down to Italy to conduct interviews for the television show. I met Pasolini, and he immediately told me, “You are going to make films.” I didn’t know why and how, but he saw that in me and offered me a place on the set of Medea.
I also worked with the spaghetti western people. I was a handyperson. I learned and helped wherever I could, and the crew called me “the German spy” [laughs]. It was my film school — and an extremely good one.
Sergio Corbucci [an Italian director best known for his spaghetti westerns] was a very nice guy and a friend of Pasolini. It was kind of like a big family back then. Pasolini was a dark, gloomy guy. Corbucci was sensual and happy. It was a nice balance to me.
TT: What was it like to be a female director in 1970s Germany?
HS: I was quite an attractive woman back then, and I earned my living partially on that [as a model]. In the world of filmmaking, you need to learn to bite in order to survive.
TT: Why was that? Were you criticized for your feministic and Marxist-informed points of view?
HS: No, I wasn’t a feminist. I find feminism of that time, and all the “isms” for that matter, quite limited in the sense that they only have a certain way of thinking, seeing and judging people. Back then in Germany, movies were seen as either political or aesthetic. But I would not go either or. Of course films have political influences and they will always be political. But if a film is made to exert political influences on people, it is violating them.
I was attacked for not having a clear political point of view. What I was interested in was the situation of foreign workers in Germany. Shirin’s Wedding was strongly received in Germany. On the one hand, I got thousands of letters from all over the country telling me how deeply they were affected by the story. On the other hand, right-wing supporters demonstrated against the film, [shouting] “long live Germany” in the streets.
TT: You are the narrator of both Shirin’s Wedding and Germany, Pale Mother. Can you talk a bit more about those two films?
HS: It [Shirin’s Wedding] started with the Turkish woman saying, “Now I am dead.” So it is the dead Turkish woman telling me how she lived in Germany. It feels like a dialogue between her and myself.
Germany, Pale Mother is another film where I use the commentator approach to speak directly to the audience. I speak about my mother, my parents, myself and the war with my voice explaining how I feel about the story.
(Sanders-Brahms was raised by her mother while her father fought in World War II. Germany, Pale Mother is said to be her own story and that of her mother in devastated postwar Germany. The film is narrated by Sanders-Brahms, and the role of the daughter was played by her own daughter.)
TT: How was Germany, Pale Mother first received in Germany?
HS: My situation in Germany has been difficult. I have been much more successful in other parts of the world. You can tell that I have problems in Germany from the fact that I had to fight for 12 years to get Clara done. I have had many difficulties finding money. Maybe it’s because I touch on the themes that somehow Germans don’t want to talk about. Maybe that’s why. I simply don’t know.
It [Germany, Pale Mother] has been re-released three times in France, whereas in Germany there is not even a DVD version available, and people virtually don’t know about it.
TT: Is that part of the reason why you have made fewer films since 1990s.
HS: Yes, it has been a fight. I re-wrote the script [for Beloved Clara] 22 times. The final draft used to shoot the film is the second one I finished in 1996. The script was given to television stations, but refused by all. I simply don’t understand why it had to be such a long battle. Anyway, the film is doing fine in Paris and here [in Taiwan]. It looks like it will do fine in Japan and the US.
TT: Do you feel close to Clara?
HS: I feel particularly close to Johannes. The reason being, first of all, he was my great-great-great-uncle, and I love this guy [laughs]. I hated his music when I was young. Born in a family like that, you had to hate the music in order to find yourself.
I suddenly fell in love with his music in my mid-40s. It was in the French countryside in 1988. There was no traffic, no noise. It was quiet, and beautiful landscape surrounded me. All of sudden, I heard his music. It brought such beauty as if it came from within.
TT: If you have any new projects coming can you tell me about them?
HS: No, I don’t talk about ... [Pauses.] I would like to have a project in Taiwan. I have a distinct childhood memory that relates to the place. When I was little, there was a Taiwanese man invited by my grandparents to stay with us. He taught me how to use chopsticks and lots of things about Chinese and Japanese culture. My first visit here felt like a childhood memory coming to life, and I liked this place very much. I still like it.
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