2023-12-24 09:26:55
Hanna Schygulla can be seen in a supporting role in François Ozon’s film “Peter von Kant”, which opened the Berlinale almost two years ago. She plays the mother of the hero, a film director who is broken by his obsession with a young actor, and her performance is the highlight of the film. Because when she appears in front of the camera, the temperature in the room suddenly changes. Suddenly you can feel an existential seriousness that is otherwise completely missing from Ozon’s remake of a fifty-year-old film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Back then, in “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” Hanna Schygulla played Margit Carstensen’s young lover, and she also brings the energy with which she portrayed the narcissism of this character into the role of mother. But there is something else there, a charisma that is difficult to put into words. There is only one term for it: aura.
She herself is a piece of film history
Hanna Schygulla is the living embodiment of everything that was great about Fassbinder’s cinema, and not just since Irm Hermann, Margit Carstensen and Rosel Zech died. She played the main characters in Fassbinder’s most commercially successful and artistically best films, and with both “Lili Marleen” and “The Marriage of Maria Braun”, she wrote not only herself but also German auteur cinema into film history . But her personal achievement, without which the professional triumph would not have been possible, is that she stood up to Fassbinder. He discovered her as an acting student, brought her to his theater and gave her leading roles in his first films.
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Hanna Schygulla’s films: stages of an actress’s career
But at the height of their work together, after “Fontane Effi Briest”, she broke away from him. She wrote in her autobiography “Wake up and dream” that she didn’t want to be “a smiling child’s face with sad eyes, a kind voice, a trained creature”. So she withdrew – and came back as Maria Braun.
Both the leaving and the coming back testify to an stubbornness that is a basic motif of Hanna Schygulla’s life and games. Even in her first role with Fassbinder, as Marie in “Katzelmacher”, she exudes, in addition to her erotic immediacy, an inner distance that is due to a special effort of will. Schygulla, born as the daughter of a timber merchant in Upper Silesia, learned early on to keep her emotions in check as a refugee child in Munich. In front of the camera, she turned this into a style of representation that should not be misunderstood as indolence because it is an emphatic form of self-control.
Passion with Godard, success with Ferreri
The look of the eyes, the pout, the long speech, the delayed gestures, these are all artistic devices that become mannerisms for small directors and brilliant moments for big ones. In the 1980s, after Fassbinder’s early death, Hanna Schygulla showed this brilliance with many European filmmakers, with Godard (“Passion”) as well as with Ettore Scola (“Escape to Varennes”), with Margarethe von Trotta (“Heller Wahn”) like Marco Ferreri, whose “History of Piera” earned her an acting award at the Cannes Festival in 1983.
Dietmar Dath Published/Updated: Recommendations: 24 Claudius Seidl Published/Updated: Recommendations: 16 Andreas Kilb Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 34
In the new millennium, major cinema appearances became rarer. “Decide enthusiastically!”, this was Peter Handke’s motto, the actress wrote in her life review, and perhaps her enthusiasm deceived her a few times. A highlight of these later years was her appearance in Hans Steinbichler’s “Winterreise”, in which she not only withstands Josef Bierbichler’s rage as the blinding wife of a Bavarian hardware dealer, but also makes Sibel Kekilli look pale. Hanna Schygulla explained nine years ago at the presentation of her “Dream Protocols” videos at the Academy of Arts that she was hoping for an older role in which she could once again fully express herself. May your wish come true. Today she turns eighty years old.
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