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.
RSS