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Helma Sanders-Brahms (1940-2014)
By Dorothea Holloway | June 2, 2014
Ron Holloway loved the work of Helma Sanders-Brahms:
By whichever standard you measure the achievements of New German Cinema, one individual accomplishment stands out over others: the remarkable career of Helma Sanders-Brahms. Indeed, given the 26 Autorenfilm credits to her name over the past three decades, she has risen steadily in the ranks to become Germany’s best known, most acclaimed, and internationally awarded woman film director. No other woman filmmaker has been honored with Germany’s highest film award: the coveted Golden Shell, given to Heinrich in 1977. No other Autorin has molded the destiny of the burgeoning cine-feminist movement more than she – and that on thematic content alone in critically acclaimed festival entries. And no other German woman filmmaker has been showered with so many distinguished artistic honors – among them, membership in Berlin’s Academy of Fine Arts, recipient of France’s Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and bearer of Japan’s Yasue Yamamoto Award for Artistic Achievement in Film and Theatre. — Ron Holloway, Berlin, 26 September 1999
From KINO – German Film No: 2 (Spring 1980):
1976. Produktion: Regina Ziegler. Distribution: Cine-International. Director and Screenplay: Helma Sanders-Brahms. Photography: Thomas Mauch. Editor: Margot Löhlein. Sets: Götz Heymann, Günther Naumann. Music: J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, L.v.Beethoven. Cast: Heinrich Giskes (Heinrich von Kleist), Grischa Huber (Kleist’s sister), Hannelore Hoger, Lina Carstens, Sigfrit Steiner, Hilde Sessak. 135 min., 35 mm, color.
Produced to coincide with the 100th birthday of Prussian poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist (b. 1777), Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Heinrich attempted to go beyond the polish of a literary spectacle to portray the inner agonies of the writer as well. She filmed in Berlin (East and West), Paris, and Switzerland, tracing the psychological and historical reasons for Kleist’s eventual suicid shortly after penning Prince Friedrich von Homburg (1810 ), German Film Prize, Gold Shell, 1977.
See also: KINO – German Film No: 4 (Spring 1981), No: 23 (Summer 1986), No: 26 (1987) and No: 47 (1992), there wrote John Mosier Aimez Vous Brahms?
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