Iconic German actress Hanna Schygulla shared important memories from her life with the audience of the 55th Thessaloniki Film Festival during a Q&A session that took place on Thursday, November 6, 2014 at the Pavlos Zannas Theatre. The audience Q&A was part of the screening of five short films in the context of the tribute to her work organised in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki.
In her opening remarks, Hanna Schygulla said she was particularly happy to see packed theatres in Thessaloniki. She then discussed the films that were part of the tribute to her work. The actress said that, in 1978, her relationship with director Reiner Werner Fassbinder was going through a rough patch. “It was a wild time; I wanted to do everything in a movie — act, sing, everything— and the project he had been working on at the time was eventually dropped. So I bought my own camera and started shooting. It was a dream come true for me, to be able to act without any directorial guidance. I was in charge of the direction, the lights, the editing”.
In 2003, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) organised a retrospective to her work and the curators asked her if there was any unknown material they could include in it. That was when those hitherto unknown films were presented for the first time. “This was a rewarding experience, after which I started working again.”
In Hanna Hannah, which has the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as a background, Ms Schygulla touches on her relationship with Germany’s past. When MoMA asked her to screen it, “I needed no more encouragement. I kept making my own films, one or two a year, especially when I had no other engagements. Shooting those films gave me hope, it made me think that the best is still to come. I was like that ever since I was a child. Even now, this is my mindset.”
Before the screening, Hanna Schygulla asked the audience not to look for perfection in those films. “I did not care about technical mastery, those films were totally handmade, using any material I could get my hands on.” The first part of the honorary screening featuredBiographical Fresco, Me And My Double and At The End, all of them directed by Schygulla. “Biographical Fresco is an autobiography, a portrait, a fresco of myself, using old materials. It is a film about how it all started, from the first snowflake.”
Her film Me And My Double is based on the literature of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. “I tried to capture the words someone else wrote, words I identified with and had a magical effect on my life,” said the actress. About her third film, At The End, she said: “The time comes when you see that the end is getting ever closer, and this affects your priorities and your idea about what really matters in life. Life today may be frantic, but personally I do not like to do things in a hurry. Haste ruins my ability to enjoy life.”
After the screening, Ms Schygulla received questions from the audience. A viewer asked her if she had difficulty expressing herself as an artist in the German language. Although the artist belongs to the post-war generation and had no reason to feel guilty, she admitted that “indeed, that was how I felt. The acts of the Nazis left their hideous marks on the entire world. This heritage was a terrible burden.” Commenting on the almost complete annihilation of the Thessaloniki Jewry, she said: “This makes me feel horrible. This is a part of History that Germans of my generation were unable to handle. But it makes no sense to stick to that feeling. Whenever I catch myself feeling ‘superior’, immediately an alarm bell rings inside me and I ponder on those events. Germans are also human beings, however. Not all of them are monsters. But those events showed us how people can be transformed into monsters when they find themselves having to deal with a crisis, a loss or destitution.”
Ms Schygulla added that she feels uncomfortable hearing anyone say “I am proud of my country.” “It makes me a bit scared. I think of Germany after the First World War. Boosting national pride was then the top priority. And I totally mistrust such efforts, because they can so easily slip towards fascism, extremism and terrorism. We are witnessing the emergence of radical movements that want to restore ‘what has been lost’. Every crisis is a great opportunity to move forward, but it also comes with the great danger of becoming attached to parochial beliefs about life in the past and how life should become in the present. My generation did not want to identify with its past. I wanted to be anything else but a German. Which was a good thing, because it made me become always open to difference, and difference has always fascinated me.”
Answering a question about how she deals with old age anxiety, Ms Schygulla said: “An entire industry profits from our fear of old age. People are willing to do plastic surgery, but they are less willing to operate on their souls and remove what they do not want to keep. Of course it is a fact that, as you age, you lose your sex appeal and your body becomes frail. No woman my age ever looks herself in the mirror without pulling back the skin on her face. You are disinclined to accept the transforming power of gravity on you, but you have no choice. Unless of course you choose a Dorian Gray solution”.
The second part of the event featured the screening of two more films: Letter to the Academy - Kafka, directed by Schygulla, and I Sell My Dreams, directed by Ruy Guerra and based on a script by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “I met Marquez in Paris. ‘I have something for you,’ he had told me. At the time, he was the director at the Film Institute in Havana and he presented me with a ‘telenovela’, as he called it, in other words a drama series. The part I played was quite strange, since no one can understand if my character is pulling the strings, if she is a ghost or a soul nurse. I really loved this part, because, unlike my other roles, which I always felt were smaller than me, this one was larger than me.” While shooting I Sell My Dreams she met actress Alicia Bustamante, who became her close friend and starred in the film Letter to the Academy - Kafka, a film adaptation of Kafka’s short story A Report to an Academy, directed by Hanna Schygulla
