The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

Katharina Blum is a young housekeeper living a quiet life. At a carnival party she meets a man and spends the night with him. The next morning the police break into her flat: he is a wanted militant and he left her apartment before dawn. Katharina knows nothing, and it makes no difference. A newspaper takes up the case and within four days turns her, in the eyes of the country, into a terrorist's lover. The film happens not in the interrogation room but at the printing press. The real violence comes out of journalism: quotes are twisted, sentences are invented in the mouth of her dying mother, neighbours are prompted to talk. What Katharina loses is not her freedom but her name. Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe von Trotta directed together, from Heinrich Boll's 1974 novel, whose subtitle asks how violence arises and where it can lead. Angela Winkler plays Katharina. It was made during West Germany's Red Army Faction years, when press and state were hardening at the same time, and nobody needed to be told which newspaper it meant. Who it is for: anyone drawn to political cinema and criticism of the press. Who it is not for: anyone unfamiliar with the period. The film leans on the German climate of the seventies, the tone is cold throughout, and it almost never goes inside its characters' feelings.