THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM (1975)

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is a mostly cool-headed but blistering dramatic story that shows how swiftly a society gets onto "That Page" in framing someone as something they aren't. When the police bring in Katharina, they should know what is what (Angela Winkler by the way in a performance that breaks your heart because she holds back so much, like even when she breaks apart a room she is trying not to break down and only does once after seeing her mother one last time). But women are always the easiest scapegoats in any Patriachal society, and if they can drive her to make up some stuff that isn't even true just to satisfy their superiors based on, oh, how many miles she drove her car over the years for work vs "other things," then so be it.

But Schlondorff and Von Trotta also take aim at the press and how equally easy (maybe easier) character assassination is. At least one could say the police offer Katharina a snack in between badgering her with questions she doesn't know the answers to - this is all because of one date with an anarchist by the way, and her greatest crime to them is an emotional one since she does care for him (terrific casting by the way, a little Jurgen Prochnow and those intense eyes goes a long way) - while the Press and specifically the Trotges character (*Dieter Laser), who keeps poking his head and hands where they don't belong even into Katharina's mother's literal death-bed.

The film is a kind of Indictment of Society picture, and that sounds like a heavy order for any filmmaker(s) to fill. What makes this story so gripping and devastating is what layers of humanity are stripped away from Katharina and how for any small bits of kindness she gets from an acquaintance or someone, even if it just getting her to a car without getting hounded by a photographer, there is the ever increasing stream of those who keep their distance from her the longer it goes on (one small detail I wish we knew more about, the brother who is said to be in prison, what was up with that, left a little bit murky but more of an observation than a critique). This is to say the directors take characterization as they key motivator, both for how Katharina and others around her react and for how the camera moves as well.

Notice how early on there are more close ups of her and then litle by little the camera itself keeps its space from her - some of this is deliberate in a way that feels closer to documentary than fiction (and while this is not far as we know fully based on a true story enough of it feels authentic), like when Katharina has her good long cry over her mother and is sitting down faced away from us outside.  Or when she drives to that remote house and the cops have already taken away the man who caused her all her misery and she just walks solemnly across a field as that uncanny, dischordant score plays on. This is direction - and Walker's increasingly tightly wound performance - that gets under your skin in the way of psychological nuch if not more as well as political oppression (like say what you will about Joseph K in The Trial, at least he didn't get phone calls from people threatening rape for what he didn't do).

The Lost Honor may be a political statement, and Schlondorff says as much on the special features of the DVD, but if it were simply that the film would be stuck in its time period and decades later it resonates because of the honesty and humanity that is shown (as awful as the police and the Press/"The Paper" are, you understand them in their fully cynical and entrusting dimensions). And in the mid 2020s in America, at a time when men with big guns storming public places behind masks to hide themselves from the public and where a significant segment of the media acts as a mouth-piece to turn a peaceful person into a violent terrorist agitator? Relevant much? Yes. Holy shit it is.

(*I kept thinking this actor looked familiar and then looking up his name it clicked into place and not so much a diamond bullet bit a diamond log of poop went right through my forehead in remembering he was *the* Doctor in The Human Centipede! Wow.  And dare I say... he is in fact creepier as this parasitic Tabloid "Journalist" than the doctor who sewed mouths to assholes)

PS: I wonder if anyone would have the stones to show this to Erika Kirk lol