Three roles in particular are deeply engraved in Hanna Schygulla’s memory: Maria Braun in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The marriage of Maria Braun, ‘who postpones her real life until tomorrow for so long that there is no longer a tomorrow’, Eugenia in Marco Ferreri’s The Story of Piera, ‘who lives the present moment so intensely in her quests for life experiences that she is eventually locked up as a madwoman’, and Susanne Staub in Fatih Akin’s The edge of heaven, who ‘after her daughter’s death, when everything seems to have come to an end, opens the door to a new life’. All these women are very unlike her, and yet resonate with her in a mysterious interplay of mirrors, in contact with the magical realism that is so dear to her – these roles that she has made her own chime with a way of making her life, just as one talks of making films.
Hanna Schygulla was born in Katowice, near Auschwitz, at the end of the Second World War (in her childhood she spoke both German and Polish), but she and her mother were forced to emigrate to Munich. After working in Paris as an au pair, she studied anti-theatre and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first films, the astonishing revelations of the New German (and hence European) Cinema, and from 1968 onwards became one of their enfants terribles. She embodied a Germany that was rebuilding and finding itself and, in the 1960s and 1970s, inventing ways of cultural and political protest that were in radical conflict with the establishment.
Various aspects of her professional life draw our attention to her notable partnerships with leading directors, other significant periods of her career (her lucky chances!) and her lives in Cuba, Paris and now Berlin. But how are we to approach Hanna Schygulla’s screen, theatre and singing performances? What strikes us most is an element of strangeness, a blend of artificiality and naivety, of self-assurance and dilettantism, to quote late-1960s German critics. It is this other Hanna Schygulla, this second identity – which she has discussed, invented and embodied for the past forty-five years – that we need to focus on. A working method invented during her partnership with Fassbinder, experiences of fear or rather enjoyment of fear that allowed her to appear and cling to the image in an unparalleled way. Above all, do not over-rehearse. And always take risks.
Hanna Schygulla’s career is a remarkable one: almost 100 cinema roles from 1968 to the present day, especially thanks to Fassbinder, who directed her in twenty-three films, and – but this is not an exhaustive list – Andrzej Wajda, Kenneth Branagh, Amis Gitaï, Michel Deville, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Béla Tarr, Alexander Sokurov, Fernando Trueba – and Emmanuelle Antille. She has also acted on stage, and sung (a memorable Brecht recital); and – although this is little known – she has produced video essays. The first tapes date back to the late 1970s. Now, in early 2014, there are plans for installations at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris. Her Protocoles des rêves, directed, shot and edited in partnership with her great Cuban friend Alicia Bustamante, are short works that help us grasp the meaning of a line written for her by Gabriel García Márquez in a film shot in Cuba, which she has adopted as her own: knocking at a door, she says ‘Let me in, I’ll dream for you’.
The photograph of this Talking Heads event shows Hanna Schygulla’s face with her eyes closed while photographer Evgen Bavčar runs his fingers over her face. The photographer is blind, the actress is smiling, this encounter beyond the visible world is a gentle one, they exist for one another. This is the image that Schygulla wanted for this event, the same one as on the cover of her autobiography (SchirmerMosel Verlag, 2013) entitled Wach auf und träume, a quote borrowed from Henrik Ibsen: ‘wake up and dream’.
Jean Perret
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