Hanna Schygulla Movies
Born in German-occupied Poland, Hanna Schygulla was raised in Munich, studying languages and literature at that city's university. Turning to acting in her early 20s, Ms. Schygulla worked extensively at the experimental Munich Action Theater, where she met the prolific and highly volatile actor/director/writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder. From 1968, Hannah starred in 20 Fassbinder film productions, retaining her professional ties to the director despite frequent and increasingly violent personal and professional disagreements. The Berlin Film Fest honored Schygulla with their best actress prize for her stunning work in the title role of Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Hardly glamour-girl material, she can best be described as a character star, whose versatility transcends her peasant-stock appearance. During her years with Fassbinder, Schygulla was also well-served in films directed by Schlondorff, Godard, Wajda and Scola. Since Fassbinder's sudden death in 1982, Schygulla has more often than not settled for bread-and-butter roles in conformist projects. In the 1980s, she appeared with frequency on American television; she played Jennie Lynd in the TV biopic Barnum (1986), Catherine Skewonskaya in the multinational miniseries Peter the Great (1986), and the mother of the title character in the made-for-TV feature Casanova (1987) In recent films like Dead Again (1991) and 101 Nights (1995) Hanna Schygulla has chosen to hide her distinctive features in bizarre makeup and elaborate costumes, though her voice remains inimitably hers. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Gods of the Plague (Gotter der Pest) is one of several German films directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder under his pseudonym of Franz Walsch. That's Fassbinder, however, playing the small role of a buyer of pornography. The main story involves a pair of two-bit hoods who spend most of the film one-upping each other with a brace of scheming females. Their dreary life of crime comes to a spectacular head in a shoot-out at a supermarket. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hanna Schygulla, Margarethe von Trotta, (more)
An independent criminal's work is admired by organized crime. He is tortured after he refuses the invitation to join the gang but later relents and becomes a member. He continues to be a pimp and a murderer in this disturbing film that appeared at the Berlin Film Festival in 1969. This feature garnered international recognition for writer/director Rainer Werner Fassbinder who would go on to become one of Germany's most prolific directors of the post-World War II era. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ulli Lommel, Hanna Schygulla, (more)
- 1969
A German bisexual male suffers the indignities of prejudice in a small town. After taking up with the town floozie -- who tries to trap him into marriage and claims he has impregnated her -- the people of the town turn from teasing to cruelty, and the young man decides to leave. When he gives a local boy a ride on his bicycle, the act of kindness is misconstrued to be a sexual advance. The boy's mother is livid and fears her mentally challenged son may have been molested. The floozie continues to pressure the young man into marrying her, until the weight of it all becomes too much; he snaps and kills her. Soon the entire town conspires to hunt down the young man like an animal in this disturbing story of prejudice and intolerance. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Martin Sperr, Angela Winkler, (more)
Jorgos (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is a Greek immigrant in Germany who encounters the intolerance of the locals against foreign workers. Open hostility turns to violence when he is beaten up by the authoritarian thugs after dating a German woman. Male and female nudity along with hetero and homosexual sex scenes are shown in this searing indictment against prejudice and fascism. This feature took the Prize of International Film Critics at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1969. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hanna Schygulla, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, (more)
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder uses a 15th century legend as an allegory to the political situation in late-'60s Germany in The Niklashausen Journey. Combining medieval and contemporary imagery, the story follows Hans Boehm (Michael König), a shepherd who believes the Virgin Mary wants him to start a proletarian revolution. Fassbinder appears as the rebellious instigator the Black Monk. Also starring Hanna Schygulla. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
A technical designer enjoys a comfortable life with his wife and child. He has the approval of his boss and is in good health except for smoking too much according to his doctor. His wife is visited by a girlfriend one Sunday afternoon. The man is bored watching television and grabs a chandelier and kills the conversing women and his child. In a chilling display of nonchalance, he contemplates his own death by hanging in this disturbing feature. This film was the fourth for director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Kurt Raab, Lilith Ungerer, (more)
Der Händler der vier Jahreszeiten (The Merchant of Four Seasons) is about the deterioration of a man's soul. Fruit vendor Hans (Hans Hirschmüller) cannot please his family. His mother harps on his failures. His wife is openly discontent. He must peddle produce to his beloved ex-girlfriend, and he is mocked by his customers for being shorter and fatter than his wife. He is withdrawn, crushed, and humiliated. He turns to drinking and violence, but his rage causes his wife and daughter to leave him. While desperately begging for their return, Hans suffers a debilitating heart attack. His family comes back, but Hans is unable to work and must hire help for his fruit stand. Hans' first employee is his wife's ex-lover, whom he fires for embezzling. He then hires a friend and hero from his legionnaire days, Harry (Klaus Löwitsch), out of pity. Harry is hardworking, diligent, and clever. He turns Hans' business around and enlivens his home life. Harry's success also begins to displace Hans -- with his fruit stand, with his wife, and even with his child. Hans becomes useless, a nothing -- exactly what his mother, his wife, and those around him set him up to be. ~ Aubry Anne D'Arminio, All Movie Guide
German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs the made-for-TV melodrama Pioneers in Ingolstadt, based on the play by Marieluise Fleisser. The film opens as a parade of soldiers are marching through a town square singing patriotic songs. Alma (Irm Hermann) and Berta (Hanna Schygulla) are watching them and musing about their ideas on men and relationships. The soldiers (often referred to as pioneers) have been given the task of building a bridge in the town. Alma seems to understand that the soldiers only want her for short sexual encounters, so she's prepared to live her life accordingly. Meanwhile, romantic Berta falls in love with self-centered soldier Karl (Harry Baer), who all but tells her to get lost. The soldiers get drunk and beat up a random passerby. The women grow to hate Alma for her acceptance of life as a sex object. Naïve Berta is ultimately humiliated. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
In his 36-year life, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made some 40 films. He is perhaps best known to American audiences for his 1978 period drama, The Marriage of Maria Braun. A theme he examined repeatedly in his films was the unreasonable meanness of people, which he shows in a stark, relentless fashion. This early film, Whity, is set in the American Old West, with overtones of the antebellum South. The main character, Whity (Günther Kaufmann), is a black servant who is sorely abused at every turn. Eventually, he has had all he can take; his manner of taking vengeance is what this film is about. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Günther Kaufmann, Ron Randell, (more)
Aimlessness and misplaced ambition take two friends in unexpected directions in this made-for-TV drama directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Michel (Michael Konig) and Gunther (Gunther Kauffmann) are two friends who feel trapped in Germany and are trying to decide what to do with their lives; Gunther has recently gotten out of the Army and is looking for work, while Michel installs floor tiles. Michel and Gunther get hold of a map of the Rio das Mortes in Peru, and become obsessed with the idea of leaving everything behind and going to Peru in search of treasure. Hanna (Hanna Schygulla), who is engaged to marry Michel, doesn't think much of this idea and wishes her boyfriend would come to his senses, eventually threatening violence to prevent him from leaving her. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- 1972
Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the lad to kill her father, whose incestuous sexual attentions to her have grown unbearable. The site they choose for this deed, which gives its name to the film, is a wild-game crossing. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- 1972
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This tale of intermingled love and hate is directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and is the 13th of the 33 films he made in his short life. It explores the universal dynamics present in close human relationships, even lesbian ones. Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a fashion designer. Some time ago, she divorced the husband she no longer loved. Until recently, she has been in a fairly satisfactory S & M relationship with her assistant. When she develops an obsession with her fashion model, however, things become far more complicated. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of a late 19th-century novel by Theodor Fontane is an austere period piece that may be the least characteristic of the German director's films. The titular heroine, played by Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla, is a 17-year-old girl forced into a loveless marriage with an old count. Living as the aristocrat's trophy wife, Effi endures her provincial existence unhappily. Her circumstances lead to a brief affair with a young lieutenant that attracts the attention of the townspeople, but not her unsuspecting husband's. Years later, however, the count discovers the love letters between his wife and her lover. As dictated by convention, he challenges the lieutenant to a duel and throws his wife out of their home. The shamed Effi is forced to live by herself, shunned by society and spurned by her family. Effi eventually returns to her unsympathetic parents, who reluctantly take in their disgraced daughter. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
- 1974
The Wrong Move and The Wrong Movement were the English-language titles for German director Wim Wenders' Falsche Bewegung. Made for television, the film is an update of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Ruediger Vogeler plays aspiring writer Wilhelm Meister, who goes on a long odyssey in the woods in search of truth. His companions on this journey are pragmatic Therese (Hanna Schygulla), bisexual Mignon (Nastassja Kinski, billed under her real name, Nakszynski), Mignon's hippielike boyfriend Laertes (Hans-Christian Blech), and artistically bankrupt poet Landau (Peter Kean). The foursome accept the hospitality of an industrialist (Ivan Desny), who unbeknownst to all but himself is a deeply troubled ex-Nazi. Novelist Peter Handke wrote the screenplay for Wrong Move. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rüdiger Vogler, Hanna Schygulla, (more)
- 1975
Based on the best-selling novel by Nobel-laureate Heinrich Böll, this drama is a passionate indictment of Catholicism. Hans Schnier (Helmut Griem) has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother's fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church. His complete estrangement from his family and friends, who are now either bourgeois or passionately Catholic (or both), is demonstrated to him, after he makes a series of efforts to make contact. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Helmut Griem, Hanna Schygulla, (more)
German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder both directed and photographed The Third Generation (Die Dritte Generation). Displaying a sense of humor that can most kindly be described as perverse, Fassbinder follows the exploits of a group of well-heeled German terrorists. Without truly taking sides, the director demonstrates how the terrorists are essentially shooting themselves in the foot. The more havoc they spread, the tighter the government restrictions against other radicals. Eddie Constantine, the sang-froid leading man of many a Lemmy Caution espionage film, is ironically cast in The Third Generation. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Margit Carstensen, Eddie Constantine, (more)
- 1979
- R
The film that elevated German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder from domestic approbation to international acclaim, The Marriage of Maria Braun stars the director's on-and-off favorite actress Hanna Schygulla in the title role. During the allied siege of Germany in the last year of the war, Maria's new husband (Klaus Löwitsch) is shipped off to the Russian front before the marriage is consummated. As she struggles to survive wartime deprivations, Maria haunts the local train station, seeking out information concerning her husband. When it appears that she's a widow, Maria takes a job as a barmaid and befriends a black soldier (George Byrd) from the occupying allied troops, who sees to it that Maria's family receives vital food and supplies. The opportunistic Maria eventually takes a job with a wealthy importer (Ivan Desny), building herself up to a position of power and indispensability. Though she sleeps with her employer, Maria still carries a torch for her husband. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, (more)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's sweeping 16-hour-long drama Berlin Alexanderplatz is an adaptation of the novel by Alfred Doblin. Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) is released from prison as the film opens; he had been jailed for four years after killing his girlfriend Ida. Franz becomes involved with Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar) and promises to no longer break the law. The 1920s German economy is horrible, and Franz has difficulty providing for himself and his partner. He goes into business with Lina's uncle, who eventually betrays Franz, sending him into a serious downward spiral. Franz becomes involved with a criminal named Reinhold (Gottfried John), a womanizer who convinces Franz to get rid of the woman Reinhold himself has discarded. After a botched robbery, Franz loses his arm in a car accident. With assistance from his ex-girlfriend Eva (Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla) and her pimp, Franz recovers and returns to the city. He starts to make some money by acting as a pimp for a prostitute named Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), but Reinhold returns and kills her. The authorities arrest Franz for the murder. The film ends with Franz in a mental hospital, a prime candidate to join the ranks of the upstart National Socialist party. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, (more)
