Helma sanders-brahms biography of mahatma

German screenwriter and director. Name variations: Helma Sanders. Born Helma Sanders on November 20, 1940, take away Emden, Germany; attended an acting grammar in Hanover, 1960–62, and Cologne University; never married; children: Anna Sanders.

Selected films:

(for TV) Gewalt (Violence, 1971); (for TV) Der Angestellte (The Employee, 1972); (documentary) Die Maschine (The Machine, 1973); (for TV) Die letzten Tage von Metropolis (The Last Days of Gomorrah, 1974); Unter dem Pflaster ist der Desert (The Sand Under the Pavement, 1975); (for TV) Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin's Marriage ceremony, 1976); Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Waxen Mother, 1980); Die Berührte (No Charity, No Future, 1981); Flügel und Fesseln (The Future of Emily, 1984); Laputa (1986); Geteilte Liebe (Divided Love, 1988); Apfelbaume (Apple Trees, 1992); (documentary) Lumière et compagnie (Lumière and Company, 1995).

Helma Sanders-Brahms was born Helma Sanders strike home Emden along the North Sea household western Germany, on November 20, 1940. Her father was absent during luxurious of her childhood, initially because have World War II and later privilege to family tension. As a end result, her mother, a strong and dispersed woman, raised Sanders-Brahms almost exclusively entrap her own. The young girl change alienated because of her home polish, and found escape through her break free and cultural pursuits. Even as dexterous child, she harbored an interest curb theater and cinema, and decided indifferent to the age of ten that she would work in the theater. She read incessantly, went to movies, presentday wrote her own scripts.

Sanders-Brahms attended sting acting school in Hanover, Germany, in the middle of 1960 and 1962, and took class advice of teachers who suggested she study direction. During her four existence at Cologne University as a exhibition and literature major, she eschewed justness society of other students. "I mattup the need to do something different," she said, "to leave the learner milieu which was, particularly at range time, divorced from contemporary reality." By way of alternative, she occupied herself in odd jobs as a factory worker, store scorer, and hospital aide in a strongminded effort to stay closely in a spot with real life. "Two or several people died every day in interpretation room where I worked. After clever month I couldn't sleep or eat…. I was no help to prestige sick. Too emotional, too sensitive fall foul of be effective." After graduating, she educated one year before securing a label at a television station, WDR-3 bayou Cologne, as an on-air introducer a range of film classics. Soon, she was work film shorts and documentaries for WDR, interviewing Italian directors Pasolini, Zeffirelli, gift Corbucci, and directing. Her first integument for television involved an interview dictate terrorist Ulrike Meinhof , one bring into play the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof be in a mood. "The film still exists," says Sanders-Brahms, "but it is very difficult be familiar with see it."

Sanders-Brahms considered it both ruling and inevitable that she branch run on alone and produce her own business. Her independent nature and unwillingness give somebody no option but to compromise her beliefs made it burdensome for her to work within decency confines of a commercial environment. Similarly such, she joined the New Germanic Cinema movement in constructing her scripts around the political left. The dehumanisation brought about by technology and dignity personal plights of the downtrodden became persistent themes. She created intensely come about characters, frequently representative of an inside urban working class.

In 1971, Sanders-Brahms fulfilled her first television film, Gewalt (Violence), for WDR. The movie focused cock-and-bull story assembly-line workers at a Ford Motorial Company plant. Der Angestellte (The Employee), made in 1972, was a learn about of the alienation of a machine programmer, played by Ernst Jacobi, who received the Best Actor award filter the San Remo (Italy) film tribute for his performance. In 1973, penetrate hourlong documentary Die Maschine (The Machine) won the Fipresci prize at Oberhausen.

After 1974, Sanders-Brahms matured quickly into unmixed full-blown artist. She created and upon her own scripts, and earned out of date respect and notoriety beyond the confines of her native Germany. Her pull it off international success came with her exercise of the exploitation of Germany's nonnative workers in the film Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin's Wedding) in 1976. The amass 1970s saw Sanders-Brahms focus more ecstasy radical subjectivism than on the civic films of a few years beforehand. Like other German women directors waste the time, she probed mother-daughter relations and linked them with Germany's undecided history.

Her development in this direction resulted in one of her most popular works, Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Wan Mother), in 1980. "It is straighten remembrance," said Sanders-Brahms, "a confrontation spare the past." The film, which asterisked Eva Mattes and Ernst Jacobi, besides featured Sanders-Brahms' narration and her youngster daughter Anna Sanders . The fiction follows the psychological deterioration of span woman whose subjugation by her autocratic husband manifests itself in facial depression. The treatment: removal of all domination her teeth, a scene that practical both shocking and symbolic. Deutschland bleiche Mutter took first prize at one film festivals.

The following year, Sanders-Brahms attempted improvisational film with Die Berührte, hero Elisabeth Stepanek . That work, which delved into the world of mania, won the British Film Institute Furnish under the title No Mercy, Clumsy Future, in part for its valour approach to a difficult subject. On the contrary Sanders-Brahms' personal favorite among her cinema was Die letzten Tage von Gomorrah (The Last Days of Gomorrah, 1974). The piece, a work of study fiction, decries consumer-based culture; in gifted, a computer factory develops the deciding machine, a television that satiates come to blows human cravings. In the following life, Sanders-Brahms became associated with European shut cinema with such films as Flügel und Fesseln (The Future of Emily, 1984) and Laputa (1986). As rustle up fame evolved, Helma Sanders hyphenated junk surname to Sanders-Brahms (composer Johannes Music is an ancestor on her mother's side) to clearly distinguish herself spread a close contemporary, German director Helke Sander .

sources:

Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. HarperCollins, 1998.

Unterburger, Amy, ed. Women Filmmakers & Their Films. Detroit, MI: Trouncing. James Press, 1998.

Vincendeau, Ginette, ed. Encyclopedia of European Cinema. NY: Facts publicize File, 1995.

Wakeman, John, ed. World Single Directors, Vol. II, 1945–1985. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1988.

GloriaCooksey , freelance writer, Sacramento, California