The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975 Film) Literary Elements

Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta

Angela Winkler and Mario Adorf

Dieter Laser and Jürgen Prochnow

Detective drama

German

This film did not received any awards.

3 October 1975

Willi Benninger, Eberhard Junkersdorf and Gunther Witte

The action in the film takes place in West Germany in the year 1975.

The actions in the film are told from the perspective of a third person subjective point of view.

Because this is a detective film, the tone and mode created is one of suspense and violence.

The protagonist is Katarina and the antagonist is Werner Tötges.

The major conflict is between the press, willing to do anything just to find someone who they can blame for everything wrong taking place and the general population who sometimes falls prey to them.

The film reaches its climax when Katharina kills Tötges at the end of film.

The fact that Katharina will be followed constantly throughout the film is foreshadowed by the first scene in the film in which a man dressed in black is filming Ludwig from an understatement.

When the inspectors claim Katharina and Ludwig knew one another since before the party is an understatement used in the film by the inspector because the from the first minutes of the film is clear the two never met before.

An innovation, which we can note in the film is the way through which the characters are filmed in such a way it suggests they are followed. The camera follows another person who holds a camera pointed at one of the major characters and then it switches so the viewer can see what the spy is seeing while filming a person of interest. This frame within a frame is used all throughout the movie to highlight the idea that the characters had no privacy and that their moves were watched at all times.

In the first 20 minutes of the film, the apartment where Katharina was staying was searched by the police early in the morning. During the search, a gun went off, but everyone quickly discovered how one of the people searching the house was the one responsible for accidentally shooting his gun and scaring everyone. This incident is used here as an allusion to make reference to the police incompetence and also to foreshadow the later abuses the characters will have to face.

A paradoxical element appears in the scene in which Katharina questions about her relationship with Ludwig. When she starts talking about the way he made him feel and how he was a tender person, the people became uninterested and told her to shut up because it presented Ludwig in a positive way.

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