Wednesday | November 12, 2003 9:30 pm

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
(Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum)

Screening on Film

Directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta.
With Angela Winkler, Mario Adorf, Dieter Laser.
West Germany, 1975, 35mm, color, 106 min.
German with English subtitles.

An international success of the New German Cinema, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is a tense adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s novel about the power of the mass media to inspire guilt by association. A young woman (Winkler) spends the night with a young man she has met at a party, who turns out to be an alleged terrorist. After suffering intense scrutiny at the hands of the German police, the judiciary, and—worst of all—the right-wing tabloid press, Katharina fights to retain her honor and, in the process, becomes transformed.