MVT: Yes, the skirt suits were the order of the day, you had to be correct. And she was correct by choice, she didn't like women wearing trousers. In this area, she was conservative. But that scene in the lecture hall... she is coming down into the arena. It is a coliseum that she is thrown into, and aggression awaits down below.

BLVR: OK, but your film actually makes theory and intellectual debate very sexy.

MVT: Entertaining too, I hope. Mary McCarthy's wit also helps. They're often together in the film.

II. BETWEEN WOMEN

BLVR: Speaking of women conversing, have you ever heard of the Bechdel Test? You've been practicing it for decades before it was actually named.

MVT: I have?

BLVR: To pass, a film has to have at least two women, these two need to have some sort of conversation at some point, and that conversation needs to be about something other than a man. Most films fail.

MVT: I like it! And let's add, they can't be talking about babies and cooking and such.

BLVR: Your films have been showing us that when you put two women together in a sustained conversation or action that is not revolving around some guy, something happens.

MVT: Yes. And I've noticed that men still get unhappy about this... women talking about something other than men, or love, or babies.

BLVR: But you also show some of the darker sides of closeness between two women. In Sisters, for example.

MVT: Sisters was also a way to show the two sides of myself—they are so different, and so far from each other, the one who is doing and fighting, and the other who is so sensitive and so offering . . . I had to put it in two characters. At the end, the main character is there with a notebook and she says, "I have to become both Anna and Maria in one person."

BLVR: And you based Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane) on the long conversations you had with one of the two sisters on whose life story the film is based.

MVT: Yes, Christiane. She became a friend. I met her at the funeral of her sister, Gudrun Ensslin, who was the so-called terrorist one. I added so many things to the story, but this basic difference between them was a fact. I lived in Germany in the fifties and there was really this bleierne Zeit—the leaden times. You understood unconsciously that there was something terrible in the past but nobody spoke about it. This grey cover over us... We felt there was something off but our parents didn't tell us and we weren't taught about it in school. That started only in the sixties. It was the same with the survivors in Israel. They didn't speak with their children about the Holocaust—the victims didn't speak, the perpetrators didn't speak. Fifties was the silent time.

BLVR: So the Holocaust and the aftermath are important in the film, although not obviously at the forefront.

MVT: There's a moment when the father of the two girls shows in his parish hall the film Night and Fog by Alain Resnais.

BLVR: What's the second film that they're watching as grown women?

MVT: Documentary images of the war in Vietnam. They are making the link between what they saw as young girls—the images of the Holocaust—and the images from Vietnam, with people running on the streets, being burned...

BLVR: So the character based on Gudrun saw her fight against militarism of her time as something that would resemble the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany in the thirties and forties?

MVT: Yes...

BLVR: What is it that they did, Gudrun and her friends? You never show their actions. Other characters mention bombs being thrown, etc.

MVT: Yes, I didn't want to make an action film. And I am following Christiane's point of view, and she only saw her sister twice in this period when Gudrun was part of the terrorist group.

Once they meet in a museum; second time, when Gudrun's group come to her home late at night. We stay with her perspective all the way until and after Gudrun's death. After the funeral of the real Gudrun in '77 many people in Germany, especially on the Left, believed that they were murdered in prison. Few people believed that it was a suicide. Only perhaps ten years later we became aware that it could have been a suicide.

BLVR: You leave that indeterminate in the film.

MVT: I did the film in '81 and we couldn't know the truth then. Perhaps we will never know.

BLVR: What did the real Gudrun and her group do? Destruction of property, mainly?

MVT: They robbed banks. They also killed people.

BLVR: Where do you stand on violent action today? My impression was that the sixties and the seventies saw more serious and braver activists than we are today.

MVT: It was interesting to me to discover that there were many women in these groups that espoused violence. In larger society, women were far from equality—their talents and their will were not valued—and yet here we had these radical groups where women were accepted as equals. They could join in the fight. The anger they had in themselves, they could express and act on. And they were valued as thinking and acting human beings.

BLVR: And meanwhile in some other groups of the New Left, women still made coffee.

MVT: I have a scene in the film—really, I did it as Christiane told it to me, I could not have imagined a scene like this. Christiane said that the two men at one point in a meeting said to her, Make us coffee, and that she got up and did it. She was in the group, and she did the coffee. It's a just a detail in the scene, but it's there.

BLVR: But seriously, where do you stand on direct action? The only two groups I can think of today that employ direct action for the cause of equality for women are Femen, and La Barbe in France. Neither is violent, though. Do you think there is anything today worth doing something violent about?

MVT: I must say I was never in favor of violence, like Gudrun was. I am always in favor of expressing anger, though. I am always in favor of revolt, and can even understand some forms of property crime. But I am not in favor of killing—that for me is the line not to be crossed. I was a very serious leftist and feminist in the early seventies and Gudrun once asked me to come with her lawyer and visit her in prison. I didn't go; I knew she wanted to convince me to continue her legacy—to become her. On the one hand I didn't want to disappoint her, she was in prison and unhappy. On the other, I knew I couldn't say yes. So I didn't go.

BLVR: Wow. You would have been making very different films had you said yes.

MVT: I was a member of a group that helped political prisoners—not Gudrun, but other ones—and I went to prison visits once a month and corresponded and sent them things they needed... But her, no. I couldn't. It's strange, no.

Another group I was in had this terrible communist reductionist language, and that was for me always an obstacle. I read poetry, and was much more open to art... all of a sudden it was like a sin to still read poetry.

BLVR: Your film The Second Awakening of Christina Klages is also based on a true story—a woman whose daycare loses funding and she robs a bank to get some money so it could stay open.

MVT: The story is true, but I invented all the travels and the people she meets in the film. The woman who did it in real life plays a small role in the film, she is in the kindergarten scenes. It was after her prison years, so when she came out I put her in the film... after that she worked as the script girl for two or three of my films.

BLVR: I like that you give people jobs.

MVT: After that she did two films on her own as a director. But now I don't know where she is, I've lost her on my way.