Early Life
The child of Elisabeth von Trotta and painter Alfred Roloff, she was born in Berlin and relocated to Paris in the 1960s, where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films.
In her early career, von Trotta was an actress, appearing in notable films of directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. In one of many interviews, von Trotta said: "I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies. Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, I saw several films of Ingmar Bergman, and all of the sudden I understood what cinema could be. I saw the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the French Nouvelle Vague. I stood there and said, ‘that is what I’d like to do with my life.’ But that was 1962, and you couldn’t think that a woman could be a director. In a way, as an unconscious act, I started acting and when the New German films started, I tried to get in through acting." Through her acting career, von Trotta was able to create an initial name for herself before becoming a director.
Read more about this topic: Margarethe Von Trotta
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)