Director Volker Schlöndorff Visits Campus, Screens His Film Voyager

This past week, the acclaimed, 84-year-old German film director Volker Schlondörff visited Dartmouth at the invitation of the Department of German through its Harris Distinguished Visiting Program. In traveling to Dartmouth, Schlondörff followed in the footsteps of a number of internationally famous filmmakers who have visited the College in the last several decades, including the Englishman Michael Powell and the Frenchman Bertrand Tavernier.

While on campus, Schlondörff met with German classes and attended a faculty roundtable on “Filming the Lebanese War.” He also elected to screen his little-known 1991 film Voyager, one of his English-language projects. He did so on April 19 in Filene Auditorium, before a nearly packed audience of students, faculty, and community members. Viktor Witkowski, Director of the Harris Program, gave a rousing introduction in which he offered substantial background on the filmmaker’s international career and centrality to New German Cinema. Schlondörff himself then provided preliminary commentary on Voyager and its genesis.

Schlondörff began by giving the audience “a fair warning” about the content of the film and recounted a recent conversation with a friend who advised him that it was “daring” to screen Voyager at Dartmouth. Schlondörff chuckled along with the audience but put the question of the film’s content temporarily to the side.

He spoke instead of the film’s literary origin: Voyager derives from a 1957 German novel, Homo Faber, penned by the celebrated Swiss author Max Frisch. Schlondörff expressed that he knew from the moment he began the project that to adapt so famous a novel (to Germans, certainly) would prove a monumental task.

He observed that he considers the film “a beautiful tragedy,” whose scenic tour of European locales provides an arresting backdrop for its ultimately disquieting story. The film’s tragic element, he said, as with that of the novel, has a “relation with the Ancient Greeks, who believed the gods struck blindly … very much the opposite of our Protestant beliefs.” By the late 1980s, Schlondörff apparently considered himself something of a victim of fate in this vein. His marriage to the filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta was falling apart and “the expected calls from Hollywood [weren’t] com[ing] either.” Thus, he began to think of Homo Faber and its juxtaposition of a logical, methodical technologist-cum-engineer against a series of consecutive, extraordinary coincidences which envelop his life.

The novel, Schlondörff said, had been optioned numerous times before, but an adaptation had yet to be made in German or any other language. Schlondörff became determined to be the one to finally adapt Frisch’s novel, and he paid a visit to the author to discuss changes that he envisioned for the film. Frisch was apparently gracious and took a ready interest in Schlondörff’s proposals.

Crucially, Frisch acceded to Schlondörff’s desire to change the protagonist, Walter Faber, from a Swiss to an American. In so doing, Schlondörff eliminated the novel’s political commentary (on Switzerland’s neutrality in the Second World War) and rendered the story more purely one of personal suffering and ruination; in effect, Schlondörff essentialized the story. As Schlondörff explained, this change also made sense both practically and cinematically. First, it was easier to acquire funding for a film that would be made in English. Second, the casting of an American as Faber fit the shifting locales of the story and would allow Schlondörff to take a sort of cinema-as-travelogue approach to certain sequences. Simply put, during his time abroad, Faber would “discover” Europe, and so too would the camera.

Concluding his commentary, Schlondörff remarked that he and Frisch quickly agreed that the film had to be a period piece—by necessity, it had to remain set in 1957 like the novel. Their reasoning was that, at that time, “one could still believe technology could save the world.” For Schlondörff’s character-driven film, this would be a critical quality to Walter Faber, as I came to understand over the course of the nearly two-hour film which ensued.

In Voyager, Faber is portrayed by the renowned actor-writer Sam Shepard. He is a tall, lanky American defined by a marked dryness, who evokes something in the nature of Gregory Peck minus the disarming smile. Faber’s dryness is cynical, and it often proves quite humorous.

The film depicts Faber’s travels and reluctance to befriend people, much less substantively interact with them, while en route. He makes exceptions for a man named Hencke after learning that he is the brother of an old friend and for a girl named “Sabeth” (the French actress Julie Delpy). Faber falls deeply in love with her, and so does she with him.

The film foregrounds absurdism in rather brilliant fashion, both in terms of situations and in depicting Faber’s attempts to reckon with his own precise, logical nature in the face of consecutive coincidences which defy impossible odds. It is very much along these lines that tragedy ultimately, and necessarily, befalls him. A realization that he comes to make regarding Sabeth and his relationship with her, in addition to the very fact that he has met her in the first place, is itself disturbing and tragic. However, this receives an appropriately ironic, miserable, and sudden twist at the very end of the film, which amounts to the culmination of the multiplicity of odds-defying situations and developments that have occurred. Voyager leaves no optimism in the viewer—only a suspicion that the calculation of odds is practically immaterial; they are never truly in one’s favor.

Voyager’s cinematography is a thing of beauty, particularly in scenes in the French countryside, and the film makes excellent use of its period sets. So too is it remarkably literate, even as its characters are hardly what could be called verbose. The film also possesses a certain episodic quality that parallels the coincidences which progressively occur in Faber’s life, and, as complemented by its musical score to great effect, the film is often darkly mysterious.

Voyager received mixed reviews upon its release, and it got notably poor notices on the Continent, likely because an attachment to the novel lingered and unduly biased critics. In my view, Voyager is a minor masterpiece and ranks among the best of Schlondörff’s films. I highly recommend a viewing.