Luzia Schmid's Film "Trained to See - Three Women and the War" will premiere at the Solothurn Film Festival. The Film consists entirely of previously unreleased archival footage and tells the story of three American women war reporters. By Geri Krebs
It's one of the highlights among the Film premieres in this first half of the 58th Solothurn Film Festival: Trained to See - Three Women and the War. "This is the story of World War II as seen through the eyes of three American women journalists, told in their own words, through articles, letters and personal notes," it says at the beginning of the Film, created exclusively from archival footage.
Using mostly never-before-seen Film footage from U.S. armed forces film archives accessible today, and the voices of the three women - Lee Miller, Martha Gellhorn and Margaret Bourke-White - Zug-based director Luzia Schmid (The Branch I'm Sitting On) shows World War II as it has never been seen before.
Strings: One might think that everything has already been said and written about World War II and the Holocaust. Yet, with Trained to See - Three Women and the War, you have found your own unique, never-before-seen approach to this history. Is it true that you also have a personal connection to it?
Luzia Schmid : I first came into contact with the subject as a teenager. At that time I was at boarding school on the Hasliberg, where I went to school for several years and had an older Jewish governess. This woman had lost her entire family in the Holocaust, while she herself was living in difficult conditions in Switzerland during that time. I think my acquaintance with this woman left its mark on me. And then the fact that I have been living in Germany for 25 years gives me another connection. Even today, almost eighty years after its end, the war is still visually omnipresent in German cities. If you look a little closer at the architecture, you can see the scars of the war. I have lived in Cologne for a long time. That was the first major German city to be liberated by the Western Allies - under very heavy fighting - and it was badly destroyed. Somehow the horror of World War II is still very present for me.
How then did you come across the three American women journalists from whose point of view World War II is told in your Film?
I was offered the Material in 2017 by Berlin-based producer Ulli Pfau of Eikon Media, who in turn had the idea based on an article by the well-known Anglicist and historian Elisabeth Bronfen. She put the three women in context for the first time in this article. I was only familiar with the photographer Lee Miller; the other two, Martha Gellhorn and Margaret Bourke-White, I didn't know at all. But after reading the first texts and seeing the photos, I knew immediately that I really wanted to make this Film.
How did you get the film material?
I knew of archival footage of the U.S. Army from World War II from previous directorial work. When I read the women's texts, it was immediately clear to me that the lesser-known images, which you usually have to leave out in the edit due to time constraints, fit here. In addition, I found it interesting that the images were purely a U.S. perspective. The footage had been shot by US Army cameramen, an early form of embedded journalism. So it was sort of the male or official perspective on the war, whereas the three women had a very different approach to combat, saw war differently and described it differently. I was sure that the women's texts and the images from the U.S. archives would complement each other well and open up a new level. In the process, I followed the paths of the three women in the years from 1941, when the U.S. entered the war, to the End of the war in Germany in 1945.
In the process, I get the impression of an ever-deepening immersion in hell: if in the first hour of the Film there are often scenes and descriptions of the war theaters in England, France, and Italy, and the struggles of the three women to be treated as equals as their male journalist colleagues, in the last part of the film the images as the U.S. Army liberates the concentration camps in Germany bear witness to a horror that is almost unbearable....
Having decided to tell the Film entirely from the women's perspective, I followed the women's journey from the shores of Normandy and Italy to Germany, and then finally to the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. And I wanted to put their view of it at the center. So it seemed logical and compelling to me to show these images. In this respect, it was a dramaturgical decision. The second reason, in terms of content, was that in my opinion there is a kind of canon of images in Germany, but also in Switzerland, that depict the horror of the Holocaust. Somehow even understandable, because it is difficult to face the horror that the images still tell of today. I wanted to counter this with something. That seems important to me, especially now that the last witnesses of the Holocaust are dying.
I was encouraged by the fact that my German editor, who is 25 years younger than me, had never seen most of the pictures from Dachau and Buchenwald. And she belongs to the generation that was socialized with this German culture of remembrance - as well as my two teenage daughters, who deal with World War II in school but don't get the horror conveyed in the same way. I am convinced, however, that the crimes of the Nazi regime are part of the German and European heritage that lingers within us. Coming to terms with them is still important.
All three women in your Film were present at the liberation of concentration camps, but later coped with this horror in different ways: While Martha Gellhorn and Margret Bourke-White were apparently able to continue their work as journalists, Lee Miller sank into depression and alcoholism and also never spoke about her work as a war correspondent again. Do you have an explanation for this?
Yes. While Margret Bourke-White was a woman who emphasized that the camera was a protective shield for her and always allowed her to maintain a distance from what she photographed - and Martha Gellhorn saw herself as somewhere between journalism and literature - it was different for Lee Miller: she was a photographic artist, she came from the Surrealist circle, and the concept of the camera as a means of maintaining distance was alien to her. She was the most sensitive of the three women; she was largely unprotected by what she photographed.
Surrealist-influenced art and war photographer Lee Miller
The three women's love relationships with men were also different: while Martha Gellhorn's and Margret Bourke-White's relationships diverged in the course of the war, Lee Miller's with her partner remained intact.
Yes, but while in Margaret-Bourke White's case it was not least the jealousy of her husband - the then well-known author Erskin Caldwell (Tobacco Road) - of her professional success that increasingly strained the marriage, the relationship between Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway was explosive from the start. Hemingway fell in love with the adventurous journalist, but then, after marrying her, wanted her as a wife at his side. Which was not at all Martha Gellhorn's idea of her life. One must not forget that the three women were in their early/mid-30s when the war began. Lee Miller, on the other hand, was quite different. She and her partner, the painter Roland Penrose, were influenced by the Surrealists, also in terms of relationships; they had an open relationship. The women's problems regarding career and relationship are surprisingly similar to the issues of women today. That's another reason why I wanted to tell the women of that time in a "modern" way.
Do you think that your Film will attract even more interest because of the Ukraine war?
I wanted to make an anti-war Film. The images from Ukraine show that the craft of war is essentially the same as it was back then, albeit with more modern weapons systems. This gave the film a sad topicality. However, we finished editing in early February 2022, two weeks before Putin invaded Ukraine. So there are no direct references to this war in the Film. But of course you see everything with different eyes now, some of the film images seem frighteningly current.
Trained to See - Three Women and the War by Luzia Schmid will be shown in Solothurn at the Filmtage 2023. It is unclear whether the film will be shown in cinemas. But it will be shown at the broadcast on Arte over the course of the next few months. The station co-produced the Film.
Source: Association Saiten, Geri Krebs
