SCHLNDORFF, VOLKER

born March 31, 1939, Wiesbaden, Ger. motion-picture director, member of the postwar cinema movement in West Germany. Schlndorff studied filmmaking in Paris, serving as an assistant to Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville. After directing several projects abroad for French television in the early 1960s, he returned to Germany and joined the burgeoning Junger Deutscher (Young German) film movement. His first feature, Der Junge Trless (1966; Young Trless, 1968), an adaptation of the Robert Musil novella Die Verwirrungen des Zglings Trless, earned him instant recognition. This study of a sensitive boy in a brutal German military academy exhibited the cool, straightforward directorial style that would come to distinguish Schlndorff from his more idiosyncratic contemporaries, notably Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. After a short period of rather poorly received efforts, Schlndorff formed his own film company, the first production of which (1970) was an adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht play Baal, starring Fassbinder. The following year, Schlndorff married an actress who had appeared in the film, Margarethe von Trotta, with whom he collaborated professionally through the mid-1970s and who later directed films of her own. Notable among their collaborative works was Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1973; The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975), adapted from the Heinrich Bll novel. Working independently of his wife from the late 1970s, Schlndorff achieved critical and commercial success in Europe and the U.S. with his adaptation (1979) of the Gnter Grass novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for best foreign film. The film's episodic structure and expressionistic style marked a departure from his earlier work. Later films include Die Flschung (1981; Circle of Deceit, 1982), filmed on location in war-torn Beirut, and an adaptation of the Marcel Proust novel Swann in Love (1984).