Oscar winner: director Lina Wertmüller has died

Lina Wertmüller’s career began in the rebellious auteur cinema of the 1960s, and she was crowned with an Oscar. Now the director has died at the age of 93.

She was the first female director to be nominated for an Oscar. 1977 for her greatest success “Seven Beauties”. Lina Wertmüller was one of the very few women in the otherwise male-dominated rebellious auteur cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.

The lover of extravagant appearances came from a Swiss aristocratic family. Against her father’s wishes, she studied theatrical arts in Rome, the city of her birth.

Challenges and scandals

Anyone who later expressed doubts to her that women can also do good directing work in films, was countered by Wertmüller: Man or woman does not matter, it is only important to have talent. Wertmüller’s films were often challenging and provoked scandals. Even benevolent critics spoke of “social comedies on the edge of the grotesque” or of “shrill theater of cruelty”.

Your Oscar-nominated work “Seven Beauties” can be considered a typical Wertmüller film. The plot: a Neapolitan petty criminal who commits a murder during fascism only comes to psychiatry. Then he goes to war and is sent to a concentration camp, where he survives because he sexually submits to a concentration camp guard.

Rename Oscar to Anna

The relationship between women and men, sex and the class struggle were always topics in the Wertmüller cinema. The woman, whose trademark was her white glasses frames, won an Oscar for her life’s work in 2019.

As a feminist, however, Wertmüller let it be known in her honor: She would like the Oscar to be renamed Anna. Wertmüller died today at the age of 93.