18/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Luzia Schmid paints a colourful if somewhat by-the-numbers picture of a grand dame of German entertainment

“I want it all or nothing,” are the first verses we hear, sung in a smoky voice by a woman with thick, dark eyelashes to excited spectators. A playful gliding across the stage, a wiggle, an occasional wink. German actress, dubbing artist, chanson singer and author Hildegard Knef always knew how to captivate her audience. I Want It All [+see also:
trailer
film profile] – director Luzia Schmid could not have chosen a more fitting title and overall theme for her documentary about the artist, a woman who was always striving for the next challenge while struggling with the implications of success, who went through extensive phases of success and failure and always managed to come back and reinvent herself.

The film, premiering in the Panorama section of the 75th Berlinale, traces Knef's life through historical documents, video and audio recordings, film, concert and book excerpts, and talking-head interviews of her daughter Christina Gardiner or her last husband, Paul Rudolf Freiherr von Schell zu Bauschlott. Discarding any need for a chronological timeline, we jump right into the height of her chanson singer fame in the 60s, watch Knef as she practices with the big band and a voice-over talks about, in her own words, her need for fame and her fear of it. The next minute, the movie jumps back to the final days of the Second World War, and Knef navigating the rubble of Berlin with her family, hungry to become a star.

Schmid clearly wants to paint the portrait of a woman who chose her own path, a woman who became famous in a conservative post-war Germany, who was surrounded by men judging her and trying to put her in a box, whose unconventional lifestyle made her an icon, an enemy and popular tabloid fodder. The movie unfolds as a rag rug of her early fame in Germany, her first failed effort to make it in Hollywood, her return to Berlin, her second, this time successful stint in Hollywood and on Broadway, and again, her failure to carry that success back home, partly because of her creative choices, partly due to being blacklisted for her lifestyle, and partly by being judged through a male gaze. She is “defiant but looking for security”, an interviewer categorises her. “You are making 24 people out of me”, she mockingly answers.

Schmid sometimes incorporates Knef's words too uncritically into her film. Was her first Hollywood “career” really derailed due to being labelled a “kraut”? Why gloss over her statement of not having known about Auschwitz with one quick interview segment and be so uncritical of her love for a Nazi film company director? It seems that she, too, has fallen at times victim to the title – “all or nothing” seems to mean incorporating it all, the life, the musings, the self-perception. While this makes the film an interesting piece of contemporary history, it also means that it is almost too conventionally crafted. Still, one message can clearly be taken from the film: to live life unabashedly to its fullest. After all, says Knef, “life owes us nothing but life itself. Everything else we have to get done ourselves”.

I Want It All was produced by German outfit Zero One Film.