by Marc Silberman
West Germany today contains a flourishing women's film
culture, both in terms of feminist filmmaking and feminist film criticism. In
this issue and next, we plan to present two special sections on German women
and film, with interviews with filmmakers, articles on their films, and
translations of feminist film criticism from Germany. Since the films under
consideration are just beginning to be seen in the United States, we would
welcome more articles on individual films and on German women's film culture in
general, to be published in future issues of JUMP CUT.
Marc Silberman has done much to introduce these films to
U.S. viewers, and it was he who initiated the idea of gathering this material
for JUMP CUT. We are indebted to him for the genesis of this Special Section.
The first two articles give a background on German women's filmmaking and on
the German feminist movement and its relation to the left. Following are
interviews with Helga Reidemeister, Jutta Brückner, and these two directors
plus Christina Perincioli in a mutual conversation. There are translations of
film criticism by Reidemeister, Gertrud Koch, and Helke Sander. Renny Harrigan,
who has provided an illuminating comparison here between the U.S. and German
feminist movements, provided much help in editing this material. — Editors
by Marc Silberman
Diverse as the films may be which we reckon among the New
German Cinema, they do have one thematic characteristic in common: they focus
on the outsider or on peripheral social groups. Consequently, as outsiders,
women and their lives become of interest to young German directors. Indeed we
find a number of films by the “new wave” star directors structured around a
female protagonist (e.g., Alexander Kluge’s PART TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE,
Fassbinder’s EFFI BRIEST and THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN, Völker Schlöndorff’s
THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM, to name just a few). Typical for a
male-dominated culture industry, these films by men view women as objects. In
fact, most fans of new wave German film, even in Germany, would be hard pressed
to name a woman film director — perhaps with the exception of two filmmakers
who have had some popular success, Margarethe von Trotte (THE SECOND AWAKENING
OF CHRISTA KLAGES) and Helma Sanders-Brahms (GERMANY PALE MOTHER).
Do, then, no women produce films in Germany? If so, why
haven't they become better known following the critical acclaim accorded to
German cinema for the past several years? And what kind of women do they
present in their films?
The number of women filmmakers, scriptwriters, producers and
technicians grows in West Germany. Contrary to their better-known male
colleagues’ preoccupation with the exotic and the allegorical, these women
directors tend to make films in fictional modes. In such films, the self is
clearly inserted, or they address women's immediate oppression in contemporary
West German society. To some extent these films can be called women's films or
feminist films. Yet such a practice quickly reveals the poverty of such
labeling. On the one hand, such a label may include any film by a woman. On the
other, it may limit the aesthetic question to one of pure content. Either way,
the dominant male film culture and criticism have used such inadequate labels
to co-opt and/or disarm the films' critical tactics. Nonetheless, here the term
“feminist filmmaking” does function to point to a filmmaking practice defining
itself outside the masculine mirror.
German feminism is one of the most active women's movements
in Europe. It has gained access to television; engendered a spectrum of
journals, a publishing house and a summer women's university in Berlin;
inspired a whole group of filmmakers; and generally pushed itself into public
view by means of media interventions. The conscious work of women as women has
visibly increased in the area of film production. This increase results from a
more broadly based feminist cultural environment, constituted as a response to
general disinterest in or even hostility toward denouncing sexism.
In this context, women have invested much energy in
organizing alternative means to bring films by women to the public and to
encourage critical discussion about feminism and film. West Berlin, in
particular, has emerged as a center for feminist film production and cinema
studies. There in November 1973 the first German women's film festival and
workshop was held. Although women have not organized another festival on that
scale, non-commercial cinemas and film societies have become increasingly
willing to show features by women, and some have even showcased individual
filmmakers or organized thematic groups of films around women's issues.
Arsenal, the West Berlin cinematheque, has led this kind of programming and
archival work.
An important link in distributing alternative feminist films
has been the popular, autonomous "women's cinemas" in cities such as
Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Munich and Saarbrücken. Berlin's Frauenkino was the
first — the model — until it closed recently. In 1977 a women's collective
began renting a movie theatre one night a week to show films by women to women.
The undertaking responded to the ways traditional movie houses excluded women by
programming policies that were oriented primarily around men's entertainment
and informational needs. In addition, the women's collective wanted to develop
a situation not only to show films but also to discuss them, so that frequently
filmmakers and technicians participated. The collective received criticism from
some feminists and leftists for sexism and a separatist mentality because it
excluded men from the weekly film showings and did not show films by men about
women. In response, the Frauenkinocalled its programming an offensive strategy,
since traditional cinemas showed an overabundance of other films, and the group
said that its exclusionary policy in fact heightened men's interest in films by
women.(1)
The feminist film journal frauen und film (published by
Rotbuch Verlag, West Berlin) represents another crucial step in establishing a
milieu for feminist film culture. Founded by Helke Sander in 1974, the original
goals of the journal corresponded in many ways to those of Women and Film,
which began publication in 1972 in California, Namely, both journals sought to
investigate the impact of patriarchal culture in the film medium and to
critique cinematic sexism. Two other German feminist monthlies (Emma and
Courage) carry on this tradition of criticism as they publish film reviews
identifying the sexism in stereotypical images and demystifying explicit sexist
ideology in film.Frauen und film, in the meantime, sees itself as a forum for
women professionally involved in film production. In its seven years of
publication, it has consistently probed into all areas concerning feminism and
film. This is despite criticism from male traditionalists that it makes sexism
into an excuse for poor quality when reviewing films by women. And it is also
despite criticism from feminists that the journal is too professionally
oriented and that it comes from a publishing house run by a collective composed
of both men and women (see excerpts from frauen und film editorials). As an
organ devoted to films by and for women, frauen und film uniquely struggles to
legitimize women's subjectivity in the cultural sphere, while also trying to
deal positively with the real absence of women as autonomous agents in film
production.
In December, 1979, an association of women filmworkers was
established in West Berlin (Verband der Filmarbeiterinnen). The organization
distributed a manifesto at the Hamburg Film Festival (1979) demanding that 50%
of all film subsidies go to women filmworkers and special money go toward
distributing and exhibiting films by women. The association meets once a month
in Berlin to formulate plans for common projects. It sponsored its first
supra-regional meeting at the Berlin Film Festival in February, 1980, and has since
incorporated, nationwide.
In many ways, German feminist filmmakers have more
privileges than their U.S. sisters. West Germany has a well-developed system of
federal and local granting agencies and prizes for independent filmmakers, as
well as ten national and local public television studios with their own monies
to commission shorts, documentaries and features. In the early seventies,
television in particular generously funded women filmmakers. In fact, TV film
production is where most feminist directors first gained recognition.
Most recently women filmmakers' situation has become more
precarious. As the general interest in feminism has subsided for political and
economic reasons, so has the flow of money from television sources.
Consequently, talented filmmakers like Helke Sander and Ula Stöckl were not
able to make films for three or four years. Moreover, films financed by TV
networks are always produced under ideological constraints, even in a society
like that of West Germany, which likes to pride itself on its postwar liberal
cultural tolerance. Films that deal with real social processes have always been
harder to get accepted.
In this respect, it should be kept in mind that West German
feminist filmmaking can be distinguished both in form and content from other
European production because of the close relationship of the women's movement
to the student Left in its initial phase.(2) In other words, many feminist
filmmakers come out of the Left. As a result of divergent influences, from both
television and from the Left, it is possible to trace a consistent interest on
the women's part in socially critical themes with a definite political
tendency, and second, a dominant interest in utilizing documentary techniques.
As far as access to money from federal subsidies and prizes
is concerned, women — as do all independent filmmakers — face the well-known
problem of the big money going to the big names. Consequently, what is referred
to here as "women's films" are for the most part low-budget productions,
forcing women to adapt their style to the format of TV shorts or non-commercial
features. This has hindered their developing new forms of production and
escaping the circuit of television and industrial filmmaking. Furthermore, in
order to stay within a limited budget, these filmmakers will often rely on
professional teams recruited from friends and volunteers, thus further denying
women film technicians and actors the kind of recognition and remuneration they
could expect.
The seven filmmakers interviewed for JUMP CUT, and whose
interviews will appear in this and the following issue, discuss the
difficulties inherent in developing their own film language under these
conditions of production: How can women struggle against social and sexual
violence? How can they find a system of values based on equality?
Many of the directors make films that in one way or another
are both documentary and fictional. This may not be a free decision on their
part but rather come from the need to produce a low budget film. Thus, both out
of necessity and an unwillingness to use traditional documentary and fictional
techniques, these women are developing their own methods for bringing together
individual experience and social insight in filmic images. Many of the
"early" films by these feminists portray a strikingly morbid reality.
Daily life often seems reduced to a few social relations, and the protagonists
to victims. More recently their films have begun to explore other
contradictions in everyday living, imagination’s role in dealing with such
contradictions, women's desire to intervene in their own lives, and hence, the
films restructuring or recovery of women's history.
These interviews are intended to present information and to
expose issues: they do not pretend to be either analytical or theoretical.
Although some of the filmmakers express hesitancy about identifying with the
goals or methods of the women's movement, they all emphasize their debt to the
questions posed by feminists' oppositional cultural perspective. Whether their
films are categorically feminist or not is a discussion that will have to be
left to another different sort of presentation. For my part, as a male
spectator, I found all the films I saw sometimes exciting, sometimes irritating
contributions to a process of change — changes in myself and changes in the way
I view films.
The interviews were conducted informally and without
pre-arranged questions in June, 1979. I asked about the following things —
biographical background; thematic questions about how to go beyond showing just
women's oppression; aesthetic issues such as the relation between female image
and female viewer or the relation between constructing alternate images and
deconstructing established images of women; the filmmaker's concern with woman
as spectator; and finally, the filmmaker's connection to the Left and the
women's movement. Transcriptions of the discussions were edited and rearranged
for publication (five of the interviews, edited by Jutta Phillips, appeared in
shortened form in Äesthetic und Kommunikation, 37, October 1979). The
filmographies which accompany the interviews are selective.(3)
Notes
1. One offshoot of the Frauenkino in Berlin was a
short-lived distributor for women's films, Chaos Film, which was forced to
dissolve after only one year of business.
2. For a more detailed introduction to the women's movement
in West Germany, see New German Critique, 13, Special Feminist Issue (Winter,
1978).
3. For a more complete overview of women filmmakers in West
Germany, see my annotated catalog in Camera Obscura, 6 (Fall, 1980) pp.
123-152; and "Cine-Feminists in West Berlin," Quarterly Review of
Film Studies, 5:2 (Spring, 1980), pp. 217-232.
Source: ejumpcut.org
No comments:
Post a Comment