What Sets Us Free? New German Cinema is now showing on MUBI in most countries.
The All-Round Reduced Personality (Helke Sander, 1978).
In September 1968, filmmaker Helke Sander delivered a spirited speech to the men of the powerful Socialist German Student Association (SDS). She demanded equal rights for women in all matters. How could women bring their perspective to political discourse when they were expected to organize the private lives of revolutionaries and raise the children?
When she confronted the progressive men of the SDS with their sexism, Sander earned derisive laughter. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of upheaval and rebellion in Germany, but the male heroes of the anti-authoritarian student revolt had no interest in challenging their patriarchal dominance. As they fought against the established institutions with teach-ins, happenings and street protests, their wives, girlfriends, and lovers resisted male chauvinism at all levels of society. Film became an important means of expression for women’s new attitude toward life.
The private sphere is political. Sander's legendary speech on this delicate point was the trigger for countless feminist initiatives. Women began to discuss alternative ideas and anti-authoritarian concepts among themselves. They organized new kindergartens and fought for the decriminalization of abortion. They designed alternative forms of child rearing, claimed participation in political life, and advocated for equal pay as well as wages for housework. Last but not least, they criticized the chauvinism of their lovers, boyfriends and husbands in all matters of sexuality. Sexual liberation had become a crucial topic among the young generation a few years after the introduction of the birth control pill, but as Sander soon noted in her film essay Macht die Pille frei? (1972), the biochemical innovation of the pill was once again imposed on women's bodies, while men remained relieved of the responsibility for contraception.
Ula Stöckl, Helke Sander, Helga Reidemeister, and Claudia von Alemann are the pioneers of feminist film of this era. In their quest to express their generation's attitude toward life, they took a pragmatic approach, based on subjective experimentation. They wrote their scripts themselves, usually from an autobiographical perspective. As often as possible, they worked with a team of women, and liked to blend documentary and fictional narrative forms. In personal voiceover commentaries, they often described the discrepancy between “inside and outside,” between psychic internal experiences and the socially imposed role of women.
Stöckl, Sander, Reidemeister, and von Alemann belong to the first generation of female film directors to learn their craft professionally at one of Germany’s three film schools founded in the 1960s—and even then, they were often under pressure to resist male dominance. Stöckl and von Alemann studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, where Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz led an avant-garde film academy for a few years. Sander and Reidemeister are graduates of the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, where Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky also initially studied.
Originally, film schools were supposed to train good craftsmen for a better mainstream. The German film industry wanted to win back the audience it was losing to television. But in 1962, a group of rebellious cineastes, cinematographers, and short film directors called for a radical renewal, a state fund for "young German film." This initiative around Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz gave the starting signal for the so-called New German Cinema, which succeeded until the early 1980s in bringing young audiences back to the cinemas with topical material and the distinctive stylistic forms of auteur films.
Stöckl, von Alemann, Sander, and Reidemeister used the professional context of their film schools to develop their themes and artistic signatures. But at the start of their careers, they were less interested in a definable “female” aesthetic than in rebelling against their poor chances in financing and distribution. Even at the height of the New German Cinema, most female directors were tasked with realizing their material on 16mm film with small budgets, as opposed to the support more easily given to male directors. And yet, these filmmakers handled the constraints of their minimal budgets excellently. Stöckl's The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968) was made in widescreen Techniscope for the big screen at the conclusion of her studies. But after her commercial distributor went bankrupt, the film disappeared for decades, and was rediscovered only a few years ago. Still, without the experimental editorial team of "Das kleine Fernsehspiel" of the Second German Television and the aid of courageous production companies such as Basis Film in Berlin, the films of female directors would not have been realized.
As New German Cinema heroes like Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders built up production and distribution structures, they naturally found resonance with film critics; this helped them secure a presence at major cinemas international festivals. In contrast, the women first had to laboriously create these networks from scratch. In 1973, forty international women directors accepted Sander and von Alemann's invitation to discuss this lack of visibility at the legendary first women's film festival in Berlin, called the “Erstes Internationales Frauenfilmseminar.” There was also room to exchange their interests, themes, and cinematic approaches. The following year, Sander founded the feminist film magazine Frauen & Film, which became the voice of the feminist film movement in Germany. A platform for open controversial debate about films by women was created. Interest grew, and Ulrike Ottinger, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jutta Brückner, Elfi Mikesch, Monika Treut, Margarethe von Trotta and many other female directors also began to assert themselves in the male domain of film.
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The Cat Has Nine Lives (Ula Stöckl, 1968).
Four feature films directed by these pathbreaking filmmakers—Stöckl’s The Cat Has Nine Lives, Sander’s The All-Round Reduced Personality—Redupers (1978), von Alemann’s Blind Spot (1978/1980) and Reidemeister’s documentary Von wegen Schicksal/Is this Fate? (1977)—are rooted, with varying degrees of intensity, in the context of this women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the loosely linked episodes of The Cat Has Nine Lives, Ula Stöckl paints a furious, atmospheric picture of two young women around 30 who seem to hover between rebellion and conformity, desire and frustration, overbearing men and small escapes into memories and phantasms. The film, now a classic of feminist cinema, captures a shimmering sense of identity-seeking in the lives of its protagonists. Anne, a newly divorced woman from Paris, visits her friend Katharina, who lives alone in Munich. The time is the spring of 1968, and the tension between demonstrating young people and conservative old people is palpable. The two women enjoy their independence—Katharina by having a fling with the engineer Stefan, whose wife is unhappily managing everyday life with children at home; Anne by drifting melancholically through Munich and the surrounding area.
Katharina tries to establish herself as a freelance journalist to escape her job as a secretary; as she does research for news reports, she becomes fascinated by the charisma of the people she meets. She interviews a self-confident pop singer, who produces the title song The Cat Has Nine Lives in the studio, and observes firsthand the happiness of children in an anti-authoritarian kindergarten. However, these stories don’t meet the approval of her editor. Anne, on the other hand, thinks nothing of emancipation through work. Like a punk avant la lettre, she has absolutely no ambition; she prefers to make out at a party and go to a street demonstration "for the world revolution." She moves through the city like a vagabond. As she aggressively flirts, she nevertheless sees through the arrogant habitus of the partygoers, but she still withdraws sadly and with frustration, cutting her pantyhose. Anne remains a conundrum of reverie and denial when, in dreamlike sequences, she begins to fold paper flowers, or eats flowers during a solitary walk across a yellow flowering field.
Stöckl has drawn comparisons to Věra Chytilová for mixing strangely enigmatic sequences, detached from the plot logic of the narration, into her fragile portraits of these two friends. At one point, the camera accompanies Katharina's lover Stefan to his workplace, an authentic aircraft factory near Munich. The production team succeeded in documenting a fascinating, monstrous accident that visually reveals the hubris of technological superiority: the prototype of a military vertical takeoff plane crashes to the ground a few seconds after liftoff and breaks into smithereens.
Other episodes, also discrete from the narrative, penetrate into unconscious layers of memory. Not clearly attributable to either of the two protagonists, they seem like flashbacks to the director's childhood memories. A wild children's society on a farm, the cruel ritual of slaughtering a pig, the implied scene of child abuse: these can be visualizations of the experience of flight that the child Stöckl went through after the bombing of her hometown Ulm. A magical counter-image to the realistic horror of the childhood reminiscences is the figure of Circe, the goddess of the hearth in Greek mythology. Stöckl was deeply affected by the absence of contemporary role models for women, and in her films, she often draws comparisons to the fate of women in classical mythology. Here, Circe is dressed in a Bavarian dirndl and surrounded by sirens; she flirts with Odysseus under flowering trees in Munich’s English Garden and turns his men into pigs.
The All-Round Reduced Personality (Helke Sander, 1978).
In 1978, ten years after Stöckl's film, Sander's The All-Round Reduced Personality sketches the portrait of a photographer, single mother, and intervention artist in West Berlin, who is much more firmly grounded as an artist and claims her share of the government's generous aid budget. With a group of women artists, Edda (Sander herself) wants to present photographs from East and West Berlin on large posters in the street space. She hopes her art will draw attention to the bizarre similarities in everyday life on both sides of the Wall, while subversively undermining the cliché of the two contrasting social systems. In long, traveling sequences, the camera documents the rundown streets of West Berlin from Edda's car, which she crosses on her way to her photo appointments. The soberly realistic impressionism of Sander's black-and-white cinematography makes it a terrific contemporary document after more than forty years have passed.
Edda is willing to wait a long time for a special motif or to talk intensively with the people she is supposed to photograph, even without payment. Yet she hardly has time for herself and for love, and still shares a flat with a friend, whom she often asks to look after her child. Writer/director/lead actor Sander contributes a diary-like voiceover commentary, in which she reflects on how difficult it is to combine the many individual points that structure an everyday life into a meaningful whole. Along the way, she explicitly quotes East German writers such as Christa Wolf and Thomas Brasch, emphasizing their shared cultural bond.
Edda’s photo project, an ironic critique of the self-image of West Berlin as a glamorous contrast to socialist dreariness, needs the support of influential men. The women's group developed it on a voluntary basis, but to realize it they need money, or at least a good presentation of the photographs in the press. The idea fails because of the ignorance of men in decisive positions. The "all-round unfolded personality" is party-speak for the supposedly happy socialist ideal image of man in the GDR; the ambitious female photographer in the "better" West feels by no means "unfolded," but actually "reduced." Here, women are still unable to venture into the male-dominated territory of urban image politics, from which they were also previously excluded.
Is This Fate? (Helga Reidemeister, 1977).
Reidemeister's documentary Von wegen Schicksal/Is This Fate?, from 1977, also deals with the bitter experiences of a woman in West Berlin. In this case, it is about a single mother of four children in precarious circumstances. Irene Rakowitz is 50 years old and has no chance of getting off unemployment benefits. She wanted to live independently after years in an unhappy marriage, and ultimately divorced her husband. Now he lives a few floors below her in one of the monumental apartment blocks of the Märkisches Viertel, a housing estate built on the outskirts of the city to make room for a freeway in the center of Berlin.
Reidemeister's film is based on her intensive examination of the milieu of her subjects. After studying fine arts, she worked in a socio-educational project that offered help in everyday life, especially in disputes with the property management, to residents of the Märkisches Viertel who had been relocated from the city center. Here she got to know the Rakowitz family, accompanied them in their attempts to gain a foothold in new jobs and to cope with the children's school problems. Part of the socio-educational work was filmmaking. The family used a Super 8 camera owned by the social workers to document their family life. The goal was more political than the TV format of a reality show today: The film was to make exemplary problems of an uprooted working-class family visible, as if in a burning glass.
But the family was overwhelmed by its own demands. Their conflicts escalated, the marriage broke up and the Super 8 material remained under lock and key. Then, in the mid-1970s, the filmmaker developed a new concept—centered on Rakowitz. The filmmaker involved her protagonist and the children directly in the work. Reidemeister's reserved questions are omnipresent in the film and evoke the character of an intimate conversation, in the escalating course of which the tragedy of a torn family is revealed. The older of the four children violently attack the mother, siding with their father, who is absent in the film. A classic dilemma of the feminist struggle becomes visible: Rakowitz asserted her independence, but her self-empowerment painfully collides with the fatal archetype of motherhood. The young women in her family, of all people, equate being a woman with being a mother, and condemn their mother as a "bad mother.”
Blind Spot (Claudia von Alemann, 1981).
Finally, von Alemann developed another idiosyncratic form of storytelling through her vital body of work. In her feature films, she loved to show landscapes, houses, and streets like resonating spaces of the subconscious. She worked with a quietly haunting soundscape of noises, voices, and new music, and often used a restrained mixture of natural sounds and precisely placed instrumental music. This is how she creates pauses in the narrative flow and awakens associations when her protagonist in 1981’s Blind Spot (The Journey to Lyon) searches for the traces of the French-Peruvian women's rights activist Flora Tristan. In a subtle way, von Alemann's film ties in with one of the early heroines of the first women's movement in Europe.
Von Alemann grew up in Cologne, where an early passion for the music scene around Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage shaped her cinematic style. She was also influenced by the Happening and Fluxus art of the 1960s, as well as her studies in art history in Berlin. Her time at the Ulm Academy of Design equipped her with the magic tools she’d need to reinvent cinema with Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz: improvisation, intense perception, and a minimalist dramaturgy. "To remember in images is to lift a little the censorship exercised by the thought put into words," she wrote of her first works in the monograph Selbstbehauptungen, a portrait of women film directors at the Ulm Academy of Design.
Blind Spot combines the avant-garde elements in von Alemann's films with her lifelong interest in political film. She became involved in street protests, documenting the surrealist happenings at the 1967 Exprmntl 4 film festival in the Belgian seaside resort of Knokke, with which the cinematic avant-garde proclaimed its claim to a left-wing new art. In 1968, in Das ist nur der Anfang—der Kampf geht weiter (This Is Only the Beginning—The Struggle Continues), she questioned people of all walks of life, including Jean-Luc Godard, about the role of art in the street struggles in Paris. And time and again, she addressed the unresolved issues of female emancipation. In 1973, she denounced the monotonous and systematically underpaid women's work in the metal industry in the film ...es kommt darauf zu verändern, which was shot in secret.
Von Alemann was unable to complete many projects—or only realize them with minimal funding—because TV editors and film funders blocked feminist film material. Among the films she nevertheless realized, Blind Spot stands out. This key work centers on a young historian who breaks free from her husband and child, perhaps experiencing a deep crisis in separation. While alone in the eponymous, strange French city, she researches what the early social revolutionary and feminist Flora Tristan, a precursor of the workers' movement disowned by Marx and Engels, may have seen in the labyrinth of Lyon's steep alleys. At the scene of the first strike movement of silk weavers in 1831, the young woman, armed with a tape recorder, tries to follow Flora Tristan's diary entries and, by looking and listening, to find an immediate point of access to the history of the city and its critical commentator Flora Tristan. In semi-documentary encounters with people from Lyon, the historian asks about the remnants of the former silk manufacturers in the city, but also about the people who were killed by the German occupation during World War II.
Blind Spot, after many documentary and experimental contributions to activist film of the second women's movement, is von Alemann's homage to the historic city of Lyon. Her protagonist uses her personal crisis to rediscover the history of the women's movement in this magical setting; as she walks the streets, we hear a subtle sound collage of music and city atmospherics. Feminist history comes to seem like a cinematic event. When revisiting the work of these four filmmakers, it’s impressive how many different cinematic languages could achieve this, too.