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| Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) Helke Sander etc.; Chantal Akerman, Maxi Cohen, Valie Export, Laurence Gavron, Bette Gordon, Ulrike Ottinger | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 2 2015, 11:58 AM (811 Views) | |
| jiricine_nvkino | Jun 2 2015, 11:58 AM Post #1 |
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xoxoxoxox
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3.1/ BEARDED LADIES, FEMININE MOUSTACHE, HIRSUTISM – CONGRATS, YOU HAVE AN ALL FEMALE PANEL! I enter this round of the cup with a collection of seven short films (made by Chantal Akerman, Maxi Cohen, Valie Export, Laurence Gavron, Bette Gordon, Ulrike Ottinger, Helke Sander), even though the topic of BEARDED LADIES, FEMININE MOUSTACHE, HIRSUTISM genre is already covered by the first part called “Gluttony” (by Helke Sander). By such a lineup I aspire (besides getting votes in the cup) to receive a Sarpa-some stamp (a feminine counterpart to Hoff-some stamp). ![]() — No Girls Allowed: David Hasselhoff gives these all-male panels a thumbs up — 'Congrats, you have an all-male panel!' goes viral with help from 'The Hoff' — Congrats, you have an all male panel! 3.2/ BEARDED LADIES, FEMININE MOUSTACHE, HIRSUTISM – PRIMORDIAL EVA The opening hirsute story is taking place at the dawn of creation, long before it was naturally selected which one of the two genders will evolve as less hairy and thus tailor made to use more extensively make up. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() P.S. Last sequel called “Pride” (by Ulrike Ottinger) can be perceived as an impertinent appetizer for a play-off’s first round to which I insolently believe this genre will qualify and (in such a case) will be represented by a full-fledged feature film (with a PTFM heroine who ironically imitates STFM attitude) by the same Ulrike Ottinger. |
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| jiricine_nvkino | Jun 2 2015, 11:59 AM Post #2 |
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xoxoxoxox
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‘SINS’ AROUSES DESIRE FOR MORE (The Milwaukee Sentinel, 17 Mar 1989) ![]() Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Jun 2 2015, 12:01 PM.
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| wba | Jun 2 2015, 11:24 PM Post #3 |
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The Merciless
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Great choice! |
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To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I'm concerned, I don't make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence. letterboxd * tumblr * website | |
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| jiricine_nvkino | Jun 3 2015, 12:47 AM Post #4 |
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xoxoxoxox
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when u mentioned dominik graf in "what i watched this month", i was looking at his oeuvre and was trying to pick something to start with (i didnt watch anything by him yet)... i only bookmarked "munich: secrets of a city" and postponed the first pick for later... thus i am glad to see his film being part of the cup now... u did the choice on my behalf :)) ... i will definitely watch "a map of the heart"! |
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| wba | Jun 3 2015, 02:52 AM Post #5 |
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The Merciless
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^ Great minds look alike.
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To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I'm concerned, I don't make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence. letterboxd * tumblr * website | |
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| jiricine_nvkino | Jun 4 2015, 04:13 PM Post #6 |
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xoxoxoxox
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— Helke Sander – Wikipedia — Helke Sander – IMDb — Helke Sander – Biography — Helke Sander – Biography (FilmPortal) — Helke Sander – Biography (FemBio) — Helke Sander – Filmography, Biography, Career (Film Directors Site) — Bibliography — about Helke Sander — Bibliography — by Helke Sander Helke Sander FILMOGRAPHY Films as Director: 1965 — Joutsenlaulu (episode of TV series Teatterituokio) 1965 — Skorpioni (TV movie) 1965 — Naurukierukka (TV movie) 1967 — Subjektitüde (Subjectivity) (short) 1967 — Silvo (documentary short) 1968 — Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Crush the Power of the Manipulators) 1968 — Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag) (documentary short) 1969 — Das schwache Geschlecht muss stärker werden: Weibergeschichten (The Weaker Sex Must Become Stronger) (TV movie, co-director) 1969 — Kindergärtnerin, was nun? (What Now, Nursery Workers?) 1970 — Kinder sind keine Rinder (Children Are Not Cattle) (documentary short) 1971 — Eine Prämie für Irene (A Bonus for Irene) (TV movie, co-director) 1973 — Macht die Pille Frei? (Does the Pill Liberate?) (TV movie documentary, co-director) 1973 — Männerbunde (Male Bonding) (TV movie documentary, co-director) 1977 — Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit – Redupers (The All-Around Reduced Personality – Redupers) 1981 — Wie geht das Kamel durchs Nadelöhr? (documentary) 1981 — Der subjektive Faktor (The Subjective Factor) 1983 — Die Gedächtnislücke: Filmminiaturen über den alltäglichen Umgang mit Giften (documentary) 1984 — Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe (Love Is the Beginning of All Terror) 1985 — Nr. 1: Aus Berichten der Wach- und Patrouillendienst (No. 1: From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services) (short) 1986 — Nr. 8: Aus Berichten der Wach- und Patrouillendienst (No. 8: From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services) (short) 1986 — Völlerei? Füttern! (Gluttony), episode of Sieben Frauen, Sieben Todsünden (Seven Women, Seven Sins) 1987 — Nr. 5: Aus Berichten der Wach- und Patrouillendienste (No. 5: From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services) (short) 1988 — Muss ich aufpassen?, episode of Felix 1989 — Die Meisen von Frau S. (documentary short) 1990 — Die Deutschen und ihre Männer: Bericht aus Bonn (The Germans and Their Men) (TV movie documentary) 1992 — BeFreier und BeFreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder (Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children) (documentary) 1997 — Dazlak 1999 — Muttertier — Muttermensch (TV movie documentary) 2001 — Dorf (The Village) (TV movie documentary) 2005 — Mitten im Malestream: Richtungsstreits in der neuen Frauenbewegung (documentary) Helke Sander BACKGROUND Born: 31 January 1937, Berlin Education: 1957-58 — attended drama school, studying with Ida Ehre, Hamburg 1960-62 — studied German and psychology at the University of Helsinki 1966-69 — studied at the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie, Berlin Career: 1962 — worked in Finnish theater 1964 — worked for Finnish television 1965 — returned to Germany 1974 — founded Frauen und Film 1981-2003 — professor at the Hamburg University for Visual Arts 1989-1993— co-founded and later co-directed the Bremen Institute for Film and Television Family: 1959 — married the Finnish writer Markku Lahtela (d. 1981) Helke Sander BIOGRAPHY Helke Sander's name has become synonymous with the advent of Germany's second wave women's movement and feminist filmmaking. Provocative in style and subject matter, her self-reflexive documentaries and later fictional explorations of women's experiences reveal the ambition to politicize the private sphere and to challenge habitual ways of seeing. Owing to her unconventional choice of topics, Sander received no funding for a period of about five years with the justification that her proposed themes addressed only women instead of appealing to a general public. It was not until 1977 that Sander was able to direct her break-through and best-known feature-length film, Redupers, which focuses on the life of Edda, a freelance photographer, mother, and activist who faces the conflicting demands of her private and professional life and who confronts sexism in the media when a photoessay of women's views of Berlin, commissioned by a main-stream magazine, is rejected. While still at the Film and Television Academy, Sander became active in the student movement. In her 1968 address at the Socialist Student's Association ("Speech by the Action Council for Women's Liberation"), Sander criticized the male Left for its disregard of women's issues and, more generally, for a political analysis that overlooked the private realm. Disaffected with the Left's blind spots, Sander co-founded the Council for Women's Liberation. This experience is reflected in The Subjective Factor, a work of memory that traces the beginnings of the women's movement in Germany and the break with the socialist student movement and the APO (extraparliamentary opposition). Interspersed with documentary footage, the subjective, autobiographical fiction challenges the claim of the objectivity of historical narration and the documentary genre. In Love Is the Beginning of All Terror the paradoxical politics of emotion are parodied when two liberated, though jealous, women vie for the same man and perform for his gaze. The film addresses the oppressive structures that shape interpersonal relations as well as collective histories commented on in a voice-over. The Germans and Their Men similarly explores the failure to link the deeply entrenched public and private divide in numerous interviews with men who neglect to contemplate their conduct toward women. In Liberators Take Liberties, an ambitious three-and-one-half-hour documentary film, Sander probes the stories of German women who were raped predominately by soldiers of the Red Army in the last days of World War II. A montage of present-day interviews breaks through the silence that has beleaguered personal and public memory. Sander's film Duzlak, a road movie/comedy, depicts chance meeting between Jenny and a skinhead whom she tries to help after he hits a tree with his car while driving under the influence. Throughout her career, in her films, essays, and most recently in her short stories, Sander has remained provocative and unveering in her pursuit to expose the asymmetrical power structures that disadvantage women and the general resistance to an analysis of gendered relations. Besides her own filmmaking interests, her formidable accomplishments include founding the first, and only, feminist film journal in Europe, Frauen und Film, in 1974, recovering works of women directors, actors, and scriptwriters either forgotten or ignored by film history, addressing the conditions under which women make films and the policies and preferences of funding agencies, and supporting women filmmakers who found little backing or visibility. In 1974 she co-organized the International Women's Film Seminar to promote women's productions. Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Jun 5 2015, 01:48 AM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Jun 5 2015, 01:48 AM Post #7 |
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South Central Review, Vol. 20, No. 2/4. (Summer - Winter, 2003), pp. 131-142. Gesa Zinn: Helke Sander and the Meaning of Laughter All of Helke Sander's work as writer, critic, filmmaker and activist is concerned with women's outlooks on life; and her films' innovative discursive structures, informed by a distinct feminist stance, are the focus of much scholarly research.[1] What has been a focus only in passing is Sander's use of irony and especially humor, with one exception: Ruth Perlmutter has seriously studied irony, humor and the grotesque in The Trouble with Love (1984)[2] and thus set the stage for further discussions of Sander's laughter. My article will expand on Perlmutter's commendable work on one of Sander's films and further discuss the use of humor and irony in the film Die Deutschen und ihre Manner (1989) as well as one of Sander's written texts, Die Geschichten der drei Damen K. (1987).[3] In my discussion, I intend to show how Sander's use of different discourses, meta-character, and descriptions of heterosexual relationships produce funny, ironic, even grotesque situations. Frequently, laughter emerges as a result of Sander's critical accounts of human relationships, power, and gender roles. In Sander's Geschichten der drei Damen K. and in her later film Die Deutschen und ihre Manner, this laughter, although serious, can be witty, even outright funny. In Der Beginn aller Schrechen ist Liebe it is tragicomic, painful and full of anguish. But before I begin to talk about Sander's particular use of laughter, let me explain laughter's relationship to humor, irony and pain. Laughter can be lighthearted, humorous, or painful. In Sander's texts it is rarely the first and frequently the latter. As a feminist filmmaker and writer, her intent is to call attention to injustices between men and women, which are the result of societal structures. A lighthearted laughter concerned only with itself, with being funny for fun's sake, would not be able to reach that aim. But a humorous laughter would, because humor can be funny while calling attention to something else than itself. This second laughter can liberate us by taking off pressures as a result of rules, laws or regulations. And although we might not be able to transcend unjust structures, we are at least made aware of them. Umberto Eco, in his discussion of the carnivalesque, gives us a good definition of humor, which informs the humorous laughter characteristic of Sander's texts. He writes: Humor does not pretend, like carnival [the comic], to lead us beyond our own limits. It gives us the feeling, or better, the picture of the structure of our own limits. It is never off limits, it undermines limits from inside. It does not fish for an impossible freedom, yet it is a true movement of freedom. Humor does not promise us liberation: on the contrary, it warns us about the impossibility of global liberation, reminding us of the pressure of a law that we no longer have reason to obey. It makes us feel the uneasiness of living under a law — any law.[4] As I will argue, in all the texts discussed in this article, Sander shows us the ridiculousness of some written and unwritten rules and expectations in Western society as well as men's and women's eagerness to comply with them. Yet, as Ruth Perlmutter mentioned already, Sander's humorous features are unlike the entertaining appeal of American black humor. For that they are too serious. Especially when coupled with irony, her black humor becomes even darker yet. Irony, in particular, is employed to unmask men's and women's struggle for power. In general a device to subvert forms of authority, in Sander's texts it lays bare men's and women's strategies to gain the upper hand in their dealings with one another. Often, her female characters' serious concerns and secret plottings "to be on top of the men in order to get to the top" are underlined, resulting in funny situations with a bittersweet aftertaste. Furthermore, irony shows viewers and readers the narrators' distance from their characters and ultimately Sander's emphasis on textual structures as an aid in laying bare gender roles. However, Sander knows well that it is almost impossible to change society's inadequate structures. That she, nevertheless, calls attention to them is the result of her radical feminism characterized by the belief in an utopia and the need to be politically involved. Both convictions, I believe, also inform the serious laughter resulting from textual ruptures, from the clashing of shots and images in her films. We laugh, because we feel the global liberation Umberto Eco describes: the freedom that comes with the recognition of inadequate structures; and we shudder, because we know that these structures are impossible to change. The clashing of freedom and imprisonment is well demonstrated in Sander's Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe, which I will address later. For now, let it suffice to say that the paradox freedom/imprisonment results in a painful form of humor, a "shuddering laughter," due to the suffering and anguish contained in it. This anguish stems from the knowledge and experience of women's historical, social and cultural positions that are marked by exclusions and marginalization. Such laughter is gender-specific. Unlike George Bataille, for example, for whom laughter leads to sovereignty, namely a refusal to submit to reason by being above it, by exploding all categories of reason and meaning, Sander's laughter critically depicts women's and men's behavior and criticizes patriarchal structures severely within the laws of reason. For as someone who writes the stories of women who have suffered under exactly these laws and structures, it would be impossible to transcend them in order to be free.[5] Unlike George Bataille or Mikhail Bakhtin for that matter, who also valorizes laughter as a weapon of transgression and liberation, Sander's laughter, although liberating at times, is always confined to this world.[6] For her struggle is to resurrect those who have been forgotten or overlooked in the design and workings of western societal laws, the possibility of "playing" up in the clouds does not exist. Her prerogative is to construct and not to deconstruct female selves, which would inevitably happen as a result of being above the laws and thus above its players. In order to construct female identities, Sander has to work within the system. Hence she strives to exhibit a laughter of confidence and reason. Unlike for Bataille, who once said, "to laugh at dying is to die of laughter" (Bataille 78), laughing is a falling apart. For Sander, however, it is a (re) building of selves that strive towards no longer facing the danger of destruction. The feeling of lightheartedness is only the privilege of the powerful, yet (institutional) power has still to come to all the women she focuses on and depicts in her work. Both irony and humor, then, work hand in hand in Sander's texts: the one to point fingers at ingrained, hidden, at times deliberate gender-specific behavior; the other to underline ingrained, hidden, and for the most part insurmountable gender structures. I will now show with specific examples how Sander employs both prose and filmmaking to produce irony and humor, resulting in a feminist laughter. Finally, I will ask where and how she succeeds, and where she fails and why. The we/they dialectic that juxtaposes men and women is not unusual in feminist narratives.[7] And in Sander's Die Geschichten der drei Damen K., it is taken to an extreme.[8] Especially the space where male and female relate to each other is analyzed ironically, resulting in the construction of stereotypes that are helpful in determining gender-related behavior. For example, in the story "Ausflug mit einem Ufo" from Die Geschichten der drei Damen K., Heinz S., who is on a hiking trip with Frau K., is so eager to make a good impression that the blisters on his feet do not prevent him from leading the way on the snowy path. Instead of accepting at least a band aid from Frau K. to soothe his pain, he refuses any help and attempts to hike as if nothing happened. In a somewhat awkward position because he made the point earlier that especially beginners are prone to get blisters as a result of poor sock and boot selection, he tries to cover up his mistake, afraid to admit that he could have prepared himself better. Similar situational puns centering around Heinz S. add up throughout the story as the male protagonist desperately attempts to hide what he himself considers shortcomings on his behalf. That he suffers under his self-induced pressure to perform heroically is noticeable when he gulps down various pills throughout their trip. It generally happens around meal time, secretly underneath the table. But Heinz is not the only one analyzed ironically. Frau K. is also viewed with skepticism. Only four sentences after Heinz S. has taken control of his life with the help of drugs, she too reaches for chemicals in hopes that they would calm her and thus ease the building tension between them (60-62). Sander's ironic depictions of the cat and mouse plays indicative of male/female relationships in her texts underline the childishness and ridiculousness of their behavior to the reader who can laugh with pleasure; s/he is not wrapped up in the situation at all, yet understands the forces at work only too clearly. In "Dankbarkeit," one of the many tales devoted to gender relations, for example, Sander chooses a cliched dispute between a man and a woman, in which the man originally promised her everything and then suddenly left her. She is now alone, picking up the pieces by herself. And she literally picks them up; she takes parts of valuable dishes, breaks plates and cups and mails him half of the broken pieces. This exaggerated reaction on her part would only be half as humorous were it not for the description of another item the partners once shared. In her rage, the once ordinary carpet turns into "old rags, on which they had already trampled for seven years" (17). They, too, are sent to his address. Humor, hyperbole, but also tragedy and the grotesque are characteristic of this scene which relates a kernel of truth: the fact that too many partnerships end in this ridiculously nitpicky and childish scenario. Especially women seem to dwell on the experience of pain and love. In another story entitled "Frau Dr. K. im Konkurrenzkampf," a female's academic ambitions put her in awkward situations where she attempts to walk a tightrope between pleasing her boss, who is supporting her research, and keeping her integrity. Rather than describing Frau Dr. K.'s fears about having to please her supervisor sexually with the use of direct speech and thus as realistically as possible, Sander's narrator elects to recount the story in the subjunctive tense until almost the bitter end. The narrator thus distances herself from Frau Dr. K.'s statements, although she does not completely disapprove. In fact, by referring to Frau Dr. K.'s boss as a "dirty little asshole" (24), Sander's third-person narrator shows eventually which side she is on. Like the narrators in her films, this one, too, supports Sander's female protagonists, although not without taking stabs at them as well. The narrator's distance from their characters, again used to employ classical irony, unmasks Frau Dr. K.'s stories as grotesque mind games in which the striving academic becomes a victim of her own drowning. Frau K. continually acts on her assumptions about her boss' intentions rather than his actions themselves and never confronts him openly. She grumbles and complains behind his back. These unvoiced complaints go hand in hand with Frau Dr. K.'s mascara, with which she needs to hide her red eyes (as a result of losing emotional and financial support) in order to continue competing as usual: "Frau Dr. K. shook hands with the little small asshole, this jerk, . . . She went to the ladies' restroom, washed and powdered herself, and put on her makeup. She couldn't afford a swollen face" (24). Women's self-imposed difficulties getting to the top, as well as some women's masquerading to succeed, are exposed in "Frau Dr. K. im Konkurrenzkampf." This story in Oh Lucy shows what some women do to succeed and what it takes for a woman to "make it." And they address the lack of self-confidence, frequently a result of those in underprivileged positions. For example, the protagonist's self-inflicted pain, a result of having to compete with the other sex, is described frequently with irony. A woman's masochistic desire, for example, is part of the story "Frau K. Unterschlagt Geld": "Frau K. was pressured so much by the envy and hatred and the competition that she started psychoanalysis for which she had to take on a part-time job (14). "It is precisely the role of the ironist to subvert forms of authority" (Walker 27), and Sander takes it on to unmask men's and women's authority. She even adds a special ironic twist to the figure of Frau Dr. K. by constantly referring to her title. Sander thus laughs at the female academic's need to elevate herself by advertising her knowledge, wisdom, and respect as implied by Frau Dr. K. As in her films, Sander employs irony as a mask and invites the viewer/reader to see it as a mask in order to view simultaneously the reality underneath it, namely what it takes some women to get to the top, and how much of a price they are willing to pay for it. The lack of self-confidence of the Frau K.s are Kafkaesque, to say the least. These women, strong on the outside, are brittle underneath. And like Herr K. in some of Franz Kafka's stories, they come in numbers. Employed in a playful way, as I would argue it has been in Die Geschichten der drei Damen K., overt gender stereotyping functions in a positive manner. Combined with irony, it pokes fun at individual behaviors and questions societal values and assumptions about relationships, gender, identity and women's achievements in particular. In the film Die Deutschen und ihre Manner, this becomes even more visible, literally.[9] Here we can definitely laugh, for Sander makes use of irony, humor and hyperbole to construct a three-dimensional protagonist, who parodies the notion of gender-related attributes and appearances in Western cultures in a witty and semi-lighthearted way.[10] In Die Deutschen und ihre Männer, the female protagonist Müller takes on many roles. Number one, she investigates violence against women as well as men's understanding of manhood and Germanness. Number two, as Lieschen Müller from Austria, she searches for a male partner in Bonn, the capital of West Germany; and number three, she personifies a private individual, who, at the end of the film, sheds her roles as Elisabeth and Lieschen to leave not only male politicians, but all German men behind. The protagonist in Die Deutschen und ihre Manner is thus ambiguous, blurring the lines between the characters. Just as the film is a hybrid of fiction and documentary, Müller, too, exists as a contradiction: as a woman in transition; as primarily two women, each of them overdrawn figures who seem silly documenting the Germans and their men. Lieschen Müller, for instance, takes on the overt characteristics of the femme feminine and the femme fatale.[11] She frequently dresses in white, frilly clothes that connote pure and virginal characteristics along with a certain cleanliness and honesty often associated with a loyal, upright, but nonetheless naive, woman. Her Austrian dirndl serves as a humorous feature. At other times, a tight, red dress, which she wears to press conferences in Bonn or to other meetings with politicians, accentuates her sexuality. And while in Bonn, Elisabeth Müller often slips into the role of the dummes Lieschen, the backward woman from Austria. She introduces herself to the politicians as Lieschen Müller from Austria, thus assuming the role of the naive woman playing up to the powerful male leaders in the West German capital. Moreover, she continues in this role when she is all by herself. After a visit to a press conference in Bonn, for instance, the viewer sees her wiping the dirt off the glass of a window obstructing her view of the government buildings in the city. In looking, and in her attempt to see, her frustration over the inept politicians who do not know or who do not want to disclose information about the government's decisions to the people, culminates in a childlike tantrum characterized by a whining and whimpering that depicts her as the typical emotional, irrational, and frustrated female, a manifestation of the Lieschen persona. Sander's parody of the stereotype of the woman from the hinterlands paradoxically allows for a critique of Germany's leaders, who do not seem to take violence against women seriously. At the same time it prevents the viewer from an overidentification with the protagonist of this film, whose assessment of German men as powerful but ignorant and unethical leaders and anything but romantic lovers, does not necessarily justify such a vehement emotional outburst. The protagonist's second role, hidden behind Lieschen Müller, is that of Elisabeth Müller. She investigates male violence against women in the Federal Republic of Germany by employing statistical data about sexual abuse with little regard for scientific methodology. Her unscientific approach, though, appears to be part of her role. She is a stereotype: pretty, sexy, naive, and characterized by hyperbole; the viewer, aware of her role as an unruly woman, as one who rocks the boat, enjoys watching her tease out serious and yet not always convincing arguments from respected German men in important positions. As the interviewees appear to be ignorant of her fictitious role, the ironic situation becomes the victim's unawareness of what they are doing. Adding a further ironic touch is the stark contrast between interviewees and interviewer, for the majority of men in the film appear as dead-serious and upright characters. They clash with the sexy, flirtatious interviewee in her tight red dress, which results in a laughter mixed with delight and triumph (Schadenfreude). I mentioned already that the construction of stereotypes that we find in the two main manifestations of the protagonist Müller and in Sander's Die Geschichten der drei Damen K. is not unusual in feminist narratives. And neither is the we/they dialectic that juxtaposes men and women. Not surprisingly then, Sander, again, employs both devices in Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe. But the result is different in this earlier film from the mid-eighties, for the laughter we laugh is at best a shuddering laughter. It is an unvoluntary reaction to our increasing awareness of Man's capacity to torture and Woman's inability to escape: it is the result of feeling powerless and helpless. Needless to say, Sander disapproves of Traugott's manipulative and cruel behavior but also of Freya's and the other "characters"' roles in the film. With the aid of visual and verbal irony, the filmmaker criticizes their behavior: Freya's (the protagonist), Traugott's (her lover), and the "authors" of the film, who Sander created to foreground the image-making process by distinguishing between the latter and the filmmakers. By authors I mean a group of women to which the narrator, as an external commentator, refers when she critiques those who have written the script. For instance, the narrator comments: "The authors chose a man, who they would have liked themselves." This man is Traugott, who is supposedly in love with two women at the same time: Freya and Irmtraut. But he refuses to end one of the relationships, and he thus tortures both women, who are aware of each other's existence. As a consequence, Irmtraut attempts suicide and Freya almost loses her sanity. Traugott, however, demands to be loved by Freya and Irmtraut. Perlmutter mentions Traugott's unregenerated, self-involved egotism and connects him to patriarchy via his name: Traugott meaning "trust in God" (Perlmutter 171). And among numerous scenes that show his control over Freya, one stands out in particular due to its neogrotesque and baroque qualities and his resemblance to the murderer Othello. This scene combines elements of realism, mysticism and opera and takes place in the city of Hamburg where Freya howls at the moon while the line Otello non uccidermi ("Othello do not murder me") of Verdi's Othello, which is part of the soundtrack in this scene, is played repeatedly. Freya's pain over Traugott finds further expression in her howling at a full moon shortly after she walks across what appears to be a performance stage in the middle of Hamburg. She feels what Desdemona must have felt. And her pain is shared by many who have played either Desdemona or other female figures in opera that generally die after being submitted to similar tortures. The abrupt, tragic and unexpected ending of this scene in which Freya sits down and puts her hand in dog feces right after having walked across the stage, contains elements of black humor. Suddenly the show on stage is over, but Freya's life goes on. And we are left with the uneasy feeling of not knowing if we should laugh or cry, for at this point the tragic ending, as the film at large, has neither a funny nor witty subtext as Die Geschichten der drei Damen K. and Die Deutschen und Ihre Manner. This is definitely not an entertaining or amusing film. Even those familiar with Sander's biting yet refreshing wit are assured of an ambiguous and pleasurable laughter in Die Geschichten der drei Damen K. and Die Deutschen und ihre Manner, will be disappointed in the somber mood prevailing throughout this visual text. Does that mean then that the filmmaker fails in her attempt to be humorous? The answer is "yes" and "no." She fails in being humorous in the ordinary sense of the word: funny, hilarious, delightful, amusing; yet she succeeds in being humorous in a feminist sense in that her humor is absurd, bizarre, serio-comic, even tragicomic, pungent, pointing, and sarcastic. This film is also humorous within Eco's definition of humor, which has close ties to feminist humor in that it reminds us that a cultural frame exists. In Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe, it is Freya who rebels against this frame, and it is Sander who accuses this frame of being wrong, for it confines Freya and other women to playing particular roles in society from which they can rarely break away. For example, Sander points to the frame by combining plot and sound in an unusual and tragic manner. Indeed, in the world of opera, to which this film alludes at various levels, women frequently have to die in order for men to continue their roles. Freya, the film appears to say, is unable to stand her ground as a result of her relationship with a man, which is characterized by aggression and domination (Gewalt). Traugott and the whole support system behind him are in the way of her expressing, let alone developing, her self. Freya's story finds equivalents in other Western narratives like opera. Sally Potter, for example, already made that point in her film Thriller where Mimi, in her role in Puccini's opera, runs up against the cultural taboo of writing a story of her own.[12] No matter how hard Mimi tries to play her part in the opera, she is constantly pushed out of sight by the role(s) of other men. As Woman she eventually dies for Man. Like Sally Potter, who also employs humor unhumorously, Sander not only shows us wrong frames in Western society at large, she also disrupts any narrative structures supporting them. She thus follows in the tradition of feminist filmmakers like Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman, and Monika Treut, to name only a few very different women filmmakers who have chosen to foreground and criticize prevailing gendered structures in Western society seriously and systematically, with irony and with sarcasm, and frequently with an unhumorous humor. Though feminist laughter can delight and entertain, it can also make us shudder by pointing out the—literally—"shitty" situation Woman finds herself trapped in. Overall then, Sander's laughter displays nuances; it can be funny, entertaining, witty, dark and shuddering. Whichever it is, it is always humorous in its serious attempt to frame the limits of men's and women's relationships. NOTES 1. Richard W . McCormick, "Re-presenting History: The Subjective Factor by Helke Sander" in The Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991) 207-28. Ruby Rich, "She Says, He Says: The Power of the Narrator in Modernist Film Politics," Discourse 6 (1983): 31-46. Kaja Silverman, "Helke Sander and the Will to Change," Discourse 6 (1983): 10-30. Renate Fischetti, Das Neue Kina. Acht Porträts von deutschen Regisseurinnen (Dülmen-Hiddingsel: tende, 1992) 27-39. Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992). Judith Mayne, "Female Narration, Women's Cinema: Helke Sander's The All-Round Reduced Personality/Redupers," New German Critique 24-25 (1981-1982): 155 -71. 2. Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe, dir. Helke Sander, perf. Helke Sander, Lou Castell, Rebecca Pauly, Filmverlag der Autoren, 1983. See Ruth Perlmutter, "German Grotesque: Two Films by Sander and Ottinger" in Gender and German Cinema. ed. Sandra Frieden, Richard W . McCormick, Vibeke R. Petersen, and Laurie Melissa Vogelsang (Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993) 167-77. 3. Die Deutschen und ihre Manner, dir. Helke Sander, perf. Renee Felden, Helke Sander, Luise F. Pusch, Claudia van Alemann. Filmproduktion/Bremer Institut Film und Fernsehen, 1989. Helke Sander, Die Geschichten der Drei Damen K. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991). 4. Umberto Eco, "Frames of Comic Freedom" in Carnival!, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984) 8. 5. See George Bataille, Death and Sexuality: A Study in Eroticism and Taboo, trans. Mary Dalwood (New York: Walker Press, 1992) 34. 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). 7. Nancy Walker, A Very Serious Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) 62-70. 8. Helke Sander, Die Geschichten der Drei Damen K. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991). 9. Die Deutschen und ihre Manner, dir. Helke Sander, perf. Renee Felden, Luise F. Pusch, Claudia von Alemann, Helke Sander. Film produktion/Bremer Institut Film und Fernsehen, 1989. 10. See Gesa Zinn, "Gender, Germans and Men in Helke Sander's Die Deutschen und ihre Manner," South Atlantic Review 64 (1999): 20-36. 11. The femme fatale is a cultural construct that foregrounds the threat of female sexuality. Her opposition to marriage and motherhood and her lust for power, freedom, and revenge do not, however, make her a symbol of female emancipation. As Sabine Hake points out, the femme fatale remains a cipher and chimera, the underside of socially determined constructions of gender. Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord, "Femme Fatale," The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997) 162-63. 12. Thriller, dir. Sally Potter. Women Make Movies, 1979. Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Jun 5 2015, 09:05 AM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Jun 6 2015, 10:50 AM Post #8 |
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Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984, p. 59 (A Review of Contemporary Media, 1984, 2005) Marc Silberman: Open forms Interview with Helke Sander I was always ahead of my time with my films. In 1969 a project of mine about the women's movement was a novelty, and no one was interested. What's more, the funding commissions told me since a known feminist couldn't possible be objective, I couldn't do it. Then they were so disgusted with my film project about menstruation (to be called RED PERIOD), they didn't even want to deal with the topic. It was meant to be neither an educational nor a documentary film, but a film about myths. For it, I was advised to try for ten minutes on the weekly TV health program. The projects I have devoted a lot of work to, the ones I really wanted to make, never succeeded. I became politically active with the Springer film (BRECHT DIE MACHT DIE MANIPULATEURE, 1957/ 68). I didn't want to adapt some crazy popular idea of art. We filmmakers had discussions then trying to figure out how to still make films, didactic ones that relied on a form that was understandable and accessible to the audience. Yet a completely false conception of filmmaking was developed in this school of Berlin Workers' films. My next film, EINE PRÄMIE FUR IRENE, in the tradition of the Berlin Workers' films, in some ways critiques the tradition. I strove to translate political content directly into film. I only slowly moved away from that position, recognizing that it came to no more than slogans. I also faced a problem of isolation. If a film took up a political issue, television networks wouldn't make funding available, so we had to produce films for political meetings with little money or material. Many filmmakers felt obliged simply to document something when officially there was no information about it. And political groups were suspicious of "aesthetics." This reductionism was mutually conditioned. In REDUPERS I took up once again something I had already done, but now with a different consciousness. In the sixties I'd been doing theatre and made some short films, but I was interrupted when the whole political movement began. REDUPERS reflects on what was left behind. I did not intend to show change but rather how minimal changes may come about, how things happen simultaneously. I tried to examine how we think and in what categories we articulate feelings, and what the consequences would be if we were to think like the women in the film. In other words, I ask the viewer to consider a given situation from an alternative perspective, namely a divided Berlin from a woman's perspective. It's a subversive procedure, perhaps even a form of utopia. The viewer must think out the consequences on her/his own. I vehemently resist any attempt to ghettoize my films as "women's films." Men or women can interpret any situation. The way I see life necessarily has something to do with my experiences, and women's experiences are, of course, different from men’s. I have had some experience in trying to gain access to institutions. For example, in 1974, founding the film journal frauen und film represented our effort to articulate the problems that women have in this profession. We faced unbelievable criticism, a defamation of the whole attempt. Professional female film critics did not want to participate at first in something so controversial, something that might fail. Women filmmakers doing their own thing were not really looking for publicity. The journal strove to codify women filmmakers' problems in order to remedy them, and it has made a real contribution here. We reviewed the few films by women that existed at the time, which were too often rejected by festivals because we had no lobby and only men in the juries, who didn't understand what the women were doing in their films. In addition, as a result of the women's movement, public consciousness no longer brands everyone as crazy who points to sexism in the media. I am especially concerned with developing new production methods. When we receive a contract and financial support (from a network, prize money or producers), we have to show results very quickly — for example, a completed script. I would prefer to work more essayistically, filming very slowly, and then maybe finishing up quickly. I don't want a filming schedule which says you film the script in 30 consecutive days, engaging each actor weeks in advance. I want to write while filming and work together with the actors. I don't want to chase them through a scene, each one standing in the "right" corner for the "right" angle. I imagine pre-conceived situations, with an idea about how they will look in the film. Elements of tension and changes come when I see actual image. That is my point of reference, not some idea about an image. Concrete images come into relation with other concrete images. I can imagine a rather open form somewhere between fiction and documentary — as in REDUPERS — where fictional people enter documentary films. I want to continue working in this direction, but find no money for such a form. We get money based on our scripts, which must be completely written to submit to the various funding commissions. That implies certain compromises if I do not want to accept the repressive nature of the script. ---------------- 1967/68: BRECHT DIE MACHT DER MANIPULATEURE (CRUSH THE POWER OF THE MANIPULATORS) 50 min., l6mm, b/w, no commercial distributor. This documentary film shows the power of the Springer Press conglomerate in formulating and manipulating public opinion”. 1971: EINE PRÄMIE FÜR IRENE (A BONUS FOR IRENE) 50 min., l6mm, b/w, dist: Zentral Film (Hamburg.) Among the first films in Germany to point to the interrelations between the public and the private spheres, this film examines, in the mode of the "Berlin Workers' Films," the difficulties of a young woman worker trying to cope with problems at home and work. 1977: DIE ALLSEITIG REDUZIERTE PERSÖNLICHKEIT: REDUPERS (THE ALL-ROUND REDUCED PERSONALITY: OUTTAKES) 98 min., 35mm, b/w, dist: Basis Film (Berlin) and Unifilm (N.Y.). This essayistically constructed fictional film draws the portrait of a woman who is trying to cope with her roles as mother, photographer, artist, girl friend and member of a women's group. It poses the question — without offering a tidy solution — of what a woman sacrifices if she wants to be true to herself while still being open to change. 1981: DER SUBJECTIVE FAKTOR (THE SUBJECTIVE FACTOR) 138 min., l6mm, color and b/w, dist: Basis Film (Berlin). A film about the student movement in the sixties which reconstructs that history from the woman activist's point of view. Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Jun 6 2015, 10:58 AM.
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| jiricine_nvkino | Jun 6 2015, 10:55 AM Post #9 |
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Jump Cut, no. 27, July 1982, pp. 49-50 (A Review of Contemporary Media, 1982, 2005) Feminism and Film by Helke Sander, translated by Ramona Curry (This essay is a paper given in Graz, Austria, in November, 1977, on the occasion of the annual fall literature and theater festival there — the so-called “Steirischer Herbst” — on the topic, “Is there and what is feminine imagery?”) After thinking about it for a long time, I have come to doubt whether this question makes any sense. But it is so frequently used, along with its variations about the forms of feminine aesthetics and feminine creativity, that it has come to belong to the repertory of many festivals, seminars and symposia. The very peculiar conclusions arrived at these conferences have also begun to work their way into professional terminology, where they tend to confuse rather than clarify concepts as well as to distract attention away from other more pressing questions. In posing the question, people often make no distinction between feminine or feminist imagery. They use the words interchangeably, even though one word is a biological and psychological term and the other a political one. As for feminism, the most contradictory and utterly irreconcilable definitions of the term are represented among women's groups that call themselves feminist, whose only common denominator is that they see all women oppressed by patriarchal power structures. But in defining causes, political consequences and relation to other theories about society, opinions diverge so widely — thus far we have not been able to use an exact terminology or refer to a single predominating position which might have set definitions of these terms. And there has not yet been a feminist art manifesto of the sort that either directly or indirectly political movements bring about, as for example the manifesto of Russian artists shortly after the revolution or of the many European artists groups in the 20s. But perhaps the initial question also implies that through the feminist movement, certain as yet unrealized feminine qualities — that is, characteristics which have been socially smothered in men, such as sensitivity, fantasy — can be expressed with confidence first in art works by women. The question about feminine imagery cannot even begin to be answered due to the lack of film-producing women. And it would break all rules of statistics to force a deduction about aesthetic similarities from the 100 films women have produced at different times, in different cultures and countries, about the most varied topics and most diverse genres. Such an effort might be worthwhile if there were anything approaching equal participation of the sexes in the arts. But I doubt then if this question would still interest us. In addition, we should consider that until very recently femininity was always defined by others, by men. Only now have women begun to comprehend themselves as social subjects and to throw off alien interpretations of their nature and being. The organized expression of these efforts is the women's movement. From all sides and with dissimilar results and battles, these organizations are feeling out the question of what women want, more than the question of what women are. Women have just begun to dare to see themselves and others, society, with their own eyes. They are beginning to compare alien opinions and theories to their own experiences. They are formuating first concepts, with the help of which we can begin to comprehend the nature of past feminine oppression, today's social contradictions, and our expectations for a different human future. And in every woman's behavior toward herself and in others' toward women — in laws, traditions, and work regulations — nowadays we always find both images: woman as object and as subject. Therefore, both — the traditional and conditioned, and the politically new — will be present in work by women, including that of contemporary women filmmakers. It is yet to be seen whether women, when first given a chance to do whatever they want, will explode in never-before-seen forms, content and techniques. It will then result from entirely different social conditions. The visual arts at least tend to answer this question about feminine imagery with “Yes.” Women's preferences for certain genres, materials and forms also seem to express particularly feminine aesthetic concepts. Something like this also floats around in the women's movement. However, it has also been adequately recognized in the meantime that women have usually painted still lives and portraits because they were forbidden to make studies of nudes, to say nothing of the barriers to sculpture. Such an approach in film aesthetics is by its very nature senseless because we are dealing with standardized materials and equipment. But that does not prevent similar theses from being proposed in the area of film, claiming that women prefer, out of feminist conviction, video, documentary film, and semiprofessional work in groups with other women. Every such argument has economic causes, but this is totally ignored. If one wants to work with film, video becomes a cheaper compromise, documentary films are usually cheaper than features. And the fact that some women filmmakers call on their women friends to help on sound, directing and in other capacities stems from pure need. So if for all the above-mentioned reasons, we cannot speak of feminine imagery. The women who film or paint, etc., interest themselves less in the question of whether their products are feminine, but rather in whether their products are authentic. The penetration of the women's movement into the arts has made it possible for the first time, systematically, to recognize patriarchal ideologies in art works, that is to say, mostly male art works. The absence of certain sexist stereotypes, which we could find throughout film history in films by women, does not yet constitute a feminine imagery, but rather at the very most leads to attention to sensitivity for image-predominant ideologies. Until now, with a few exceptions in the silent film era, film has been purely a male domain. As such a widely distributed and immediate means of communication, it has also shaped women's images of themselves, their roles, their ideals and standards of beauty. Women in film were for a long time the artistic creations of those who made the images. We can perhaps measure the meaning of this indoctrination through false images if we consider that only about two percent of the population reads literature, and literary production has always been less standardized than film production. But nearly everyone shares in film culture through movies and today through television. Although the participation of women working in these media has grown in recent years, women still make up just a fraction of the whole and are almost never involved in decision-making. The women's movement in the arts now reveals the masculinity mania in art. The movement is freeing the image of women from a "natural feminine state” and from an assumed natural relation to men visually as well. A very simple example of this is that in film even more than in reality, women are expected to be shorter than men. For example, no serious romances could ever occur between partners of the same height, much less between tall women and short men. If this happens, it is always only comical and means that the man in such a relationship is not to be taken seriously. It is new that such a relationship today can be treated with irony, as in that TV news report showing a visit to Mao by Kissinger with his wife Nancy — a head taller than Henry. Mao, giggling, pointed repeatedly at Mrs. Kissinger while looking at Kissinger, as if Mao were bringing a good joke into politics. The newscaster announced this news item with a slight smile. In recent years, many Hollywood actresses have complained that scripts are no longer being written in which women even appear. We at frauen und film have suggested that this could be perhaps unconsciously a correct and honest reaction to the women's movement. If one has nothing to say, one should remain silent; it is only in keeping with principles that women's roles get eliminated altogether. I hope I have made clear thus far that the denial of feminine imagery does not mean that art does not vary according to sex, any less than it varies according to class, as socialist theory has analyzed. I do not mean by this that these aspects and others — national characteristics, for example — add up to determine a work of art. Rather, they enter into the formal experience that only an artwork makes accessible. But just as a progressive social theory has led to a dogmatic aesthetic, that is, the equation of social realism with a thesis about knowledge (about how we experience the forms of knowledge), feminism has also had the tendency to make certain aesthetic categories a measure of the aesthetic experience. Thus spontaneity, in women, is no so much oppressed but rather socially patronized. It has been sharply ideologized, and the form into which this spontaneity flows has been summarily declared to be art. This phenomenon is like the fact that science's being antipathetic to women has led to women's groups' showing a antipathy to theory. In a turnabout, social deficits are simply idealized and declared artistic victories. From such tendencies within the women's movement itself then, definitions can be arrived at which always see women and their works only partially and not in terms of our whole living condition. But underlying those sometimes so emphatically expressed women's demands for collectivity and spontaneity is also the wish to abolish the dichotomy which makes some responsible for the production of goods and the others responsible for the arts. At the base lies the wish that it be the fundamental right of every person to work out their experiences in every direction. In the realization of this demand, with all the catastrophes and horrors it brings, lies a piece of utopia. There is only rarely, very rarely, a lucky case when the joint work of non-professionals results in outstanding productions. I have already implied that women today find themselves in a situation perhaps best compared to that of Kaspar Hauser or the Wild Child. We must first learn to see with our own eyes and not through the mediation of others. And when we have just first begun to talk, we still stutter and write no poetry. This leads feminist artists into conflicts for which there are no solutions and which affect them qualitatively totally differently than male artists. The women's movement is striving to examine our fragmented history from the point of view of women's interests. So far there has been virtually no division of labor at this, only gargantuan efforts to gather individual insights piece by piece. The questions touch everyone existentially. The forms of confronting issues require again and again that we abandon our own line of work. We have to choose between things of immediate importance to the movement and the requirements of our own work, which is in many ways, however, also based on the entire movement's insights. We are not only building a house, but simultaneously gathering and assembling the materials for it ourselves. Women artists have worked not only on art but on the movement's pressing problems. They do both always in the hope of soon making their presence there rather superfluous in order to be able to concentrate again fully on developing their own talents. Almost all the women's movements' projects with which we have meanwhile become acquainted are unpaid. They have arisen from this inner contradiction, such as the first women's film festival organized by women filmmakers to familiarize themselves with otherwise inaccessible knowledge; the art exhibitions; the journal frauen und film, for work on which even today no one makes a penny. Many film projects have also arisen in order to contribute to social campaigns, for example around Paragraph 218 (the Federal law restricting abortions — trans. note), contraceptives, etc. Such work is all born of the desire to support the women's movement in such a way as to have an immediate effect. But this often distracts from women artists' own projects, which are more complicated and stand in a much less direct relation to the movements. The pressure of making many such works without financial support, and often with untrained people, quickly leads to unbearable conflicts with the women filmmakers' own standards of excellence. Later, such films are frequently used in an official context against the filmmakers when they are applying for money. Furthermore, the art and film market will scarcely allow even a temporary absence. Artists must rigorously pursue their own interests or else be lost. It means being torn back and forth between the women's movement and its demands and its advances on the one hand, and the conditions of artistic work on the other. This contradiction leads to nearly insoluble internal and external problems, which necessarily become apparent in our work. Besides, the competition in the freelance world is murderous. This system again makes women filmmakers themselves into competitors. This is because in comparison to their male colleagues they receive fewer commissions to begin with and do not yet have a lobby of any sort. Beyond this, many of the qualities which are encouraged in and through the women's movement, such as eliminating hierarchical behavior and irrational authority, and recognizing and paying attention to underrated abilities, are in actual work situations likely to result in catastrophe. Filmmaking conditions are so intertwined with the laws of the market, that humane behavior at work is often interpreted as feminine weakness. Consider too that normal professional work teams derive from labor traditions which fully accept capitalist values. In short, wherever women land, within a very short time there is nothing but confusion, shock, excitement. If we also consider that many women, in keeping with their principles, propose to make films on subjects which have arisen from a movement which the ruling powers ignore or fight, then we can get a pretty good picture of what happens before productions, that is, where decisions about financial means are made. Examples of this are almost all of the works which came out of the campaigns against Paragraph 218. Because the political demands of the women's movement could not, in fact, really be theoretically grounded within the public media, this resulted in the semi-professional works which I have already mentioned, often formally quite lacking. These works born of necessity have lead, as I said, to definitions about feminist film and the sort of conclusion that feminist film is presumably "primarily interested in the documentary and mistrusts the power of fantasy." Still other aesthetic points of friction have arisen in these confrontations. Quite materialistically and simply, the women's movement has begun with itself, with the female body, thereby exposing injustices and alien definitions. Now in many of these films, nude bodies and sexual organs play a role. These are filmed not to awaken erotic feelings in men nor to be sexually neutral or medically functional, but rather to picture the female body so as to lead women into the blank regions of unexplored subjectivity. Because a female sex organ is immediately associated with pornography and thus banned from all public media, we can imagine the collisions between themes of this kind with public broadcasting stations. The stations follow general guidelines, which clearly forbid showing anything which violates customary moral feeling or which in principle challenges marriage and family. This challenge, however, forms a basis of the entire women's movement. On the international scale, this chapter of women's seeing their bodies with their own eyes is far from having been written to the end. It will become explosive anew when contributed to by our Arab sisters, who must struggle to win not only the filmic right to their own bellies but also even the right to their own unveiled faces. Not long ago a newspaper article mentioned the Turkish censor had forbidden showing love scenes or women in bathing suits in films. When we perceive our own interests, we do not express that only in tearing down ruling ideologies, but really concretely in confrontations at the work place, now among women filmmakers in the arts industry. Stated otherwise: women's most authentic act today — in all areas including the arts — consists not in standardizing and harmonizing the means, but rather in destroying them. Where women are true, they break things. With visual material, this "breakage" has been the most progressive in analyses, and the most diffuse in practice. It often makes productions disjointed and inconsistent, especially with women artists who have just begun to work, those not trained in and then building on an art tradition before joining the women's movement and then consciously distancing themselves formally from this tradition. Of course, we also should not forget that there are women filmmakers and artists who because of personal distance from the women's movement remain altogether untouched by these problems and can for this reason often work much more effectively. Unburdened by politics, they can get commissions and sit on certainty instead of on chaos. In contrast, feminist artists can say with Bob Dylan: “I like chaos, but I don't know whether chaos likes me.” Edited by jiricine_nvkino, Jun 29 2015, 11:27 AM.
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12:42 AM Jul 11