Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema

by Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey (Editor), Ingeborg von Zadow (Editor)

Overview

This broad-ranging collection, the first of its kind, gathers essays on the representation of women in recent German cinema, as well as recent interviews with German women filmmakers.

This book illuminates some of the challenges feminist German filmmakers face and offers original insights into their filmmaking practices. It considers the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality as these are cinematically represented, and discusses narrative, documentary, "art," and essay films from both West and East Germany before and after unification. Several essays treat films by well-known filmmakers, including R.W. Fassbinder, Jutta Brückner, Ulrike Ottinger, Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Monika Treut, and Wim Wenders in ways that challenge the limits of major critical approaches in feminist film criticism today. Importantly, Triangulated Visions also offers suggestive and original analyses of works by filmmakers who, until now, have not received much scholarly treatment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791437186
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	04/16/1998
Series:	SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	291
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey is Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Ingeborg von Zadow is a playwright and lives in Heidelberg, Germany. Among her works currently performed on stage are Pompinien and Ich und du.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey
Part I. Genre and Other Border Crossings
1. Triangulating Performances: Looking After Genre, After Feature
Nora M. Alter
2. Fassbinder, Women, and Melodrama: Critical Interrogations
Douglas Kellner
3. Behind the Curtains of a State-Owned Film Industry: Women-Filmakers at the DEFA
Margrit Frolich
4. The Queer and Unqueer Spaces of Monika Treut's Films
Marcia Klotz
Part II. Triangulations of Ethnicity, Gender, and Class
5. "It Takes Three to Tango" or Romanace Revisited: Jutta Bruckner's One Glance and Love Breaks Out
Barbara Kosta
6. Interview with Jutta Bruckner: Feminist Filmmaking in Germany Today
Ingeborg von Zadow
7. Observing Rituals: Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia
Julia Knight
8. Community and Its Contents: Race and Film History in Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe
David J. Levin
9. Interview with Seyhan Derin: ben annemin kiziyim (I Am My Mother's Daughter)
Henriette Lowisch
Part III. Images of Power and Pleasure
10. Narcissism: The Impossible Love
Kaja Silverman
11. Wanda's Whip: Recasting Masochism's Fantasy—Monika Treut's Seduction: The Cruel Woman
Barbara Mennel
12. Why Drag the Diva Into It? Werner Schroeter's Gay Representation of Femininity
Ulrike Sieglohr
13. Interview with Doris Dorrie: Filmmaker, Writer, Teacher
Klaus Phillips
Part IV. Images of Women as Social Ciphers
14. Commodified Body: Helga Redemeister's Mit starrem Blick aufs Geld (Blank Stares and Hard Cash)
Magda Mueller
15. Interview: Women, Film, and Writing in the GDR: Helga Schubert and the DEFA
Ute Lischke-McNab
16. Models or Misfits? The Role of Screen Heroines in GDR Cinema
Andrea Rinke
17. Wenders' Genders: From the End of the Wall to the End of the World
Scott Spector
Part V. Recovering (from) History: Memory and Film
18. "The Robber Bridegroom" in Helma Sanders-Brahms's Deutschland, bleiche Mutter: Erzahltes Marchen und erlebtes Greuelmarchen
Rosmarie Thee Morewedge
19. Fairy Tales and Reflexivity in Marianne Rosenbaum's Peppermint Peace
Susan E. Linville
20. Interview with Helke Sander: Reception of Liberators Take Liberties: I would have hoped for a different discussion...
Sabine Smith
21. Helke Sander's Liberators Take Liberties and the Politics of History
Marie-Luise Gattens
Appendix
A New Home for the EIFF-European Institute for Women and Film
Ute Lischke-McNab talks with Jutta Bruckner
Contributors
Subject Index
Author Index

Editorial Reviews

Collects 21 essays that represent a wide range of current film theory and illuminate some of the challenges feminist German filmmakers face. They consider the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality and discuss various kinds of films (narrative, documentary, art, and essay) from both West and East Germany before and after unification. Several essays treat films not only by well-known filmmakers but some whose work has not, until now, received much scholarly treatment. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

"This is a book which really needs to be read, on the work of some of the most important artists working in cinema today." — Gwendolyn Foster, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

"The theories, films, and directors discussed here have been too seldom treated but are very important to film studies, German studies, and cultural studies in general. This book does a valuable service in redressing this neglect." — Barton Byg, University of Massachusetts–Amherst

"The topic of women in German cinema is undeniably significant in itself, and also of interest as an aspect of cinema studies and German literary/cultural studies. The inclusion of material on filmmaking in the former GDR and on documentary, along with more standard fictional films, as well as the filmmaker interviews and essays discussing a number of recent films, all make this volume particularly valuable." — Ramona Curry, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

From the Publisher