Local funding and global movement: minority women's filmmaking and the German film landscape of the late 1990s.

The German cinema landscape of the 1990s was characterized by two major trends: one featured international mainstream successes with post-feminist representations of strong female heroines, and the other consisted of a new independent minority cinema, identified by the German feuilleton primarily as male. For minority cinema directed by women, these trends create expectations and pressures, which are often expressed through the identity politics of funding decisions. Two films from the period, Seyhan Derin's I Am My Mother's Daughter (1996) and Fatima El-Tayeb and Angelina Maccarone's film Everything Will Be Fine (1997), subvert the implicit and explicit expectations of their funding by reworking traditional genres and employing narratives of movement that reconfigure notions of identity. (BM)

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"Chick Flicks": Cinefeminism Revisited

In her book-length study of the feminist film movement, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (1998), B. Ruby Rich claims that the women's film movement has abandoned the diversity of concerns--including production, distribution, and reception--that characterized its beginnings in the 1970s. She argues that in a process of academization, its concerns were increasingly limited to the theoretical question of female spectatorship. In this essay, I take up Rich's challenge to address the conditions of production, distribution, and reception, on the one hand, and cinematic representation, on the other. How do the political dynamics of production, distribution, and reception shape the possibilities for minority women filmmakers in contemporary Germany to make and show films? How do their films, in turn, reflect and subvert these political dynamics?

Funding and distribution for women's films were central to cinefeminism, the feminist film movement of the 1970s in the United States, argues Rich. The activism rooted in these concerns led to the creation of women's film festivals, distribution companies such as Women Make Movies, and archives and journals devoted to women's film. In Rich's account, German films and directors feature centrally, both in regard to the discovery of forgotten women directors as well as to an emerging feminist cinema: "New German Cinema was the riveting center of attention in seventies film circles, propelled by the new generation of German auteurs as well as by the pioneering academic work of journals like the New German Critique" (175). Similar to cinefeminism in the United States, the West German feminist film movement was also concerned with production and distribution, exemplified in Helke Sander's film The All-Round Reduced Personality (Die allseits reduzierte Personlichkeit, 1978). The film documents the fictional struggles of a collective of feminist photographers discussing the means of production for their photo series about women in Berlin as well as access to potential exhibition spaces, ranging from an art gallery to billboards in the city. The film's emphasis on production and exhibition parallels the concerns of the feminist film movement in West Germany. By organizing women's film festivals and feminist film journals, such as Frauen und Film, the feminist film movement created alternative venues and ultimately a public sphere for distribution of a feminist cinema, and, in turn, a feminist audience and reception.