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.

Rich argues that the academization of feminist film studies in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s increasingly limited concerns to the question of female spectatorship, first developed by Laura Mulvey in her path-breaking article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In this 1977 classic essay, Mulvey suggests that both cinematic apparatus and spectatorship are organized by the male gaze, while the narratives of Hollywood films are arrested by "woman as image" (62). Rich does not criticize the concept of cinematic spectatorship, but rather the singular attention it has received in Anglo-American feminist film scholarship of the last two decades. In German feminist film studies in the United States, spectatorship has been the focus of several studies but with a socio-historical approach that expands the sole emphasis on psychoanalysis that characterizes Anglo-American feminist film studies. (1) Rich claims that the single focus in feminist film studies created "a tendency towards stasis and atrophy" (380).

Rich's historical narrative of cinefeminism delineates a division between a socio-economic approach, which addresses funding and distribution, and a psychoanalytic approach, which focuses on the gendering of representation and spectatorship; the first approach is mapped onto feminist film activism, while the second shapes academic feminist film studies. In German Studies this methodological bifurcation mirrors the methodological split between the study of DEFA film, dominated by a sociological approach, and the study of West German film, dominated by a semantic and psychoanalytic approach. Rich calls for reviving the diversity of methodological and topical approaches that characterized the beginning of cinefeminism, yet her account leaves the boundaries between different methodologies intact. I suggest, however, that these methodological boundaries need to be revisited in order to account for the interdependence of socio-economic conditions of cultural production, on the one hand, and the psycho-social structures that shape our cultural imaginary, on the other.