Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film

Jennifer L. Creech

Description

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film merges feminist film theory and cultural history in an investigation of "women's films" that span the last two decades of the former East Germany. Jennifer L. Creech explores the ways in which these films functioned as an alternative public sphere where official ideologies of socialist progress and utopian collectivism could be resisted. Emerging after the infamous cultural freeze of 1965, these women's films reveal a shift from overt political critique to a covert politics located in the intimate, problem-rich experiences of everyday life under socialism. Through an analysis of films that focus on what were perceived as "women's concerns"—marital problems, motherhood, emancipation, and residual patriarchy—Creech argues that the female protagonist served as a crystallization of socialist contradictions. By framing their politics in terms of women's concerns, these films used women's desire and agency to contest the more general problems of social alienation and collectivism, and to re-imagine the possibilities of self-fulfillment under socialism.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Introduction: Rescuing History from the Ruins
1. Happily Ever After? The Emancipatory Politics of Female Desire in Lot's Wife
2. The Lonely Woman? (Re)production and Female Desire in The Bicycle and On Probation
3. Pleasure in Seeing Ourselves? All My Girls
4. Real Women: Goodbye to Winter and the Documentary Women's Film
Conclusion: After the Fall
DEFA Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• Feminist Theory
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Germán
• Película fotográfica
• Women's studies
• Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft
• New Wave
• East Germany
• Feminism
• History of film
• Cinema
• Central Europe
• German
• Germany
• DEFA
• Film
• Media
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780253023179
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women s Films
NEW DIRECTIONS IN NATIONAL CINEMAS
Jacqueline Reich, editor
Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women s Films
Jennifer L. Creech
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Jennifer L. Creech
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Creech, Jennifer L., [date]- author.
Title: Mothers, comrades, and outcasts in East German women s films / Jennifer L. Creech.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2016] | Series: New directions in national cinemas | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017124| ISBN 9780253023018 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253022691 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253023179 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures for women-Germany (East). | Motion pictures-Germany (East)-History. | Women in motion pictures.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.W6 C74 2016 | DDC 791.43/6522-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017124
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For Violet Mae, Charlotte Yvonne, and Violet Gail
The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman . From this relationship one can therefore judge man s whole level of development.
-Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Introduction: Rescuing History from the Ruins
1. Happily Ever After? The Emancipatory Politics of Female Desire in Lot s Wife
2. The Lonely Woman? (Re)production and Feminine Desire in The Bicycle and On Probation
3. Pleasure in Seeing Ourselves? All My Girls
4. Real Women: Goodbye to Winter and the Documentary Women s Film
Conclusion: After the Fall
Notes
DEFA Filmography
Works Cited
Index
Preface
In the opening sequence of Egon G nther s 1972 film, Der Dritte [ Her Third ], the viewer watches the female protagonist, Margit, at work as a mathematician in a computer engineering lab. Overlaid with a blue filter, the camera captures the lab and the engineers-equal numbers of men and women-in medium shots, in discussion while working with the computers that fill the room. In voice-over, we hear the film s director, G nther, asking the lab s director about specifics regarding job skill differences, wages, and gender parity. The camera then cuts to medium shots of Margit and her colleagues leaving the lab, taking the streetcar, and walking home.
Arriving at home, Margit enters her dark apartment, turning on lights that reveal its emptiness, occasionally turning toward the camera in medium close-up, baring a face that looks tired, beat. She is alone. She turns on the television and returns to the kitchen to make a solitary meal, but the dialogue from the television piques both her and the viewer s interest. We see her peer around the kitchen doorway to get a closer look at the man and woman on screen. The camera cuts to the screen-within-the-screen: we-the diegetic and extra-diegetic viewers-see a Russian captain standing on the forest floor, looking up at his younger female compatriot, an army nurse, teasing her, suggesting she is afraid to walk along the narrow trunk of the fallen tree on which she stands. 1 A high-angle close-up emphasizes his desiring gaze as he exclaims, taunting, you are afraid! The camera cuts to to a low-angle medium close-up of the nurse shaking her head. As she asserts, I don t need your pity, thanks! the camera cuts to a medium shot of Margit watching, somewhat disinterestedly, focusing more on her dinner plate than on the drama unfolding before her. As the camera cuts back to the film-within-the-film, we see and hear the nurse assert that she can-and will -jump over a large crevice in the earth on her own. Yet there stands the captain, legs broadly spread, straddling the crevice, tauntingly second guessing her: On your own?! On your own?! Grabbing her around the waist, he pulls her to him, her limp body hanging over the abyss, her legs motionless between his. The camera tracks lower into the earth, presenting this dynamic scene of his desire. He sizes her up with his eyes, then bends her to the side, kissing her passionately. The camera hovers below until he sets her down, safely, on the other side and, as both diegetic and extra-diegetic spectators watch, she moves unsteadily away from him along the edge of the abyss.
The camera cuts back to Margit and we register minute changes in her formerly disinterested spectatorship: she now leans slightly forward, and her movements, as she eats, are more agitated. She pushes her plate away and picks up a newspaper, but her eyes constantly move from the page back toward the television as the captain demandingly whispers, Mascha, come here! We see the nurse in close-up, her eyes racing from side to side, as she contemplates his command aloud, asking Why should I? Yet the answer is obvious to both the diegetic and extra-diegetic spectators. The camera cuts back to Margit and we see her visibly restless: she readjusts her position and quickly flips through the newspaper, all the while watching the TV from above and around the pages. Finally, she sets the paper aside and stands, removing her plates from the table as we hear the captain half-commanding, half-pleading Go away. Go away, Mascha. Do you hear, Mascha? Leave. I m asking you to leave. Margit reenters the frame, and we see that she has brought her glasses with her. She sits down, cleans her glasses on her breast pocket, and proceeds to get a better look at the captain s aggressive pursuit of his desired object. The camera cuts to a medium shot of Margit s hand turning off the light. She turns toward the camera, in the dark, and walks slowly over to the wall of windows. Crossing her arms over her chest, hugging her shoulders close, and shivering, she looks out over Berlin Plattenbau at night, and the camera follows her gaze: a broad cityscape of windows, some lit, most dark. Margit sighs.
In these first eight minutes, the average viewer likely feels challenged to make sense of a narrative that does not begin with a typical exposition, inexplicably mixes generic conventions, and focuses on the banality of a single woman s after-work routine. Why, for example, does the film begin with a documentary realist scene-formally stylized, yet framed by the humorously interrogative voice of the film s director-followed by the cinematic play of the film-within-the-film? Why, some may wonder, is a cinematic classic playing on primetime television? What, we ask, is the relationship between the shots of Margit at work and those of Margit at home? Between Margit, as a protagonist, and the female protagonist on the screen-within-the-screen? How is Margit s lonely stance in front of the secondary screen of high-rise apartments related to what we have seen of her thus far-Margit as a laboring and a spectating subject?
In these first minutes of his film, G nther self-consciously emphasizes many of the issues this book attempts to confront. First, he calls attention to film as a medium of pleasure. The seemingly objective documentary form in the opening shots are complicated by the director s own playful banter with those who assist in constructing the narrative. Similary, spectatorial enjoyment is emphasized, as we watch Margit resist and ultimately succumb to the pleasures of viewing. Further, by intercutting the celebrated work of Russia s most acclaimed director, Andrei Tarkovsky, with his own, G nther s work embodies the socialist ideal of art for the masses, art as pleasurable cheerful and militant learning, proving (as Brecht had many years prior) that art and entertainment must not be mutually exclusive. 2
Second, G nther s film emphasizes the role of narrative film as a sociopolitical medium. While Tarkovsky s narrative reproduces a traditional understanding of the feminine as primary object of the desiring male gaze, G nther s documentary realist introductory scene coupled with an emphasis on Margit s resistant viewership opens up a space for the film s larger critique of generic conventions and socialist femininity. The play between G nther s own film and Tarkovsky s invites the viewer to think more concretely about narrative conventions that govern spectatorship as a site of subject formation. Genres, narrative conventions, teach viewers through identificatory structures how to be and what to want, and spectators register affective responses in their reception of-and resistances to-the texts they encounter in the social field. Prior to presenting us with Margit as a pleasure-seeking spectator, G nther constructs her socioeconomically, as one who labors. The contradictions between those aspects of socialist identity-labor and desire-will be borne out by Margit over the course of the film. As G nther s film shows, and as this book will attempt to articula