Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Rhiel, Mary

Major-O'Sickey, Ingeborg and Ingeborg von Zadow, eds. 1998. Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema. SUNY Series in Feminist Criticism and Theory. Albany: SUNY Press. $65.50 hc. $21.95 sc. vii 291 pp.

Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema is a significant anthology for the way it brings together German filmmakers' and German film scholars' post-feminist insights into the conjunction of women/woman and German cinema. This volume has a lot to recommend it: it compiles in English 17 scholarly essays on the recent German cinema and five interviews with German women filmmakers. It is particularly valuable to the U.S. readership for its attention to under-treated areas of German film in English language scholarship, areas such as the former GDR (East German) cinema and documentary filmmakers.Yet the volume also includes articles on films and filmmakers who have had a higher degree of visibility in English language journals and book publications and on the screens of repertoire theaters and university classrooms. These include some of New German Cinema's famous Filmautoren (Fassbinder and Wenders), German avant-garde filmmakers (Ottinger and Treut), and women associated with the genre of women's/feminist films (Sanders-- Brahms, Sander, and Rosenbaum).

The key intervention that the editors want to make in publishing this volume is to redress the relative absence of work on German women filmmakers in booklength studies on the German cinema (6). Thus the unifying theme of Triangulated Visions, according to its editors, is a psycho-politically informed discussion, from a variety of approaches, of the triangulated intersections of filmmaker/image/audience. These intersections have formed the basis of feminist film theory's investigations into gender as constructed/deconstructed/reconstructed. At the same time, the editors and the authors of the essays make clear that we are operating in an era of post-feminism, an era, that is, in which it no longer suffices to talk about a feminist or feminine aesthetic, a feminine spectator position, or representations of women with the same sense of assuredness or mission that was possible in the previous two decades.

The anthology is divided into five parts (Genre and Other Border Crossings; Triangulations of Ethnicity, Gender and Class; Images of Power and Pleasure; Images ofWomen as Social Ciphers; Recovering (from) History: Memory and Film), each part reflecting theoretical and historical concerns that are addressed somewhat unevenly by the essays in each section. Of course, such divisions are themselves only constructs, and one finds many of the same films, filmmakers, and concerns reappearing in various parts of the volume. Germany's women avant-garde filmmakers Monika Treut and Ulrike Ottinger receive the most attention throughout the anthology, beginning with the lead essay by Nora Alter. The avant-garde texts by these two filmmakers exemplify Alters assertion that the triangulated intersection is an unruly place of meaning formation. According to Alter, we must approach the view of the spectator as one that is both unstable and a place where meaning is constituted. Both Treut's and Ottinger's films transgress genre categories through which the spectator participates in construing meaning. Ottinger's Johanna d'arc of Mongolia and Treut's The Virgin Machine weave documentary style and feature film sequences seamlessly together, creating a post-genre hybrid text that destabilizes our categories of understanding-categories that include sexuality, historical time, and geographical place. More than any other essay, Alters theorizes the effects of such textual/spectatorial processes for triangulated vision:". . .(it) is at once confirmed, disrupted, and confirmed again" (21). Douglas Kellner's article on Fassbinder revisits the way in which his films use (Sirkian) melodrama to both create and disrupt conventional meanings (by mixing strategies of identification and distanciation) in the service of social critique. Margrit Froelich writes on women documentary filmmakers in the history of East German Cinema, an institution with very different conditions than those of the West. For that reason, Froelich gives the reader an historical account of GDR film production and women documentarists' place in it. She includes plot descriptions for the western reader unfamiliar with the filmmakers to show how these films, while often navigating "the fine line between addressing controversial issues and tempering the view to a level acceptable to the regime's cultural functionaries," raised issues that official public discourse in the GDR did not (45). Andrea Rinke, in a similarly descriptive article on "The Role of Screen Heroines in GDR Cinema," makes the same point as Froehlich. Women, whether as filmmakers or heroines in so-called women's films, occupied a unique ability to critique official GDR society with stories about problems that arose in the interstices between women's private lives as mothers and lovers and the socialist guarantee of equality between the sexes. Marcia Klotz's essay is astute in observing that Monika Treut's films create spaces for radical sexual subject positions that challenge both the dominant (read heterosexual) and marginal (read lesbian-feminist) understandings of identity (66). Although anti-essentialist, Klotz observes that Treut's films are marked historically by the creation of a sexually experimental space that is constructed outside of class and race conflict. As if in answer to the problem of ethnicity in even the most avant-garde German film texts, the next section moves to the topic of ethnicity, gender and class.