Specials

Specials

The Rise of Women in Film

»THE FILMS SHARE THE NARRATIVE THEME OF THE DOUBLE HEROINE. IT IS A COUNTERPART TO THE CONCEPT OF THE TRADITIONAL HEROINE.«

A retrospective of 21 feature films by 18 female film-makers from seven countries in Berlin last year demonstrated the fact that the first generation of young women were successfully producing full-length films as authors in Europe in the 1960s. The series of films also proved the theory that these women’s criticism of worlds dominated in the East and West by men was as much a phenomenon that transcended borders and systems as the (oedipal) rebellion of young male directors against traditional social structures and filmic conventions at this time.

These female directors, who saw themselves as lone crusaders, never appeared together and were contextualised for the first time in a film series curated by Sabine Schöbel, occupy a place in film history between the feminist generation of film-makers in the 70s and 80s and a few solitary figures in early film history, such as Germaine Dulac, Wanda Jakubowska, Muriel Box and Jacqueline Audry. Alongside films by the well-known representatives of the › European Sixties ‹ Věra Chytilová, Agnès Varda and Mai Zetterling, the series also included the early work of women film-makers who later achieved fame. Examples here are Lina Wertmüller, Márta Mészáros, Liliana Cavani, Judit Elek and Kira Muratowa. The virtually unknown films of Anna Gobbi, Paula Delsol, Nadine Trintignant and Lívia Gyarmathy were genuine discoveries for the audience.

These films rank among the great films of the 1960s, and this is underlined not only by the appearance of such stars as Anouk Aimée, Michael Lonsdale, Elsa Martinelli and Manyi Kiss, but also by the fact that they experiment with formats and also draw on genre cinema. Unlike the allegorical female characters presented by the likes of Kluge, Makavejev, Jakubisko and Godard, the narrative theme of the double heroine, the female duo that pushes in different directions, portrays not the rebellion of the autonomous subject but a kind of balancing act between tradition and new departures.
_Sabine Schöbel