Helke Sander

Helke Sander (born January 31, 1937 in Berlin) is a German feminist film director and writer.

Early life and Education

Sander attended a drama school in Hamburg. While married to Finnish writer Markku Lahtela, with whom she had a son, she worked as director at the worker's theatre and for Finnish television. She returned to Berlin in 1965.

From 1966 to 1969, she studied at the newly founded film school 'Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie'. Sanders' work in cinema is very closely linked to her political engagement as a feminist.

Career and activism

In 1968, she co-founded the Aktionsrat zu Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee on the Liberation of Women). In September 1968, she participated at the conference of the Socialist Students Association (SDS). Her speech, in which she criticized her male colleagues for their sexist attitudes, was yelled at.

Together with Claudia von Aleman, she organized the feminist film conference 'Erste internationale Frauenfilmseminar' which took place in 1973 in Berlin. In 1974, she founded Frauen und Film (journal), the first feminist European film journal, which she edited until 1981.

Her film The All-Around Reduced Personality is among the most important German feminist films of the 1970s. In part this is because it blends techniques of both documentary and fictional film.[1]

Sander's critical eye towards postwar German culture was expanded in her 1984 satire on sexual politics, Love is the Beginning of All Terror.

Her 1992 documentary film, BeFreier und BeFreite (Liberators Take Liberties), examines the mass rape of German women committed by soldiers of the Red Army at the end of World War II. Sander's film was particularly controversial because there were concerns that the film placed too much emphasis on German suffering, thereby lessening guilt for the Holocaust. Defenders of the film argue that Sander's project is a complex reflection on rape as a weapon of war. They argue that the film resists presenting a one-sided depiction of German victimization citing the film's attention to German war crimes and self-reflexive qualities.[2]

Starting in 1981 Sander was a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg.

Work

Helke Sander's work is characterized by the use of filters, which function as a visual cue to remind the audience of the subjectivity presented. The use of the filter draws attention to the properties of a documentary and the ideology being communicated, allowing the audience an awareness of the rhetoric being delivered.

Redupers: The All-Round Reduced Personality (1977)

Redupers is a documentary about the Berlin Wall, the border between East and West Berlin, and the central character's relationship to Berlin . Through authorial inscription, Helke Sander portrays the central character of the film, a woman who must come to terms with the political and private sphere of being a woman against the backdrop of unrest. Helke Sander also focuses on photographer Edda Chiemnyjewski's efforts. Feminist interpretations of Helke Sander's film, Redupers, posit that the Berlin Wall functions not only as a representation of the divide geographically, but also as a stand-in for the psychic and sexual differences between men and women.

The Subjective Factor (1980)

The Subjective Factor chronicles the origins of the women's movement and the Berlin student movement, set against the backdrop of a commune, and deals with issues of anarchism, terrorism, and phallocentrism. Sander's portrayal shows Leftist males run the commune while women are relegated to domestic duties and are denied rights to speak out.

The film is set during the late sixties and consists of a combination of fictional footage and newsreel footage. The use of filter in the film draws attention to the properties of the documentary itself, the views that are presented. Sander's use of the female voice over in The Subjective Factor was a marker of progressive film making at the time.

Films

Director (28 titles)

Writings

See also

References

  1. ↑ Mayne, Judith (1982). "Female Narration, Women's Cinema: Helke Sander's the All-Round Reduced Personality/Redupers". New German Critique. 24-25: 157–159. JSTOR 488047.
  2. ↑ McCormick, Richard (September 2001). "Rape and War, Gender and Nation, Victims and Victimizers: Helke Sander's BeFreier und Befreite". Camera Obscura: 99.

Further reading

External links

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