Triangulated visions: women in recent German cinema

Abstract

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. …