Further Thoughts on Helke Sander's Project
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4300510 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Annette Michelson, Andreas Huyssen, Stuart Liebman, Eric L Santner, Eric Santner, Silvia Kolbowski |
| Year | 1995 |
| Volume | 72 |
| Pages | 89 |
| Publication date | 1995-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | October (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-2870 • E-ISSN: 1536-013X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/778930 |
| OpenAlex | W2323750788 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Annette Michelson: We are here to discuss a work by the important German feminist filmmaker Helke Sander. Although this film won the Nestor Almendros Prize at the Human Rights Film Festival of 1993 in New York and was the subject, last fall, of a day-long symposium at the Graduate Center of the City University, it has not yet received a fully articulated and nuanced response in the United States. It seems to us that the film raises important questions about the documentary genre, about feminism and the politics of history, both in Germany and elsewhere, and about recent cultural trends in the larger, reunified Federal Republic. Through our discussion, we wish to address a number of issues that will illuminate the film's complexity and interest for our readers. I should like to list several general topics so as to map the terrain for our discussion. We can take them in any order, and you should feel free to add topics you think to be of interest. The first has to do with the reception of Sander's work in Germany by the press and other sources. Second, we should like to place this film as an intervention within the feminist movement, for American, German, and other women, and to consider its relation to changing notions of feminism. Then, we might consider the question of what one could call the film's particularistic but simultaneously transhistorical view of the very complex event which is the Second World War and the way in which it situates itself with respect to alternative constructions of that historical nexus. Fourthly, the film recalls a long-standing interpretive framework of German historiography and of German culture, both high and low, in which Germans-here, German women in particular-are characterized as victims of the war. Can and should one discuss this film in relation to aspects of a revisionism generated by the recent Historians' Debate which draws on similar images and narratives? It seemed to us that the third and fourth questions are linked, and that they might in turn induce us to consider Liberators Take Liberties in relation to other aspects of German critical filmmaking and of feminist production. Finally, how might we situate this film, to put it most crudely, in
Art · Sander · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Engineering · European history and politics · German History and Society · Mechanical Engineering
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,2 |
| Citation span | 2001 - 2021 (21) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |