Sander, Helke 1937-

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SANDER, Helke 1937-

PERSONAL:

Born January 31, 1937, in Berlin, Germany; married Markku Lahtela (a writer), 1959 (died, 1981); children: Silvio. Education: Attended drama school, 1957-58, University of Helsinki, 1960-62, and Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie, Berlin, Germany, 1966-69.

CAREER:

Director, writer, actor, producer, and editor, 1962—; worked in Finnish theater, 1964, and Finnish television, 1965; began directing 1965; Frauen und Film, founder; Hamburg University for Visual Arts, Hamburg, Germany, professor, 1981—; Bremen Institute for Film and Television, codirector. Producer of films, including Die Deutschen und ihre Männer—Bericht aus Bonn, 1989, and Die Meisen von Frau S., 1989. Actor in films, including 3000 Häser, 1967; Unsichtbare Gegner (also known as "Invisible Adversaries"), 1977; Allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit-Redupers, Die (as Edda; also known as "The All-Around Reduced Personality: Outtakes"), 1978; Fräulein Berlin, 1983; Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe (as Freya, also known as "Love Is the Beginning of All Terror"), 1984; Vater und Sohn, 1984; Des Lebens schönste Seiten (as Neri; television); Bungalow (as Paar am Bahnof), 2002.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Women's Film Hyères, and Prix l'age d'or, Brussels, both 1977, both for Redupers; Golden Bear and German Film Prize, Filmband in Gold, 1984, for No. 1—From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services.

WRITINGS:

(And director and actor) Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit (Redupers), (title means "The All-Around Reduced Personality"), Basis Film/ZDF, 1977.

(With Gislind Nabakowski and Peter Gorsen) Frauen in der Kunst, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt, Germany), 1980.

(Writer and director, with Christel Buschmann, Helke Sander, and Margarethe von Trotta) Felix (movie), Future Film Production, 1987.

Die Geschichten der drei Damen K. (short stories), Frauenbuchverlag (Munich, Germany), 1987, translation by Helen Petzold published as The Three Women K, Serpent's Tail (London, England), 1991.

Oh Lucy: Erzählung, A. Kunstmann (Munich, Germany), 1991.

(With Barbara Johr) BeFreier und Befreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder, A. Kunstmann (Munich, Germany), 1992.

(With Roger Willemsen) Gewaltakte: Männerphantasien & Krieg, I. Klein (Hamburg, Germany), 1993.

Also editor, with Eva Hiller and Gesine Strempel, of Cutterinen, (Berlin, Germany), 1976, and Filmpolitik, with Claudia Lenssen and Gesine Strempel, (Berlin, German), 1978; contributor to periodicals, including Frauen und Film, Jump Cut, and October; author of prologue to Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, edited by Alexandra Stilgmayer, translated by Marion Faber, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1994.

Also screenwriter and director of the films Subjektitüde (title means "Subjectivity"), 1966; Silvio, 1967; Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (title means "Crush the Power of the Manipulators"), 1967; Kindergärtnerin, was nun? (title means "What Now, Nursery Workers"), 1969; Kinder sind nicht Rinder (title means "Children Are Not Cattle"), 1969; (codirector), Eine Prämie für Irene (title means "A Bonus for Irene"), 1971; (codi-rector), Macht die Pille Frei? (title means "Does the Pill Liberate?"), 1972; (codirector), Männerbunde (title means "Male Bonding"), 1973; Der subjektive Faktor (title means "The Subjective Factor"), 1981; (and actor as lover) Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe (title means "The Trouble with Love"), 1983; Nr. 1—Aus Berichten der Wach—und Patrouillendienst (documentary, title means "No. 1—From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services"), 1984; Nr. 8—Aus Berichten der Wach—und Patrouillendienst (documentary, title means "No. 8—From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Services"), 1984; (codirector; "Fütter" or "Gluttony" episode) Sieben Frauen—Sieben Sünden (title means "Seven Women—Seven Sins"), 1986; Die Deutschen und ihre Männer (title means "The Germans and Their Men"), 1990; BeFreier und Befreite Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder (documentary; title means "Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children"), 1993; Duzlak, 1997; Muttertier-Muttermensch (television), 1999; (and producer) Dorf (television; international English title Village,), 2001; Mitten im Malestream, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Helke Sander's name has become synonymous with the advent of Germany's second-wave women's movement and feminist filmmaking. Provocative in style and subject matter, her self-reflexive documentaries and later fictional explorations of women's experiences reveal the ambition to politicize the private sphere and to challenge habitual ways of seeing. Owing to her unconventional choice of topics, Sander received no funding for a period of about five years with the justification that her proposed themes addressed only women instead of appealing to a general public. It was not until 1977 that Sander was able to direct her breakthrough and best-known feature-length film, Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit (Redupers), ("The All-Around Reduced Personality"), which focuses on the life of Edda (played by Sander), a freelance photographer, mother, and activist who faces the conflicting demands of her private and professional life and who confronts sexism in the media when a photoessay of women's views of Berlin, commissioned by a mainstream magazine, is rejected. Writing in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film "as earnest and clear and chilly as its elegant black-and-white photography."

While still at the Film and Television Academy, Sander became active in the student movement. In her 1968 address at the Socialist Student's Association Speech by the Action Council for Women's Liberation, Sander criticized the male Left for its disregard of women's issues and, more generally, for a political analysis that overlooks the private realm. Disaffected with the Left's blind spots, Sander cofounded the Council for Women's Liberation. This experience is reflected in Der subjektive Faktor ("The Subjective Factor"), a work of memory that traces the beginnings of the women's movement in Germany and the break with the socialist student movement and the APO (extraparliamentary opposition). Interspersed with documentary footage, the subjective, autobiographical fiction challenges the claim of the objectivity of historical narration and the documentary genre. In Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe ("The Trouble with Love"), the paradoxical politics of emotion are parodied when two liberated, though jealous, women vie for the same man and perform for his gaze. The film addresses the oppressive structures that shape interpersonal relations as well as collective histories commented on in a voice-over. Die Deutschen und ihre Männer ("The Germans and Their Men") similarly explores the failure to link the deeply entrenched public and private divide in numerous interviews with men who neglect to contemplate their conduct toward women. In BeFreier und Befreite Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder ("Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children"), an ambitious three-and-one-half-hour documentary film, Sander probes the stories of German women who were raped predominantly by soldiers of the Red Army in the last days of World War II. A montage of present-day interviews breaks through the silence that has beleaguered personal and public memory. In an interview with Stuart Liebman in Cineaste, Sander noted: "I think people are interested in history and, for the first time, this film makes it possible for women to articulate in public a certain important fact about their own experiences of rape which they were not allowed to do before." Sander's film Duzlak, a road movie/comedy, depicts a chance meeting between Jenny and a skinhead whom she tries to help after he hits a tree with his car while driving under the influence.

Throughout her career, in her films, essays, and most recently in her short stories, Sander has remained provocative and unwavering in her quest to expose the asymmetrical power structures that disadvantage women and the general resistance to an analysis of gendered relations. Besides her own filmmaking interests, her formidable accomplishments include founding the first, and only, feminist film journal in Europe, Frauen und Film, in 1974, which focuses on recovering works of women directors, actors, and scriptwriters either forgotten or ignored by film history, addressing the conditions under which women make films and the policies and preferences of funding agencies, and supporting women filmmakers who found little backing or visibility. In 1974 she co-organized the International Women's Film Seminar to promote women's productions.

Sander also codirected and cowrote several films, including Felix, which she created with Christel Buschmann, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Margarethe von Trotta. The film focuses on a cad named Felix who, contrary to appearances, feels subjugated by the women that he uses. New York Times contributor Vincent Camby commented: "The pleasures of the film accumulate. Felix is finally so enjoyable that no one, without being told, would easily identify it as the work of four very different talents."

Sander is also the author of several books, including the short-story collection Die Geschichten der drei Damen K., published in English as The Three Women K. Similar to her films, the author's short stories, which are narrated by three women known as Mrs. K, focus on feminist issues and the roles that both genders are forced to play in society. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that her "tales are ironic and amusing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

McCormick, Richard, The Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), 1991.

PERIODICALS

Camera Obscura, September, 2001, Richard W. McCormick, "Rape and War, Gender and Nation, Victims and Victimizers: Helke Sander's BeFreier und Befreite, "p.99.

Cineaste, winter-spring, 1995, Stuart Liebman, "There Should Be No Scissors in Your Mind: An Interview with Helke Sander," p. 40.

Discourse, fall, 1983, Kaja Silverman, "Helke Sander and the Will to Change."

New York Times, April 29, 1974, Vincent Canby, review of The All-Round Reduced Personality; September 24, 1988, Vincent Canby, review of Felix.

Publishers Weekly, May 3, 1991, Penny Kaganoff, review of The Three Women K., p. 69.