4 - Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist Movement

Summary

The early cinema of the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), established on September 17, 1966, in West Berlin, is often read together with the then unfolding social movements.Films produced by dffb students between 1966 and 1970, when the movements splintered along various lines, document and engage with the late sixties’ uprisings and their main concerns. Given the dffb’s original location at the Theodor-Heuss Platz in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, its students were in close proximity to and witnessed key events of the sixties in West Germany, such as the June 2, 1967, demonstrations of the state visit by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, Farah Diba. During this protest, police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras fatally shot nonviolent student protestor Benno Ohnesorg. This fatal shooting is widely credited with kicking off West Germany’s “1968,” both galvanizing and radicalizing social movements throughout West Germany. Dffb students were present at and filmed these and other demonstrations. For example, dffb students Thomas Giefer and Hans-Rüdiger Minow filmed the day’s demonstrations and produced the film Berlin, 2. Juni 1967 (1967).

Many dffb students were involved with the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Students’ Union, SDS) and the teachins, reading groups, and demonstrations it co-organized. Some dffb students carried out actions in solidarity with the SDS. For example, partially in response to the ratification of the Emergency Laws on May 30, 1968, which had been protested nation-wide, but also in response to demands internal to the dffb, eighteen students occupied the dffb from May 30 to June 10, 1968, renaming it the Dziga Vertov School. The early dffb’s film-making documented the political actions and also sought to put forward a counter-message, thereby supporting the social movements politically and acting, de facto, as their mass media arm.

Helke Sander was a key figure of the early dffb, where she studied between 1966 and 1969.When scholars discuss her filmmaking of this era, they typically focus on Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators, 1968), which, crucially, engages the Springer Press. Sander is mainly considered for three things: first, her role in establishing the Second Wave Feminist Movement in West Germany, which will be discussed below; second, her work to support feminist filmmaking; and third, her later cinematic work.