Focusing the Gaze: The Critical Project of Frauen und Film

Focusing the Gaze: The Critical Project of Frauen und Film Sabine Hake Today, feminist film theory occupies a highly visible position within the academic, aesthetic, and countercultural discourses. By resisting marginalization and, at the same time, maintaining a commitment to the practice of feminist filmmaking, it has asserted its existence through a large number of diverse texts. These are notable for their theoretical complexity and profound understanding of the relations between knowledge and power, theory and practice, subjectivity and engagement. They also continue a tradition of self-reflection, at times excruciating, which has proven indispensable to the ongoing struggle of the feminist project itself. Feminist film theory has acquired sufficient self-assertiveness and institutional security to allow for a tentative assessment of one of the journals that participated in that process of theory formation. I am referring to Frauen und Film, except for Camera Obscura the only feminist film journal worldwide. Although the name Frauen und Film is not unknown to American academics in the field of film and German studies, few of its major texts have been translated nor has the journal's existence been commented upon at length.1 Frauen und Film was founded in 1974 in Berlin by filmmaker Heike Sander, who served as editor-in-chief (with interruptions) until No. 27/1981, Kamerafrauen? In the following two years, a collective was responsible for editorial decisions although individual contributors coordinated specific issues. Since the journal's move to Frankfurt in 1983, Frauen und Film has been published by an editorial group consisting of Karola Gramann (until 1986), Gertrud Koch, and Heide Schlüpmann. Between 1974 and the present, the journal has acquired a certain position of authority within West Germany's cultural scene, even if its mention often amounts to lip-service, readily performed to pass over the whole issue of feminism and women working in the media. Its change from four to two, more voluminous, issues per year and a small average edition of a thousand copies cannot 19 invalidate the fact that Frauen und Film today is indeed West Germany's only regular contribution to the international advancement of film theory and criticism. It also remains, aside from the esoteric Filmkritik, the semiprofessional Filmfaust, and other short-lived film journals, the only one that maintains a political position, and, at the same time, ventures into new grounds of discourse. Frauen und Film can best be compared with other international film journals that have reconciled their background in cultural politics and the emancipation movements of the 1970s with theoretical rigor, such as the British Screen and, to a lesser degree, the American Camera Obscura? This is particularly astonishing since Frauen und Film continues to exist within a cultural sphere that is characterized, on the one hand, by the absence of a tradition of sophisticated film audiences, as well as the marginality of film/media studies as an academic discipline and, on the other hand, by the persisting tradition of a film criticism informed by individual tastes. One may reasonably assume that it is the journal's conscious commitment to the feminist perspective that has prevented its demise. The central topic of this paper is the emergence of feminist film theory and the practice of feminist film criticism in Frauen und Film. Both issues will be discussed by looking at the editorials and a number of important theoretical articles; however, my emphasis will be on the earlier years.4 I will begin with a brief survey of the themes, subjects, concerns, and approaches that have characterized the journal between 1974 and the present. Following that, a short digression into Frauen und Film's cover design since 1979 will serve as a link between the documenting first part and the more theoretical second part of the paper; it appears to me that looking at the journal's visual self-portrayal could illuminate some of the issues at stake in its programmatic and theoretical statements. Finally, I will focus on a close reading of the editorials between 1974 and 1983 and on what I consider the unique contribution of Frauen und Film to the problem of feminist theory and practice. Frauen und Film started out as a journal with...