No Man, No Cry? The Film Girls in Uniform and Its Discourses of Political Regime

Leontine Sagan's film Girls in Uniform (Germany, 1931) offers a critique of Prussianism and, by extension, of patriarchy and fascism. By dint of a shift in psychoanalytic paradigms, this essay displaces the 1947 interpretation of Siegfried Kracauer, who thought the film opts for authoritarianism. Instead, the author argues that the master signifier, the closure offered by a new regime, is lacking: Girls in Uniform presents a cinematic space that tends toward democracy. The investigation of the status and function of the representation of men, i.e., patriarchal figures, in the film and its critical discourses is pivotal to this conclusion.