The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film ed. by Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner (review)

Explorations of documentary and, in particular, experimental film have not been afforded ample space within German cinema studies. At first glance, this may seem a logical development: with their relatively marginal status and narrow distribution, such films cannot be deemed to play significant roles in the construction and maintenance of imagined communities. And yet, while many of the films discussed in this collection may be familiar to only small audiences, what makes their investigation so compelling is how they shed new light on the ways in which genres often deemed universal—in this case autobiography—are in fact culturally and historically variable. As the editors point out, the notion of autobiography as a “culturally mutable mode or genre” has long been recognized (2); nevertheless, nonfiction film studies have only recently begun to take account of the cultural and temporal specificities of autobiographical cinema. Building on Robin Curtis’s earlier work on German film and video, and sharing theoretical concerns that have shaped Rachel Gabara’s studies of Francophone autobiographical cinema and Alisa Lebow’s investigations of Jewish autobiographical film, the essays assembled in The Autobiographical Turn offer a comparative approach that challenges existing generic frameworks that have largely emerged from the Anglo-American context in seminal works by Jim Lane and Michael Renov. In case studies ranging from lesser-known artists to canonical directors such as Fassbinder and Wenders, the contributors chart some of the distinctive ways in which notions of selfhood and the possibilities for cinematic self-representation have been shaped in the Germanophone context.

The interview with filmmaker, artist, and cultural theorist Hito Steyerl that opens the collection signals one of the volume’s major conceptual frameworks. Steyerl traces her own discomfort with the field of autobiography to the institutional and market pressures on visible minorities in Germany to resort to confessional modes in their work. The obligation to refer to one’s own heritage and origins as perceived markers of “authenticity,” argues Steyerl, has led to a refusal among many artists to engage with autobiographical modes. Curtis and Fenner note how this refusal contrasts starkly with “the large output of films taking up identity politics from a first-person perspective in the North American context” (18) and point to how this particular difference reflects Germany’s arduous struggle to finally recognize itself as a country of immigration (8–9). Several chapters take up the tensions and challenges inherent in the self-inscription of marginalized subject positions, exploring how filmmakers such as Fatih Akin, kate hers, Ming Wong, and Wayne Yung navigate the emancipa-tory potential of representing the specificity of their lived experiences along with the potential risks of reifying stereotypes and models of essentialized identities.

Another major preoccupation of the volume involves the use of family narratives as a path to investigating complex relationships between personal and collective memories. While family narratives constitute a staple of autobiography in a variety of cultural contexts, a particularly fraught instance in the German case is the investigation of family histories directly implicated in Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust. Ebbrecht-Hartmann’s chapter on Malte Ludin’s 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2004) and Jens Schanze’s Winterkinder (2005) investigates the intergenerational memory work of descendants of Nazi perpetrators, as well as the stylistic choices that are involved in documenting the distressing negotiations of feelings of family loyalty in the face of unmistakable historical evidence of crimes committed. While focused on a different type of intergenerational conflict not framed by memories of the Nazi past, Fenner and Maierhofer’s chapter on Thomas Haemmerli’s Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche (2007) poses intriguing questions about the role of technology in confrontational forms of domestic ethnography. Noting the “power of the camera to not merely capture but actually induce the display of subjectivity among social actors,” they posit that directors may be...