19.09.2025 | TUMULTUOUS BODIES by Annette Brauerhoch

(OUT) OF THE ARCHIVES | Feminist Counter-Histories

DIE URSZENE

DE 1981, D: Noll Brinkmann, 7’, 16mm

VIVA AVIS

DE 1985, D: Lilo Mangelsdorff, 6’, 16mm

BETWEEN

DE 1989, D: Claudia Schillinger, 9’, 16mm

DUSCHEN, SAN FRANCISCO

DE 1994, D: Anja Czioska, 3’, 16mm

DACH, SAN FRANCISCO

DE 1994, D: Anja Czioska, 3’, 16mm

LES MISERABLES

AT 1987, D: Mara Mattuschka, 2’, 16mm

CEROLAX II

AU 1985, D: Mara Mattuschka, 3’, 16mm

WENN DER HAARWUCHS LÄSTIG WIRD

DE 1987, D: Anja Telscher, 7’, 16mm

COMPARTMENT

DE 1990, D: Eva Heldmann, 5’, 16mm

THE COLOR OF LOVE

US 1994, D: Peggy Ahwesh, 10’, 16mm

ONE PUSSY SHOW

DE 1996, D: Anja Czioska, 6’, 16mm

The Archive for German Experimental Film by Women at the University of Paderborn holds 50 analogue 16mm film copies by female filmmakers from Germany and Austria, mainly from the 1980s: a time without home computers or mobile phones. It was an intense and lively phase of production which engaged with cinematic conventions and avant-garde classics in the (usually male-dominated) film classes at film and art colleges in Hamburg and Braunschweig, as well as the Städel in Frankfurt am Main. The collection is a project to which the participating female filmmakers have contributed in solidarity. It reflects my desire not only to add something to a growing institute for media studies in the 2000s, but also to deliberately counter so-called “media” and “digitality” with film in its concrete materiality, filmic forms beyond narration and documentary, and feminist (corporeal) energy. It was about “other” films in an environment where they were initially alien, but they found an audience in the students that experienced film in a new and different way. After my retirement from the university in 2021, the collection will in the future find a new home at Kinothek Asta Nielsen under a new name (Experimental Film Collection Brauerhoch) – and hopefully see the light of projection again and again.

Cinema, like no other medium, is about the body and the gaze. Feminist film theory recognised early on that the sexes are assigned different roles in this context, roles that have to do with power and space. The programme of Tumultuous Bodies focuses on female gazes and bodies, offering a targeted examination of visual pleasure in cinema. DIE URSZENE ironically takes up Freud’s theory of the origin of voyeurism, while consistently rejecting gazes at the female body or the sexual act, hence the voyeurism commonly associated with cinema. Instead, we follow the voyeuristic curiosity of the female filmmaker, the haptic pleasure of the camera movements and our fantasies. In Anja Czioska’s and Claudia Schillinger’s films, voyeurism is directed at their own bodies. Czioska joyfully plays with a standard voyeuristic situation in film – a woman taking a shower – and takes it to funny extremes. In DACH, SAN FRANCISCO, she enjoys lustful, wild, expansive movements that form a rebellious alliance with the body of the film. In BETWEEN Claudia Schillinger meets the normative and standardising gaze of mainstream (Hollywood) cinema with self-confident exhibitionism and a provocative gaze into the audience. Lilo Mangelsdorff and Anja Telscher demonstrate and counter the repression associated with beauty ideals disseminated by media, while Mara Mattuschka takes these media appeals to the extreme and subverts them in defiant animations. The films in the programme show passions, break taboos and reshape the images of women and their bodies in certain genres, as in THE COLOR OF LOVE and COMPARTMENT.

In the first film of the programme (DIE URSZENE), the turmoil of the bodies takes place primarily in the imagination of the spectators, in the last film (ONE PUSSY SHOW), however, it finds an extremely lively and lustful staging. All films show visual pleasure in their own unique way, distinct from mainstream voyeurism.