Intersectional Feminist Filmmaking and the Pedagogy of the Ulm School, 1962-68
Hester Baer, Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Maryland
Angelica Fenner, Associate Professor of German and Cinema Studies, University of Toronto
Founded in 1962 as West Germany’s first film school, the Ulm School developed a distinctive pedagogical model that proved particularly influential for the West German feminist film project, one of the most sustained and significant instances of feminist countercinema to emerge worldwide. Drawing on archival research and filmmaker interviews, this paper focuses on three early shorts by women directors who trained at Ulm (Stöckl, Alemann, and Meerapfel). We demonstrate how the Ulm pedagogy underpinned their experimentation with novel visual forms for investigating and representing relational structures of power. Ultimately, our project offers a new take on early cinefeminism’s intersectional openings.
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This seminar provides a forum for scholarship-in-progress in the area of German studies. The seminar is particularly interested in papers that cross disciplinary boundaries and that reconceptualize the materials and conventions of German Studies as a field, including beyond the frames of the German language and nation state. The seminar is generously sponsored by Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, and the Department of History at Northwestern University.