Helke Sander's dffb Cinema, 1968 and West Germany's Feminist Movement

Helke Sander was a key figure of the early dffb (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin), where she studied between 1966 and 1969. Returning to her political organizing and her films of the era revises three crucial narratives:
1. it expands narratives about 1968 to include the establishment of feminism as part of it (The Tomatenwurf), which is often read as a 1970s phenomenon;
2. it expands narratives of cinemas of the late sixties to include feminist filmmaking; and
3. it shows how the seeds for her much better known filmmaking of the seventies were already visible thematically and formally in her little known earlier work.

Christina Gerhardt is Visiting Scholar at the Institute of European Studies 2018-19, and Associate Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is author of “Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory” (2018) and co-editor of “1968 and Global Cinema” (2018).