Writing in 1971, Vivian Gornick described the US women’s movement as “a declaration of independence against the false description of the self.” Although articulated in a different place and time, the phrase has a distinct resonance with the documentary films Helke Misselwitz made in East Germany in the ’80s—an essential body of work now enjoying a renewed international circulation, with recent retrospectives at New York’s Anthology Film Archives and Spain’s Play-Doc festival, and as part of the four-woman program “Films d’Allemagne(s), 1978–2020” at the Goethe-Institut in Paris. As the German Democratic Republic ambled into its twilight years, Misselwitz filmed everyday people at work and at home, gave women and girls the chance to tell their own stories, and captured the textures of a country that would soon cease to exist. In films such as After Winter Comes Spring (Winter adé, 1988) and Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman (Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann, 1989), she gently asks questions and listens attentively to what people say in response; she gazes upon her subjects with care and generosity. The result is an assembly of counter-images that stand in a critical relation—at times implicitly, at others explicitly—to a reigning falsity, shattering its scripts to pieces with the desublimating force of particularity.
Even if men are central to and (, 1991), they tend not to be Misselwitz’s primary concern. When Elena Gorfinkel contends that gives “attentive space to women as complex, multivalent, and ambivalent subjects,” she could be writing of the director’s oeuvre as a whole. That Gorfinkel deems such attributes worth underlining speaks to how seldom this “attentive space” appears onscreen, how often it is that women are flattened into cartoons of empowerment or dolled up as objects of desire, dispossessed of our right to contradictory and complicated selfhood, still today. For Gornick, feminist consciousness involves articulating a resounding “no” to this condition, one she describes in the following way: that “the defining characteristics that are attributed to her, the destiny that is declared her natural one are not so much the truth of her real being and existence as they are a reflection of culture’s wilful that she be as she is described.” A corrosive demand for inauthenticity is imposed from without, forcing one to squeeze to fit a predetermined shape, no matter how much it chafes. The consciousness-raising groups of Second Wave feminism were one of the ways women could engage in “the courageous pursuit of honest self-discovery” that Gornick saw as a necessary remedy; Misselwitz’s cinema shows how documentary filmmaking can also serve such a purpose, negating stereotypes (whether positive or negative) and redescribing reality from other, previously occluded points of view.
