Environmental (S)explorations

The private is political – this maxim has characterized the feminist efforts since the 1970s, the so-called Second Women’s Movement, and decisively shaped the associated feminist film practice of those years in West Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well. As early as the 1960s, with the founding of the first film schools in the FRG (above all, the Institute for Film Design in Ulm and the DFFB in Berlin), the first post-war generation of women began to study film. The accessibility of 16mm film technology and later the video camera also made it easier for young women to experiment with film. Feminist film theory also developed in academia, first in the U.S. and the U.K., but soon in the rest of Europe. As early as the 1970s, a series of festival-like gatherings were organized, called “film seminars” in keeping with the rhetoric of the time, at least in German-speaking countries, before the first women’s film festivals were founded in the mid-1980s: Feminale in Cologne (founded in 1984) and Femme totale in Dortmund (founded in 1987). Experimental films were the predominant, most present form. This was partly due to the difficulty of gaining access to large budgets, since the producers and editors were mainly (patriarchal) men who saw in cinematography a form reserved for themselves.