Selbstbestimmt: The Woman in Contemporary German Women’s Filmmaking

Abstract

Women’s representation in film has become an increasingly relevant topic in gender and film discourse, challenging the postfeminist claim that gender equality has been achieved and feminist critique is no longer necessary. German cinema in particular has recently experienced renewed scrutiny for its evident gender inequality, with scholarship pointing to the underrepresentation of women both on and off the screen, a pattern that reflects enduring structural barriers within the industry. Despite graduating in equal numbers as men from film schools, women direct fewer than 25% of the feature films released in Germany, receive less than 20% of all available funding, and are significantly underrepresented as directors, writers, and producers. At the same time, female figures in German films are “visible but not diverse:” the average German cinematic woman is slim, white, heterosexual, in her teens, twenties, or thirties, and more likely to be shown in the context of relationships or partnerships than in work environments. Yet when women occupy key filmmaking positions, not only do they work with more women behind the screen, but they also construct more complex female characters, foregrounding female subjectivity in diverse contexts. This dissertation attaches itself to questions of women’s representation in German cinema by examining three contemporary films directed by women in order to to explore how they engage with womanhood through their female protagonists. The first, both chronologically and analytically, is Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), which centres on the relationship between business consultant Ines and her father, who unexpectedly visits her. An international critical and commercial success, Toni Erdmann has exerted wide influence on the German cinematic landscape, drawing significant attention on its portrayal of gendered subjectivity. The second is Annika Pinske’s Alle reden übers Wetter (2022), which follows doctoral candidate Clara’s return to her hometown to celebrate her mother’s birthday. Despite being the most recent of the three films analyzed, Alle reden übers Wetter is placed after Toni Erdmann due to its contextual and aesthetic parallels to Ade’s film, as Pinske—the only director among the three who hails from the former East, a rarity among German women filmmakers—worked closely with Ade and adopts a similarly realist aesthetic in her debut feature, which presents a range of multidimensional female characters. Finally, the dissertation examines Sherry Hormann’s Nur eine Frau (2019), which dramatizes the life of Hatun “Aynur” Sürücü, a German woman of Kurdish background who was murdered by her brother at a Berlin bus stop in 2005. The film is discussed last not only because it diverges from Ade’s and Pinske’s works through its highly stylized form, but also because it engages with a distinct subject matter—migration and Islam—through a real-life case that remains central to German debates on cultural difference and integration. A close reading of the formal and narrative strategies in these films reveals a multifaceted engagement with gendered subjectivity by contemporary German women directors, whose protagonists are constructed as complex characters navigating intersecting pressures and gendered demands. Central to these trajectories is the pursuit of self-determination, which emerges across all three works as an ongoing process marked by the continuous negotiation of often conflicting roles—as daughters, mothers, partners, and friends. While these films stop short of articulating a collective dimension of self-determination, instead adopting an individualized lens reflecting postfeminist discourse, they nonetheless articulate a shared feminist consciousness by exposing and challenging gendered scripts and essentialist notions of womanhood. By foregrounding self-determination as an analytical lens, this dissertation demonstrates how these films articulate feminist modes of resistance on screen while their production contexts reveal parallel struggles for autonomy off screen. Moreover, by bringing two largely unexamined films into scholarly conversation—Alle reden übers Wetter and Nur eine Frau—the project expands the representational and analytical space of German women’s filmmaking and illuminates the diverse ways women directors intervene in, reshape, and critically reimagine dominant cultural narratives about womanhood. Ultimately, the analysis shows that contemporary German women filmmakers and their protagonists enact a mode of agency and resistance that foregrounds their struggle to live and create selbstbestimmt.