Helke Sander

Helke Sander (born January 31, 1937 in Berlin) is a German feminist film director and writer. She is known primarily for her documentary work and contributions to the women's movement in the seventies and eighties. Helke Sander's work is characterized by her emphasis of the experimental over the narrative arc. In her essay "Feminists and Film (1977)," Helke Sanders states the motivation for her work: "To put it in other terms: women's most authentic act today--in all areas including the arts--consists not in standardizing and harmonizing the means, but rather in destroying them. Where women are true, they break things." Sander's work is concerned with the breakage of conventional ideas and forms.

Sander attended a drama school in Hamburg. While married to Finnish writer Markku Lahtela, with whom she had a son, she worked as director at the worker's theatre and for Finnish television. She returned to Berlin in 1965.

From 1966 to 1969, she studied at the newly founded film school 'Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie'. Sanders' work in cinema is very closely linked to her political engagement as a feminist.

In 1968, she co-founded the Aktionsrat zu Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee on the Liberation of Women).

Helke Sander was a member of the SDS, or German Socialist Student Organization. In 1968, Sander made an entreaty to the SDS, hoping for support for the German women's political agenda. Her male colleagues ignored this plea and effectively, the second wave of German feminism was sparked by a thrown tomato.

In 1971, Helke Sander organized the women's group 'Brot und Rosen'. The platform centered on the idea that birth control was not safe for women.

In 1972, Helke Sander continued work on her birth control project. Her film Macht die Pille frei? (Does the Pill Liberate Women?) was a campaign against anti-abortion law. Sander worked on the film with Sara Schumann.

Together with Claudia von Aleman, she organized the feminist film conference 'Erste internationale Frauenfilmseminar' which took place in 1973 in Berlin. In 1974, she founded Frauen und Film (journal), the first feminist European film journal, which she edited until 1981.

Her film The All-Around Reduced Personality is among the most important German feminist films of the 1970s. In part this is because it blends techniques of both documentary and fictional film.

Sander's critical eye towards postwar German culture was expanded in her 1984 satire on sexual politics, Love is the Beginning of All Terror.

...
Wikipedia