The All-Around Reduced Personality: Redupers (1978)

Director: Helke Sander
Stars: Joachim Baumann, Frank Burckner, Eva Gagel

Edda Chiemnyjewski, a freelance press photographer and single mother living in 1970s West Berlin, is confronted with the fact that "a cook has no time for affairs of state". She also fails to find a market for the project she has been working on with her women′s photography group that seeks to document the city. While from today′s perspective the city, which becomes one of the film′s protagonists, looks like post-war Berlin, little has actually changed as regards the precarious existence of free-lancers. With a heavy dose of self-irony Helke Sander, who also plays the leading role, tells of a divided life in a divided city.

For all its attention to the mundane aspects of Berlin’s politics and society, this 1978 film by writer-director Helke Sander can also be read as a sly take on the New German Cinema. Sander stars as a freelance photographer whose collaborative project chronicling life around the Berlin Wall runs afoul of its state sponsors, who find it too political; its private investors, who question its artistic merit; and a women’s political organization backing the project, whose leaders are unhappy that it doesn’t center on women. Despite the episodic, quasi-documentary style, this comes across as an engaged vision of the artist’s struggle for integrity amid a compromised cultural scene.

More in My Blog