Maren Ade's recently acclaimed Toni Erdmann (2016) has brought renewed attention to women's film authorship in Germany and a growing cadre of women directors making films that are engaging, intelligent, and deeply thought-provoking without being didactic. Their work accords with counter cinematic practices sometimes loosely identified under the 'Berlin School' moniker, which have emerged in response to the changing social and economic landscape following unification. Rejecting the mode of production and ideology underlying German blockbusters such as Downfall or The Lives of Others, some filmmakers have instead embraced realist aesthetics to explore everyday life worlds and subjectivities against the backdrop of eroded social democratic structures and post-Fordist labour policies.

Via readings in feminist film theory, new materialism, animal studies, gender and queer theory, and cultural studies, we will place these compelling contemporary productions into conversation with those of pioneers the feminist film movement of the 1970s, such as Helke Sander and Ulrike Ottinger. Echoes of that movement are, for example, evidenced in the way Maren Ade has leveraged her success to draw public attention to imbalances within the German film industry and called for gender parity in the distribution of subsidies. With an eye towards both continuities and divergencies in aesthetics, mode of production, and culture, we will investigate to what extent recent German and Austrian directors, e.g., Barbara Albert, Angela Schanelec, Valeska Grisebach, Tanja Turanskyj, and others share among themselves and/or with an earlier generation a common focus on disparate experiences of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and precarity. How does their work accord with such labels as 'oppositional,' 'subversive,' or 'resistant,' and in what ways does it enact intersectional alliances with feminist, queer, anti-heteronormative, and anti-racist projects?