Introduction: Revisiting Feminism and German Cinema

Setting the stage for this special issue of Camera Obscura, the introduction makes the case for German cinema as a renewed site for the theorization of women’s film authorship and feminist film production today. German cinema presents an especially generative case study for considering women’s filmmaking in neoliberal times because of its centrality to the development of feminist film theory at an earlier historical moment in the 1970s. Reframing the history of the West German feminist film movement, the introduction considers the unfolding of new practices of women’s cinema at present, visible in the rise of the Berlin School, the development of women-oriented production collectives, and the resurgence of feminist organizing on behalf of gender parity in the contemporary German film industry.