Die Frau mit der Kamera

Five people in one city, different ways of loving and living, different views on how to experience or suppress the past.

In an experimentally compiled film review, Danielle Jaeggi, Paule Baillargeon and Claudia von Alemann reflect on their work as filmmakers and life as mothers. Just as the title is based on Michel Leiris' book of poems Bright Nights and Many a Dark Day, the film has its own poetry, which is also evident in shots of everyday activities, such as hands washing dishes. “Just the hair or the relationship of the hands to each other or gestures, and then words come in between and film clips that we talk about, and we were amazed to find that the women we portray in the films always have a lot of trouble with theirs Identity, their search for something, for lost people or lost things. “They are usually looking for something that has been lost, forgotten or gone,” said Claudia von Alemann in the 1992 interview conducted by Renate Fischetti, A Pioneer of Female Film Language. An essay about desire, doubt, contradictions. (fib)

What does Che Guevara"s mythic presence represent to people at the turn of the century, and how do people define their concept of utopia?

Story concerns two friends, Freya and Irmtraut and their relationships with the same man, Traugott, who finds it impossible to choose between the two women.

The young historian Elisabeth is traveling to Lyon on her own in order to explore the city tracing the life of Flora Tristan. Tristan, whose diary Elisabeth is carrying, was a 19th century socialist and feminist who influenced many contemporary activists and intellectuals yet fell into oblivion herself. Elisabeth tries to put together the clues she can find in Lyon wanting to reconstruct Tristan's life in the most sensual way.

Fragments of fairy tales alternate with observations of children. Documentary and staged sequences are combined. There is no break and no contrast between reality, the children's behavior and the imagination; they merge into one another.

Claudia von Alemann filmed the co-founders of the Black Panther Party, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, in exile in Algiers, on her own. Their filmed statements were intended for a solidarity campaign in West Germany for the release of Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale, their Black Panther friends.

Turn of the year 1967/68: at the fourth EXPRMNTL festival in the Belgian seaside resort of Knokke, the film documents spontaneous performances, happenings and protest actions, capturing – only a few months before May ’68 – the harbingers of cultural upheaval.

Claudia Alemann's film documents the general strike and student mass protests in Paris in 1968. As a participant in various film collectives, she also examines the role of the medium of film in times of political and social upheaval and the impact of changing cultural-political paradigms on artistic activity. Alemann allows workers, students, teachers and filmmakers to have their say.