q-sputnik

I am here referring to the Volker Schloendorff and Margarehthe von Trotta film and not the 1974 novelle by Heinrich Böll. Katharina, a woman that leads a quiet life, meets an anarchist -evidently linked to the Red Army Faction- and takes him to her house where they make love. After he escapes, her life is completely destroyed by the journalists and the police investigations.

Part of the New German Cinema of the 1960s, the film is the work of German filmmakers from the left who “challenged the Establishment history of the terrorist movement” (Hoerschelmann, 2001 : 86). I will not go into the theme of the imagined terrorism and the hysterical reaction of the state. I am more interested in the dualism virgin-whore as that is represented in the film and the ideas of gender in general.

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This article discusses my reading of ‘Victim’ (1961) directed by Dierden and Relph and writen by Janet Green but in relation to Richard Dyer’s essay ‘Victim: hegemonic project’ in Dyer, R. (1993) The Matter of Images, Routledge. Though the film is part of a tradition in British cinema between 1956-1963 that deals with social problems, it is the very first movie where male homosexuality and the law that criminalized it are explicitly addressed.

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