Future Feminism : Political Filmmaking and the Resonance of the West German Feminist Film Movement

This chapter analyses Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return (1979) and Turanskyj’s The Drifter (2010), bringing into focus the imprint of West German feminist filmmaking on contemporary cinema, despite the significant undermining and obscuring of its legacy via processes of privatization and media conglomeration. Like the films discussed in the previous chapter, the two films under consideration here engage themes of refusal and disaffection with the status quo at the levels of both form and content. Focusing on women protagonists in Berlin who exhibit gender, sexual, and class mobility and refuse to accede to regimes of normativity, these films demonstrate how responsibilization, flexibilization, and professionalization emerge as “solutions” to problems of agency and sovereignty in neoliberal capitalism.