Review by Choice Review
Linville (Univ. of Colorado) bases her analysis of West German women's films on the contention that postwar psychosocial theories about the Germans' inability to come to terms with their Nazi past and to mourn metamorphosed fascism into a female notion and sought to reinstate the traditional patriarchal family and gender hierarchy as the antidote to fascism. The author demonstrates how Peppermint Peace, Germany, Pale Mother, Hunger Years, Marianne and Julianne, and Malou were political as well as personal in their deconstruction of traditional models that reinforced authoritarianism and amnesia. By subverting hierarchical notions and exposing oppressive dynamics, these films offered alternative modes of remembrance. Although the introduction does not identify the periodic conflation of "melancholy" and "mourning" as the author's or other theorists', the main chapters make persuasive connections among the films' contemporary and sociohistorical contexts, psychoanalytic theory, theories on the body and on spectatorship, relevant scholarship, and cinematic technique. A perceptive viewer, Linville never forces her cogent arguments. The study includes endnotes, a bibliography divided by chapters, a brief filmography, and an epilogue, in which Linville polemicizes about the transnational neglect of and resistance to auto/biographical women's film and literature. A book for graduate students and scholars of German culture as well as film. I. Di Maio; Louisiana State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
