Papers by Mary Hennessy
German Studies Review , 2025
This article examines Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s popular film Großstadtmelodie (Metropolitan melody).... more This article examines Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s popular film Großstadtmelodie (Metropolitan melody). Released in 1943 but set in 1937–1938, the film repur- poses Weimar’s New Woman and prewar newsreel footage of Berlin to transport audiences, especially women on the home front, to interwar Berlin, not only to distract from the war but also to envision a future Berlin that would be achieved only after the war was won. I suggest that remediation in the film works ultimately to counter the aesthetic, social, and historical fragmentation of war, captured by the feminine “melody” of the film’s title and central metaphor.
New German Critique , 2024
This article examines the role of the female film editor in the production of German silent cinem... more This article examines the role of the female film editor in the production of German silent cinema, turning to the depiction of editing in a little-known short comedy from 1926, ( , dir. O. F. Mauer), also known as ( ). This film, about a distracted editor who mixes revue film and newsreel footage to produce an avant-garde montage film, hands authority over the film to the editor while suggesting that the film she has produced is simply a mistake. Situating the film within discourse on silent-film production practices and Weimar-era montage techniques, the article uses the film as a magnifying glass through which to consider female labor and its relationship to mediation and aesthetic form. It shows how the film offers a remarkable—and relatively early—feminist theory of montage as disruption that hinges on unruly women workers.
Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film, 2023
This chapter examines the terminological conflation of women and typewriters in the Weimar Republ... more This chapter examines the terminological conflation of women and typewriters in the Weimar Republic from the perspective of the reification of capitalist social relations. Siegfried Kracauer’s “Das Schreibmaschinchen” (“The Little Typewriter;” 1927) imagines an anthropomorphized, sexualized typewriter and “her” tumultuous relationship with a male narrator. While critical of reification, Kracauer’s piece remains wedded to a normative understanding of the writing subject as male and frames the harassment and exploitation of women as a pleasurable experiment in commodity fetishism. Christa Anita Brück’s 1930 novel Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (Destinies behind Typewriters) follows the protagonist Fräulein Brückner as she goes from one typing job to another—five in the course of the novel—each worse than the last. Schicksale offers a pointed critique of a system that saw women typists as little more than objects to be used and discarded, not unlike the typewriters at which they worked. By forcefully inserting gender into contemporary critiques of capitalism, Brück’s novel offers a perspective that is notably absent from Kracauer’s “Das Schreibmaschinchen” and remains undertheorized in Frankfurt School Critical Theory and in German media theory, describing women’s work at the typewriter as a matter of life and death itself.
Camera Obscura, 2018
This article retraces a genealogy from the contemporary Berlin School back to German feminist fil... more This article retraces a genealogy from the contemporary Berlin School back to German feminist film culture of the 1970s. It focuses on two films with female protagonists: Helke Sander’s watershed feminist film of the New German Cinema, Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit—Redupers (The All-Around Reduced Personality—Redupers, West Germany, 1978), and Berlin School director Angela Schanelec’s Marseille (Germany, 2004). Examining each film’s attitude toward photography through the lens of Siegfried Kracauer’s postwar theory of film realism, this article relates the politics of cinematic realism to the historically disparate stakes of subjectivity in the two films’ production contexts. In Redupers, the film’s protagonist employs photography as a means to build solidarity and assert women’s subjectivity in the face of nearly insurmountable material and social obstacles. In Marseille, by contrast, photography becomes a means of severing attachments and dispersing subjectivity. Insisting on a feminist understanding of the term counter-cinema, this article argues that Marseille—though less explicitly political than Redupers—nonetheless shares with Redupers an investment in realism that has feminist critical potential. In doing so, this article challenges the gender-blind discourses that characterize much existing scholarship on the Berlin School.
The German Quarterly, 2016
This paper considers Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 melodrama Martha in a transnational, compara... more This paper considers Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 melodrama Martha in a transnational, comparative framework, focusing on the film's relationship to the Hollywood “woman's film” of the 1940s and 1950s. Such an approach illustrates the ways in which Martha both draws on and pushes against the narrative strategies, tropes, and images of Hollywood and of women's culture. In doing so, I argue, Fassbinder takes to a narrative and aesthetic extreme what Lauren Berlant calls the “female complaint”—that cultural constellation in which “women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.” Viewed both transnationally and as a product of Fassbinder's Germany, a film like Martha pushes against Berlant's theory of the American woman's film and of the female complaint as modes by which women manage their intimate lives under conditions of patriarchy. In addition to engaging with Berlant's work, my analysis of Fassbinder's film and its performance of gender consequently draws not only on theories of melodrama and the American woman's film, but also on Bertolt Brecht's writing on Gestus. Fassbinder, I ultimately show, estranges the Hollywood woman's film in Martha. Harnessing the affective and emotional excess of the woman's film as Brechtian distanciation, exaggerating social gesture, and playfully appropriating Sirkian aesthetics, Martha offers a spectacular critique of the masochism inherent in gender roles under patriarchy.
Book Reviews by Mary Hennessy
German Studies Review, 2021
Feminist German Studies , 2020
example, she was criticized as too maternal by right-wing parties for allowing refugees to enter ... more example, she was criticized as too maternal by right-wing parties for allowing refugees to enter the country in 2015. An extensive and useful bibliography concludes the anthology. German Female Leadership will certainly contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the topic in the German context.
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Papers by Mary Hennessy
Book Reviews by Mary Hennessy