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Dr. Ervin Malakaj, associate professor of German studies, published his research on German feminist filmmaker Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Die Berührte (No Mercy, No Future, 1981). The research appeared in a chapter for the volume New German Cinema and Its Global Contexts, edited by Marco Abel and Jaimey Fisher, and published by Wayne State University Press.
The chapter studies the film’s interest to foreground how state apparatuses debilitate women, whose agential prowess in itself comes to constitute a prominent site of their undoing. The film was not received favourably by feminist film critics precisely for its assessment of agential prowess as futile under the guise of an all-powerful debilitating state infrastructure. To examine the tension between the film’s politics and that of the international feminist film aesthetic movement of the second wave, Malakaj compares it to the work of Chantal Akerman.
Moreover, drawing on queer of colour critique, the chapter demonstrates that Sanders-Brahms’s political shortcomings are located in the film’s treatment of racialized characters as mere props to articulate the title character’s personal struggles.
