Muratova, Chytilová Meeting Miss Butterfly and Franziska Linkerhand: Female Directors and Female Protagonists Subverting Socialist Housing Schemes
Muratova, Chytilová Meeting Miss Butterfly and Franziska Linkerhand: Female Directors and Female Protagonists Subverting Socialist Housing Schemes

Summary/Abstract: My essay investigates the representation of female protagonists in selected feature films that were produced in the Central European socialist realm of the 1960s and the long 1970s. While mainly concentrating on Czechoslovakian filmmaker Věra Chytilová and Kira Muratova from Soviet Ukraine, the study will also draw comparisons to the subversive heroines in two East German films. The unifying aspect consists of commenting on the literal construction of a socialist environment through architecture and urban planning. By means of contrasting the individual and the realisation of collective structures, contradictions are disclosed that foreshadow the demise of the socialist project. All film directors introduced here employ women with a critical agency towards systemic regulations that are based on ideological premises. As an art historian, I focus on aesthetic collisions and iconographic prototypes of rebellious femineity, trying to identify a specific visual language that was opposed to the heroic guidelines of Socialist Realism and showed the slow erosion of related formulae, both in art and reality.

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