Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture

This essay uses the trope of stardom to imagine and map women's film culture in West Germany in the sixties. From mainstream film culture and the women's press to the new "image of woman" of the Young German film-makers, we find a rich and often contradictory "women's cinema" before the second German women's movement and the feminist feature films of the late seventies. The star persona of Liselotte Pulver and Ula Stöckl's Neun Leben hat die Katze (The Cat Has Nine Lives) offer uniquely protofeminist meditations on images of women and stardom and suggest complex experiences of female spectatorship in the sixties. (TC)