Joyless Streets

by Patrice Petro

Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular illustrated magazines, she shows how Weimar Germany had a commercially viable female audience, fascinated with looking at images that called traditional representations of gender into question.


Interdisciplinary in her approach, Petro interweaves archival research with recent theoretical debates to offer not merely another view of the Weimar cinema but also another way of looking at Weimar film culture. Women's modernity, she suggests, was not the same as men's modernism, and the image of the city street in film and photojournalism reveals how women responded differently from men to the political, economic, and psychic upheaval of their times.

Genres: Germany, Film

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1989

Reviews

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Petrol argues for the need to consider the ways in which the women on Weimar Germany consumed films, arguing that previous authors have focused solely on the male experience. She rejects the modernist- mass culture divide, arguing instead that the two were overlapping. In particular, it was melodramas which appealed to women, as they portrayed female frustration. At the core of Her argument is a general assertion that Weimar women experienced modernity in a fundamentally different way then men.

However this category of "women" is itself a broad one which future work must break down. I would have also liked to have seen an analysis of whether Weimar filmmakers specifically targeted women during production.

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting discussion of how most critics have looked at German films as seen by men, while this tries to look at how film spoke to women, and comparing with the popular women’s press, especially the fashion press. Compares mens and women’s views of androgeny. Discusses in detail some film melodramas aimed at women—-Drinentragodie, Hinertreppe, Zuflucht, and Freudlose Gasse.