She polarizes, is quick-witted and exposes machos in front of the camera. For decades, Alice Schwarzer has been tirelessly digging her finger into the wound in the fight against patriarchy – and always manages to be the focus of discussion. In her portrait “Alice Schwarzer” the Austrian filmmaker Sabine Derflinger devotes herself to the Emma-Founder and icon of the women’s movement, who has shaped the discourse on gender justice since the 1970s, who is loved and hated.
An archive excerpt from the legendary television duel between Alice Schwarzer and Esther Vilar from 1975 forms the start of the film and at the same time reveals a decisive characteristic of Schwarzer: the desire for provocation allows the journalist, who was born in Wuppertal in 1942, to achieve top form, whereby she always shares her opinion pursued with the utmost consistency to the end and is incredibly entertaining at the same time.
At the time of the meeting, Vilar had just written her book “The Trained Man”, a polemical bestseller against the emancipation movement of the time – women were to be exposed as exploiters of men. The linguistically superior Schwarzer immediately thundered what “outrageous nonsense” it was, that Vilar’s writings were “ripe for the striker“. Sexist, fascist – she wasn’t stingy with insults for her colleague. The exchange of blows made Schwarzer the best-known feminist in the country overnight.
How many times has she had to read that she “preaches hatred of men”?
“Your flow of speech could only have been stopped by tearing out your tongue,” they write Ruhr news after that, the picturenewspaper dubbed her a “witch with the stinging eyes.” The look into the archive that Derflinger enables in her documentary is as shocking as it is long overdue, because it reveals how misogynist and defamatory the male-dominated media landscape was at the time – and to some extent still is today. Schwarzer was repeatedly described as a “man-murdering Amazon” who “preached hatred of men”, later as “Federal German chief prosecutor for the cause of women”.
Precisely because of her courage to contradict, Schwarzer’s greatest merit is that she brought feminism into German living rooms. You can see her at work and in her private life, companions such as Jasmin Tabatabai, Élisabeth Badinter, Jenny Erpenbeck and Schwarzer’s wife Bettina Flitner have their say. Battles and successes can be reviewed, alliances are formed and broken again. That’s how it was star In 1971 she was still helpful with the famous “We have had an abortion!” mass confession by prominent women against paragraph §218, but seven years later she sued the newspaper for sexist cover pictures.
Director Sabine Derflinger cares deeply about the matter, her last documentary film was about Austria’s first women’s minister, Johanna Dohnal. Subtle and benevolent towards her protagonist, she now explores what shaped Schwarzer and how her most controversial views developed, such as her anti-Islamism with an uncompromising rejection of the headscarf, or her negative attitude towards prostitution. Derflinger investigates without evaluating, leaves ambivalences and leaves them to the audience to form their own opinions. However, Schwarzer’s dubious role in her Kachelmann reporting for the picture-Zeitung is dealt with somewhat briefly and unclearly, and their controversial position in relation to transsexuality has no place in the film at all.
Instead, we learn about her childhood with her grandparents in Wuppertal, her student days in Paris with the French women’s movement MLF and Simone de Beauvoir. Already as a volunteer at the Düsseldorf news she was noticed by “extreme striving,” says Schwarzer. The consistency with which she unswervingly pursues her goals can be felt, for example, in the memory of research for which she spent four months in a factory at the punching machine. A persistence that made Schwarzer very lonely at times, as she admits.
As early as the early 1980s, Schwarzer was trying to set up a feminist archive because she had recognized the important role that making women’s history visible plays in the fight for equal rights. With the portrait of one of the most important representatives of the second emancipation movement, this film also contributes to this: It shows and preserves a strong and important piece of women’s history.
Alice Schwarzer, D/Austria 2022 – director and script: Sabine Derflinger. Camera Isabelle Casez, Christine A. Maier. Distribution: Mizzi Stock/FilmAgentinnen, 100 minutes. Theatrical release: September 15, 2022.