Authors

Discussion

This paper argues for and explores the ways in which women in fiction films produced under state socialism resist different forms of authority, be it an institution, a boss, or gender expectations. Rather than presenting a totalizing account, I focus on particular moments (fragments) in three films – All My Girls/Alle meine Mädchen (dir. Iris Gusner, GDR, 1979,) A Bagful of Fleas/Pytel blech (dir. Věra Chytilová, Czechoslovakia, 1962) and Ramdenime interwiu pirad sakitchebse/Some Interviews on Personal Matters (dir. Nana Gogoberidze, Soviet Georgia, 1978) – that serve as an opening for a bigger project and possibly a new critical intervention. This paper employs rigorous, texturally attentive close reading advocated by Eugenie Brinkema’s notion of ‘radical formalism’ to examine how the films’ protagonists manifest their resistance and how it is imbricated in the films’ formal construction. Specifically, I am interested in reading the interview, which is established as the prime mode of communicating one’s thoughts and affinities, against other filmic forms such as the women’s bodies at work and at rest. The paper suggests that political potentialities lie not in the interview, or not only in the interview, which in these films often becomes the space for the predictable, the official, the conformist, but instead in the interaction between the camera, light, and bodies, as well as in the interaction between women.