#Vibeke Løkkeberg | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

filmtexts · 16 days ago

Text

Women Listening – The Long Road to the Director’s Chair by Vibeke Løkkeberg

Everybody's Listenin': director Vibeke Løkkeberg (seated center). Lower right: feminist magazine EMMA publisher Alice Schwarzer photo (c) bpk/Abisag Tüllmann

The opening day of the Berlinale Forum section in the soon to be vacated Arsenal cinema was an almost hauntological experience as past, present and future looped, ricocheted and mingled. Vibeke Løkkeberg’s documentary The Long Road to the Director’s Chair captures a seminal event in the histories of the women’s movement, independent cinema, and the Arsenal itself. In 1973, German filmmakers, authors and activists Helke Sander and Claudia von Alemann organized the first Frauenfilm-Seminar (women’s film seminar) at the Arsenal’s first premise off West Berlin’s high street Kurfürstendamm, in a middle class neighborhood (soon to become a queer nightlife hotspot).

With a minimal grant from the Protestant Church (brokered by a sympathetic clergyman who soon established one of Germany’s two church-affiliated film periodicals, the other published by a Catholic media education organization), Sander and von Alemann planned a combination of film festival and women’s movement congress – inviting 45 films made by and about women from seven countries (Western Europe and the US) and 250 female media professionals and women’s movement activists from all walks of life. (At the Q&A following the screening, von Alemann quipped that the media workers and rank and file activists were mutually wary; bringing them into one space aimed to build more trust and sisterhood.) The Arsenal team intensified its support in the months before the event and the elementary school across the street from the cinema provided space for an exhibition and discussions.

One of the attending filmmakers was Vibeke Løkkeberg from Norway. In addition to screening her film Abort (Abortion), Løkkeberg also brought a small crew to document the event. Sadly, Norwegian TV was not interested in commissioning the final film and for almost 50 years, the footage was thought to be lost.

Then, in 2019, the film prints, without sound, were found. At the Arsenal’s Archival Assembly festival in 2023, the silent footage was screened with a live commentary by Sander and von Alemann. Also that year, the sound tapes popped up in the Norwegian National Library, enabling Løkkeberg to complete the film. A 15-minute work in a progress was shown - at the Arsenal – as part of the „feminist elsewheres“ festival which connected the dots between feminist cinema initiatives and issues (filmmaking, but also curating and knowledge production) in November 2023.

Løkkeberg completed the feature-length version, celebrating its world premiere at Forum. The Long Road to the Director’s Chair is an evocative title. It describes the trajectories of so many female filmmakers who cut their teeth (and in some cases chomped at the bit for years) as assistants in all departments, continuity, editors, writers, actresses, ADs, (in rare cases also as DPs, still a largely male profession, and producers) before they had the opportunity to realize their visions. In Løkkeberg’s case, the road was long and winding. As she movingly reminisced at the Q&A, her international career as a director, author and actress was marked by both acclaim and public demonization (apparently largely due to a film about incest and sexual abuse) as well as constant censorship of her documentaries by TV execs.

From left to right: Claudia von Alemann, Helke Sander, Vibeke Løkkeberg photo (c) bpk/Abisag Tüllmann

Through interviews and footage of discussions (formal and informal) the film documents this key event which facilitated important conversations and established networks which persist to present day. The audience participates in several discussions. One topic von Alemann (talkative with funny stand up like delivery), Sander (deadpan) and TV journalists reflect is the double bind women experienced in (not only) media professions: not showing the full range of skills to not threaten male colleagues, remaining non-assertive and yet women who did manage to climb the career ladder often assumed „male“ qualities (and thus becoming less „feminine“). Advancing female colleagues was certainly not on the agenda; one often had to elbow one’s way into the boys club.

Reproductive rights were also a pervasive topic. Ariel Dougherty, filmmaker and co-founder of Women Make Movies, which organized workshops, produced films and is active to this day as a distributor, talks about female reproductive health workshops. The Frauenfilm-Seminar took place almost one year after Roe vs. Wade, thus the attendees from the US offered optimism to their colleagues in European countries where access to abortion was more restricted.

The discussions become even more compelling because the film gives ample time to women listening and processing what they’re hearing – with a wide range of facial expressions and body language. Speaking and listening become equally important.

In addition to its value as a document, The Long Road To The Director’s Chair also creatively and honestly presents the available material and what’s missing. In the beginning, the inclusion of the cameraman remarking (surprisingly cavalierly) that he’s run out of stock establishes the use of sound on a black screen when there are no images. (The sound has been edited seamlessly.) The film takes its time to also capture the atmosphere of the event and women interacting (the few men on view – school employees, friends of attendees – are silently encouraging or stonefaced), footage that other editors might have discarded to focus on the „meat“ of the discussions. Women arriving at the Arsenal on foot or by car, with Løkkeberg interviewing one participant about her expectations for the event, and shots lingering on the women talking among themselves, smoking or looking pensive as they leave frame the film. This heightens the sense of the event’s sustainable after effects.

Løkkeberg eschews the standard lower thirds with names and function of speakers, instead presenting them at the end with short biographies. This allows viewers to focus on what the women are saying and doing in the filmic moment without preconceptions. Her unconventional subtitling also adds layers of meaning. The subtitles often appear word by word, in rhythm to the speech they’re translating. She also uses a slightly serifed font - subtitles are usually serif free - which makes the them pleasant to read.

From left to right: Forum section head Barbara Wurm, Helke Sander, Ariel Dougherty, Vibeke Løkkeberg, Claudia von Alemann

The film screening and Q&A with Løkkeberg, von Alemann, Sander along with members of „feminist elsewheres“ in the audience, opened up a space where time melted. The audience experienced younger and current selves of the Frauenfilm-Seminar organizers and the director in dialogue. Several generations of cinema activists whose work was sparked by the Frauenfilm-Seminar were present, and this made its connections and reverberations across five decades palpable. The urgency of some issues such as reproductive rights has come full circle, while in others some linear or incremental progress has been made. The event also followed the tone set by Tilda Swinton’s speech at the Berlinale opening ceremony: critical discourse can be respectful and even loving. Hope for these otherwise acrimonious times.

#berlinale #berlin film festival #berlinale 2025 #feminism #cinema #film

0 notes