HELKE SANDER
The All-Around Reduced Personality (1978)
A Screening as Part of WEX…
Tuesday, October 30, 7pm
I am always affected by art that has a high political IQ and a full set of human emotions. Not common–as art with good politics often only obeys a compulsory, healthy-mindedness for people in numbers.
The All-Around Reduced Personality stars Edda (played by Sander). Edda is formidable. Edda’s got a kid, a low-pay gig, “autonomy-issues,” inflation, inequities, and an art collective on commission to document Berlin. Edda does her rounds and represents herself and the city in installments. And we start to wonder alongside her, why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only?
We’re grateful to Isla Leaver-Yap for introducing us to the film. The film is courtesy of the Goethe-Institut Boston.
Born in 1937, Helke Sander founded the Coalition for the Liberation of Women in 1968 and co-founded the women’s group Bread and Roses in 1972. The speech she delivered at a 1968 conference of Socialist German Students, which argued that the students’ movement reflected the sexism of its time, is widely credited as the spark that began the New German Women’s Movement. In 1974, Sander founded Frauen und Film, the first European feminist film journal. This, her first feature-length film, received the Prix de l’Âge d’Or at the Brussels Film Festival in 1978. Helke Sander is still active making films, writing, and teaching.
Supposedly, time is money:
Money will buy you time
assuming you have money
to spend, as well as time
to wait while your money
grows. However, time
spent waiting can be like money
misspent–it’s often time
wasted, even if money
is made, a kind of time
not worth spending, so money
isn’t necessairly time.
Maybe time is money
if you make with your time
something else that makes money,
though most of the time
it’s not your money
you’ve made with your time.
And money isn’t even money
necessarily, in a time
like this, when money
loses value and time
is misspent losing money.
And time isn’t even time,
necessarily, if it’s lost money
on which your waisting time,
nor is money really money
if it’s wasted on wasted time.
Still, sometimes, time is money
but only if you money and time.
Money Time, Craig Morgan Teicher