Feminist Filmmaking before Feminism: An Interview with Ula Stockl

Director Ula Stockl occupies a unique place in film history. Her debut feature, Neun Leben hat die Katze (1968; The Cat Has Nine Lives, 1977), is considered the first West German feminist film. As the first woman to enroll in the film program at the Ulm School of Design, in 1962, and also its first graduate, she lacked female role models and peers, turn-ing instead to the women protagonists of classical Greek drama as a means to conceive of gendered resistance to patriarchy. While Stockl's interest in form contrasts with the social realism prevalent in the women's filmmaking movement of the 1970s, there is an undeniable politics to her aesthetics. In this edited conversation, which took place at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020, Stockl reminisces about her early training in 35 mm film, the forms of creativity that emerged among peers of her generation in response to the limited resources available to them, and her own teaching methods as a professor of film production at the University of Central Florida.