Anna Bitter is a film scholar and artist currently working in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. She is a PhD candidate at the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Aesthetics of Democracy” at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. Next to her academic work, she has worked for several art institutions including Filmgalerie 451 and the Berlin Biennale. As a member of the Ateliergemeinschaft Westhafen, she artistically explores urban landscapes through formats such as the “Spazierwerkstatt” and sculptural works. Her interdisciplinary research examines everyday environments and seeks ways to exceed them through feminist practices of rewriting and unlearning. Her works can take the shape of seminars, reading groups, or a bench. She declares these to be places and architectures of re-telling and reimagining; of feminist storytelling beyond prescription. Anna holds a Master of Fine Arts from Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies from Freie Universität Berlin.
The Aesthetics of Neighborhood: Representations of Micro-Communities in Film
My dissertation examines representations of neighborhoods and the aesthetics of in-between spaces in documentary and semi-documentary film between 1968 and 1992. The focus is on activist films produced within the context of politicized film schools and self-organized film collectives in East and West Germany. I will particularly focus on the works of feminist filmmakers. Their films draw attention to urban spaces and forms of small-scale community organization—families, housing communities, migrant neighborhoods, and working-class districts. Unlike architectural photographs and commissioned films, which document organized residential construction as successful democratization projects, the mentioned filmmakers shift the focus to the spontaneous and contentious negotiation processes of coexistence. They reveal the functionalization of entire districts and their integration into industrial sectors and capitalist production; they depict precarious living conditions in working-class neighborhoods, but also draw attention to forms of improvised daily life.
From today’s perspective, their films can be understood as visual archives of forms of self-governance and organization in modern metropolises. They shift the focus from centralized authorities of power and planning to the creative forces of local initiatives, intergenerational connections, and trans-temporal community-building. In this context, the city no longer appears as the result of architectural or administrative planning, but as an ongoing process and archive of communal spatial production.
My dissertation attempts to add a film studies perspective to urban sociological discourses concerning the significance of urban spaces for democratic societies (Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett and Henri Lefebvre). I argue that the films grasp democratic practice less at the institutional level than in everyday life. Against contemporary proclamations of a crisis of liberal democracy, these cinematic explorations of urban communal life take on new relevance as they envision urban spaces as “Erfahrungsräume” of political participation.
