Author: Lisa Haegele, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Texas State University

Lecture: Haegele, Lisa. »Anti-Art: Rape as Subject in Roger Fritz's B-Film Mädchen mit Gewalt (1969).« Forty-Third Conference of the German Studies Association. San Diego 2019. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Summary: »The bsst-known directors of the Young German Cinema-the burgeoning art cinema movement in West Germany in the 1960s- later became the internationally celebrated auteurs of the New German Cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s. Funded largely by the newly established Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Young German Film Subsidy Committee), the early feature films of Volker Schlondorff, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Edgar Reitz broke from the traditions of commercial genre cinema-mockingly dubbed "Papas Kino" (Daddy's Cinema) by the young directors-that had dominated the West German film industry since the 1950s. While scholars have tended to focus their attention on these directors, the films of many others in the Young German Cinema movement have been ignored, including the so-called Neue Munchner Gruppe (New Munich Group), a small group of filmmakers based in Munich's hip Schwabing district. First identified as a group by film critic Enno Patalas in 1966, these directors- among them Rudolf Thome, Klaus Lemke, Eckhardt Schmidt, May Spils, and Roger Fritz-rebelled against the abstract intellectualism and serious sociohistorical criticism endorsed by their better-known peers. Inspired largely by the French New Wave and Hollywood B-films of the 1930s and 1940s, the New Munich Group directors opted instead for simple stories, fashionable young protagonists, visually appealing settings, and rock 'n' roll soundtracks.
This essay examines the New Munich Group film Mädchen mit Gewalt (1970; Girl with Violence), which was released in English as The Brutes and Love by Rape in 1970 and as Cry Rape for its 1975 rerelease in the United States. Shot in English and later dubbed in German, the film was directed by Roger Fritz, known also for his work as producer, actor, photographer, journalist, and cofounder of the popular West German youth magazine twen. The last film in Fritz's so-called Madchen-Trilogie (girl trilogy), Mädchen mit Gewalt centers on the abduction and rape of a young woman named Alice, played by Fritz's then wife, Helga Anders, by two men over the course of an evening in a gravel quarry on the outskirts of Munich. On its surface, the film seems to offer us little more than a misogynistic rape fantasy and sexploitation, a popular style in European low-budget cinema that became especially popular in West Germany with the Schulmädchen-Report (schoolgirl report) film cycle.« (Source: Cambridge Core)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany / West Germany | Film: Roger_Fritz | Film: Rape in fiction | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in Germany