Films

The history of feminist film in Switzerland is a history full of trouble. The protagonist Lady Shiva in Tula Roy and Christoph Wirsing’s film Lady Shiva oder: «Die bezahlen nur meine Zeit» (1975) leads us directly to one such trouble: In her story, Irene Staub, alias Lady Shiva, recounts experiences of violence and precarity, of feelings such as grief, shame, fear and self-loathing, which affect her as a woman, a sex worker and as a person from a working-class background. The film by Tula Roy and Christoph Wirsing was one of the first feminist films in German-speaking Switzerland. Many of these films, such as Il Valore della donna è il suo silenzio (1980) by Gertrud Pinkus, gave marginalized individuals a voice and brought their testimonies into public discourse. By doing so, they exposed how patriarchal and capitalist structures determine the lives of individuals and shape their subjectivity.

But it wasn’t just Lady Shiva who was affected by trouble. Tula Roy’s film emerged in the context of a broader feminist movement in Zurich. Alongside Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch, June Kovach, Marlies Graf, Nina Stürm, and Reni Mertens—to name just a few—she was part of a group of Swiss women who, from the 1970s onward, made their mark as directors.¹ However, the agency for these filmmakers remained limited. In a 2021 interview, director Gertrud Pinkus noted:

I think that women in my generation had to make a lot of curves.... That they couldn't make the films they wanted to make in the end. I felt like making comedies. Something playful... That wasn't in the cards. A woman had to choose a social theme. Other subjects didn't come through. I wrote a lot. It just didn't come through. [...] I didn't want to make the normal interview films that were expected of women, where someone complains in front of the camera.²

Today, several women directors recall the difficulties they had in securing funding or, even more fundamentally, in gaining access to male-dominated networks and institutions. Tula Roy remembers:

I joined the association of filmmakers. And… of course, they were all men. And I thought, I just want to work politically because I want to push things forward for women. But then… these meetings were so strict, everything had to follow a formal agenda, just as it was supposed to. Not fun or pleasant at all—just rigid. And when I once suggested that we might go for a coffee afterwards, a famous filmmaker said to me: ‹Tula. Filmmakers don’t go for walks›.³

Obviously, it was also more difficult for women to produce feature films with a large budget. Lucienne Lanaz reflects on this:

I once wanted to make a feature film. I even received funding for the script. The script still exists, but we were never able to make the film. They simply didn’t believe I could do it. It’s like if you write crime novels and then suddenly want to write a history book—people say, ‹They can’t do that.› That’s how it was for me. ‹She makes documentaries, and now she wants to make a feature film? She can’t do that.› Today, we know that filmmakers like Wim Wenders and many others started out making documentaries before moving on to feature films. But in the 1970s and 80s, people didn’t believe a woman could do the same.⁴

The films made by Swiss women during this period represent a marginalized form of filmmaking on multiple levels, one that eludes the categories of auteur, work, and cinema that still dominate memory institutions and historical discourse today. They mainly made documentaries or commissioned films, working with the cheaper 8mm or 16mm small gauge format or later in video. Tula Roy, Yvonne Escher, and Lucienne Lanaz, for instance, never made a 35mm film. Cinema was not the primary venue for their screenings. Instead, their films circulated in so-called non-theatrical contexts—shown in educational institutions, associations, or churches. Social and political concerns were sometimes more important than an autonomous artistic and formally ambitious authorship. Moreover, there was not necessarily a continuous lifelong creative practice or a comprehensive life's work.

When people talk about these films, it is usually with a dismissive tone: they are «only» documentaries, «only» 8mm or 16mm formats or video, «only» about specific women's issues, «only» films that were not shown in cinemas, «only» the one work of a female director. The supposedly deficient nature of these films has led to them being «forgotten». However, as Daniella Shreir points out, this rhetoric needs to be challenged: more specifically, this means that many people did not consider it as relevant to preserve, screen, discuss or critically engage with them.⁵ 

Archives

This marginalization continues in the archive. Now that I have been working with archives by women for some time, I would say that hegemonic structures and categories in the archive tend to favor films by men and marginalize those by women. This is because the categories of author, work and cinema still play an important role in collection practices, in the organization of the archive, and in the field of mediating film history. At that time, women with their films or film-related activities often operated within subcultures and on the periphery, remaining outside established institutional structures. In the archive, the remaining material thus provides information about the conditions and structures of feminist filmmaking in Switzerland and points to its precarious existence. I would like to present a few examples here.

For instance, only a fragment from the program of the first women's film festival in German-speaking Switzerland—organized by director Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch from early January to early March 1975 at the Commercio cinema in Zurich—is included in the Cinémathèque suisse collection.⁶ The festival took place only once, on the occasion of the International Women's Year, and this singularity contributed to a gap in its documentation.

The Frauen-Film-Festival was organized by the Filmpodium (now Zurich's municipal cinema), which at the time was holding events at the Commercio cinema but did not yet have a permanent venue. One could argue that alternative film culture was not yet firmly established in Zurich, and the surviving documents are generally incomplete. But a review of Filmpodium's programs at Kino Commercio from 1971 to 1981 mentions other film series, but not the women's film festival. Clearly, even in retrospect, it was not considered significant.

Another example is the screening print of Mano Destra (1986), the debut film by director Cléo Uebelmann. Mano Destra circulated in feminist contexts through Europe and achieved cult status. Set to the music of the Swiss dark-wave band The Vyllies, Cléo Uebelmann stages two female figures in stark black-and-white imagery within a dark concrete vault—one (played by Uebelmann herself) taking on the role of the dominant, while the other submits. This experimental film, difficult to categorize and made by Uebelmann when she was just 21—she described it in conversation as a coming-of-age film—, lends itself to multiple interpretations with its minimalist and austere aesthetic. It was a key work in feminist debates on pornography, BDSM, and lesbian sexuality and continues to evoke a queer longing for everything that did not (or perhaps did?) happen in Swiss history and film history. As of now, only two screening prints of Mano Destra are known to exist. One is available through LUX in London, while the other was acquired by the Cinémathèque suisse in 2023 and has since been digitized.

Cléo Uebelmann belongs to the larger group of women whose filmographies remain small. For directors who have made only a few films and are not consistently active in the industry—such as Regine Bebié or Elisabeth Gujer—, the risk of losing the films is generally high.

In the case of Gertrud Pinkus, a short film with recordings of conversations between Italian emigrants is nowhere to be found. These discussions, held after screenings of her film Il Valore della donna è il suo silenzio, were an important part of Pinkus's filmmaking practice. With the film, which deals with the situation of Italian migrant women in Germany, Pinkus aimed to reach people who had experienced similar fates to those of her protagonists and to deliberately stimulate discussions with and among them. These testimonies would also be significantly relevant in the context of current discourses surrounding a post-migrant Switzerland and calls for an examination of past labour migration and the discriminatory legal and living conditions associated with it.⁷ The short film is likely lost because it was not granted the same ‹work of art› status as a feature film.

Similarly, the preservation and accessibility of Tula Roy and Christoph Wirsing's work is precarious. The original audio recording and print of Lady Shiva are lost. Except for her comprehensive documentary film on Swiss women's history, Eine andere Geschichte, which is available on online platforms, none of Tula Roy’s films—the majority of which are short documentaries—have been digitized and made available online. Had we not taken over Tula Roy's paper archive as part of an active acquisition of collections from women, it would probably be lost as well. And since Tula Roy did not place as much importance on preserving everything—especially not making copies and copies of copies, as we sometimes find in the archives of male filmmakers—, her collection has also been significantly reduced. Perhaps there is a connection between the absence of vanity and the loss of material.

Despite these gaps, I keep coming across traces of feminist filmmaking in the archive, and sometimes working with the collections leads to new discoveries. For example, a fragment of the program for the women’s film festival unexpectedly turned up in Tula Roy and Christoph Wirsing's collection. The program page, a simple A4 sheet, has been repurposed, with its reverse side now serving as the front. Tula Roy and the artists Ernst Mitzka, Sigmar Polke, and Achim Duchow used it for a spontaneous handwritten agreement.⁸ 

This document regulated the potential commercial exploitation of video recordings made by the three artists during the exhibition Frauen sehen Frauen: eine gefühlvolle, gescheite, gefährliche Schau, which took place in 1975 at the Städtische Galerie zum Strauhof on the occasion of the International Women's Year and in the context of which Tula Roy's Lady Shiva oder: «Die bezahlen nur meine Zeit» was directed.

A similarly fortunate discovery occurred during the digitization of Mano Destra, when another film by director Cléo Uebelmann, Museum of Modern Art (1988), was identified in our archive. This film arrived at the archive thanks to Schwarz Film AG, a film lab that, upon its closure in 2011, transferred its remaining film materials to the Cinémathèque. As for the lost short film of Gertrud Pinkus, at least a list of subtitles has survived, highlighting the importance of non-film materials in preserving these works.

What enters the collections is initially what fits into the existing, established structures of the film industry (i.e., films that find distribution are officially screened in cinemas or are recognized as major works), and thus appears on the archive’s horizon. Occasionally, this structural logic is disrupted. Somehow these marginalized objects seem to resist, they remain steadfast, somehow sneaking in, insisting on their existence. The archive structures and organizes and at the same time leads a kind of uncontrollable life of its own. Lisa Darms describes it as follows in a conversation with Elisabeth Subrin about her film Maria Schneider, 1983, which is also based on an archive find: «People often characterize ‹The Archive› as this authoritarian space that is obsessively organized, and where there’s a scarcity of material. And that’s all very true. But at the same time, what I noticed when I started working with archives 15 years ago is that it’s also total fucking chaos in there».⁹

Feminists

Such various troubles characterize the feminist filmmaking of this period to this day. At the same time, the troubles that affected Irene Staub, the main character of Lady Shiva, and those that affected Tula Roy the film's director are not the same. From today's perspective, Lady Shiva is also an ambivalent film because it does not reveal these differences.

In Lady Shiva, Irene Staub talks about her life in voice-over, while the 8mm camera captures her glamorous self-presentation, observes her work as a sex worker and follows her and her small child in everyday life. Image and sound represent different stories and are characterized by gaps and contradictions. The often harrowing biographical first-person narrative seems to contradict the glamorous staging. From this discrepancy created in the montage, the contemporary historical reading of Lady Shiva concluded a deconstruction of the supposed masquerade in the images through the sound. In reality—according to this interpretation—, Irene Staub was a lonely and desperate person who was hiding behind this image of a glamorous woman.¹⁰

The paratexts in the archive —newspaper articles but also statements from the director —follow this interpretation of the character presented in the montage. They reduce Lady Shiva to her existence as a sex worker and tend to equate sex work with exploitation, submission, and a lack of self-determination. The categories of class and gender dominate Irene Staub's perception both in the film and in the paratexts. The contemporary newspaper articles were highly inventive in their use of derogatory terms for the obviously fascinating work of sex work. They do not document «Lady Shiva’s true life story», but rather the ongoing inability of society to engage with the subject of sex work in a constructive and non-moralizing way.¹¹ One article criticizes the single mother's «pathological compulsion to buy» and «compulsive consumerism».¹² Her origin, poverty, and gender dominate the perception of Irene Staub in both the film and the paratexts. She herself makes racist statements in the film, which hardly encountered or encounter any counter-speech in the white feminism of the Swiss women's movement of the 1970s and perhaps even today.

A quote towards the end of the film is the only comment by an authorial position and another voice besides that of Irene Staub: «Where cohabitation without love is enforced by property interests, law or custom, prostitution exists. According to R. Owen 1771-1858.» Elsewhere, Tula Roy explains this idea: «At first [...] I thought of a slide series about the sexual dependence of women. Later [...] I thought, now I'll make a movie! And I was looking for the best example of dependency, which is usually also linked to economic dependency, and that is of course a prostitute.»¹³ The observation that women are coerced in various ways into sexual relationships with men draws general conclusions about the living and working conditions of women in patriarchy and capitalism from the specific situation of the sex worker and represents a kind of act of solidarity with Lady Shiva. However, there is also an uncomfortable sense of appropriation here. A person becomes a projection for the concerns of the women's movement and for personal desires for nonconformity and taboos to be broken. The curators of the Frauen sehen Frauen exhibition not only showed the film but also integrated Lady Shiva’s wardrobe and her preparations for work as a daily performance into the exhibition. Perhaps even at that time, but at least in retrospect, as suggested by a 2013 book on Irene Staub and statements from a 2021 publication on Frauen sehen Frauen, the treatment of Irene Staub seems to be ambivalent.¹⁴ From a historical distance, one would wish for a more radical dissociation from such problematic perceptions and statements. And, a more determined reflection on the ambivalences and power structures existing within the women's movement and feminist film.

This historical interpretation of the film is contradicted on several levels. As Caroline Schöbi’s research has shown, Tula Roy and Christoph Wirsing —due to the poor audio quality —trouble, once again! —re-recorded the soundtrack when creating a 16mm copy for the later circulation of the film. The supposedly authentic voice does not belong to Irene Staub, but to the actress Margot Gödrös. This subsequent editing, which is not mentioned in the credits, fundamentally challenges the authenticity effect of the soundtrack.

In a scene near the end of the film, Lady Shiva drives along Zurich's Limmatquai with a group of people in a Jeep convertible. Sitting on the hood of the car, draped in a flowing dress and feather boa, she eventually seems to dissolve into the red of her clothes and the blonde of her curls. This scene could be read as a moment of excess and escape—one that resists the control of the voice-over and is accompanied only by music. In this sense, it disrupts the first-person narrative, which is otherwise marked by deep sadness. It also suggests that the interplay of identities and the contradictions between sound and image cannot simply be resolved or reduced to the familiar narrative of the unfortunate sex worker.

Lady Shiva is, in fact, a figure who, in her mysteriousness, her performance and her contradictory nature, resists any form of appropriation. Perhaps the gaps and discrepancies can be understood differently. Maybe it is precisely in the incongruence of sound and image that her resistance lies, a resistance to a constrained, conservative society, an assertion of her existence on her own terms. Perhaps Lady Shiva is not a film about Irene Staub at all?

The doomed attempt to delve into Irene Staub's inner life obscures the traces the film lays out and the reflections it prompts. Lady Shiva points to 1975 as an important moment in the history of feminism, art, and filmmaking in Switzerland, a moment of both failed and successful breakthroughs and impulses. In doing so, the film connects to numerous other works and biographies. With its setting in Zurich’s Niederdorf, it also becomes a part of the city’s urban history.

The film also tells of numerous gaps that remained and continued to exist despite the women's movement and the emergence of feminist filmmaking by predominantly white and heterosexual women. It tells the story of what happened in Zurich, but also of what did not happen in Zurich, or what did happen but left no material traces: of a way of life that perhaps could not even exist in Zurich at that time. It hints at the absence of more radical feminist positions and an activist movement of sex workers, as seen in Carole Roussopoulos' Les prostituées de Lyon parlent from the same year.¹⁵ Or of the missing cinematic testimony of a childhood as a person of color in Switzerland in 1973, as it appears in the character of Irene Staub's small child. Here, the film could serve as a point of departure —and it seems to me that this is already inherent in the character of Lady Shiva —for a new narrative. A narrative that, as Saidiya Hartman suggests, is fictional, speculative, one that moves beyond the archive, beyond the absence of material traces, and imagines what could have been. And perhaps, fifty years from now, such a speculative approach will again be necessary—to make sense of the voids and ambivalences of our own present, which we ourselves may be unable to see.

A longer version of this article was published under the title «Vielleicht ist LADY SHIVA gar kein Film über Irene Staub? Über allerlei Funde, Lücken und Suchbewegungen im (feministischen) Archiv», in: Brunow, Dagmar/Müller, Katharina (eds.), Frauen und Film, 72 (Archive), 2024. It was revised and translated for a presentation at the conference Archive Trouble at the Seminar für Filmwissenschaft (June 6-7, 2024).