Diorama Film

An intimate portrait of director Mai Zetterling that includes interviews with Zetterling, David Hughes (Zetterling’s ex-husband and the cowriter of LOVING COUPLES, NIGHT GAMES, and THE GIRLS), and actors Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Bibi Andersson.

It’s quite telling that Katja Raganelli chose the animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger as her gateway figure into German cinema’s past. Like Alice Guy-Blaché, she was prolific, and worked in all kinds of formats, including commercials and animated interludes for fiction features. More than Guy-Blaché, though, she was an inventor of forms and techniques whose genius was admired by the likes of Bertolt Brecht. It says a lot about film history that Reiniger remains still a specialists’ darling…

Joan Tewkesbury reflects on her collaboration with Robert Altman and her first feature, Old Boyfriends (1979). This excerpt, from an unfinished working print by Katja Raganelli for the 2024 Robert Altman retrospective at the Munich Film Museum, serves as a starting point to explore her production process, how she found collaborators like Tewkesbury, her development of project ideas from these encounters, and why some projects never reached completion.

Katja Raganelli was not solely interested in female filmmakers, but women artists in general. This early work offers a portrait of painter-educator-pacifist Anna Ottonie Krigar-Menzel, also known as Annot. Suppressed by the Nazis and forced into exile, it’s tempting to consider Annot a key inspiration for Raganelli, as one of her main works is a late 1920s cycle of paintings called Faces of Working Women, depicting female surgeons, physiotherapists, all manner of women’s labour.

Katja Raganelli’s sole excursion into the realm of avant-garde cinema was this focus on Austrian experimental film axiom Valie Export. This portrayal of the filmmaker is quite special as it presents Export at a very particular moment in her career, during the shooting of a fiction feature, Menschenfrauen (1980), with which she was able to break into the avant-garde mainstream, shedding the skin of her path-breaking, often performance-based early works.

Rabe Perplexum was one of the earliest West German artists to live in a non-binary gender identity. A key figure (for all their fringeness) of the Munich scene in the 1980s, Rabe’s paintings and performances were soon forgotten after their too early death at the age of 39. Interest in Rabe has since resurged, with Raganelli’s portrait becoming a key document of this visionary.