“It Was The Way We Lived”: On Underground Cinema, Reproductive Labor, and Curating

A text on Birgit Hein and the group of filmmakers associated with the XSCREEN: Studio for Independent Film (Cologne, c. 1968–1973), which is conceived as a family photo album and poses questions on how to historiographically navigate impasses between reading on-the-ground praxis and ideologically politicized lines of identification. In its form, the piece proposes to do so through a feminist trajectory of analysis of power, with all of the matters of social reproduction embedded therein.