Abstract
If you are a novice to East German cinema, this book is for you. For some years, I have been teaching courses on German (and German language) film, covering virtually all periods and genres, from the silent film of the expressionist era to the films of the Berlin School. I introduced Westerns, comedies, dramas, documentaries, newsreels, animated pieces, short films, mainstream, and independent productions—you name it. I taught masterpieces and obscure films, and each time, I had no trouble finding appropriate texts to provide a first introduction, a theoretical framework, or an in-depth study of the films I would show my students. Not quite each time, however. Whenever I put the period between 1945 and 1990 on my teaching agenda, I ran into the problem that I suddenly would have not one, but essentially two national cinemas to teach. After Germany had lost World War II, it split into two separate countries, East Germany and West Germany, and each developed its own national film industry. For my film courses covering both halves of the divided screen, finding appropriate texts has become easier and easier over the years.1 However, when I taught courses on my research specialty—East German cinema—I was often dissatisfied with the selection of books, but not for a lack of outstanding and well-researched texts focusing on numerous fascinating topics and intricate details, I should point out.2 Yet whenever I shared my field of research expertise with friends, colleagues, students, and other film scholars who knew nothing about East German cinema, I found it vexing that there was no introductory-length text I could recommend to help them understand my passion for this period of German film.
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I am not prone to playing extensively with my brain chemistry anymore (except by watching esoteric Asian and East German cinema).
—Paul Turner, Darkside Cinema
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Notes
For example, Sabine Hake, German National Cinema, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008);
Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Gokturk, eds. The German Cinema Book (London: British Film Institute, 2008);
Stephen Brockman, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010);
Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch, eds. A Companion to German Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); and
Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson, eds. A New History of German Cinema (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012).
Some books to start are Seán Allan and John Sandford, eds., DEFA: East German Cinema 1946–1992 (Oxford: Berghahn, 1999);
Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002);
Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001);
Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005);
and Anke Pinkert, Film and Memory in East Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
For two German-language treatments of the DEFA documentary genre, see Günter Jordan and Ralf Schenk, Schwarzweiß und Farbe: DEFA-Dokumentarfilme 1946–1992 (Berlin: Jovis, 1996)
and Tobias Ebbrecht, Hilde Hoffmann, and Jörg Schweinitz, eds., DDR Erinnern, Vergessen: Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms (Marburg, Germany: Schüren, 2009).
Ralf Forster and Volker Petzold, Im Schatten der DEFA: Private Filmproduzenten in der DDR (Konstanz: UVK, 2010).
A good start into this genre would be Nora Alter, Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema 1967–2000 (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 2003). Some of these films are available as bonus material or have been released separately on DVD by the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
See Ralf Schenk and Sabine Scholze, Die Trick-Fabrik: DEFA-Animationsfilme, 1955–1990 (Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 2003).
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© 2013 Sebastian Heiduschke
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Heiduschke, S. (2013). Introduction. In: East German Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322326_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322326_1
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