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The state-sponsored Deutsche Film Anstalt (DEFA) was responsible for film production in the former GDR from 1946 until 1992. This volume traces the development of DEFA and East German cinema.
Paints a complex portrait of East German film art and representation through examining eighteen key DEFA films following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, East Germany's DEFA filmmakers had a brief window in which to critique GDR society on either side of the Wende, the sweeping political turn that surrounded the fall of the Berlin Wall andthe opening of the border. Building on the DEFA Film Library's retrospective Wende Flicks series and Indiana University's DEFA Project, this study examines the newly rediscovered filmic artifacts of this transitional cinema, introducing eighteen key films from 1988 to 1994 in essays by German scholars, film professionals, and ...
From their very inception, European cinemas undertook collaborative ventures in an attempt to cultivate a transnational “Film-Europe.” In the postwar era, it was DEFA, the state cinema of East Germany, that emerged as a key site for cooperative practices. Despite the significant challenges that the Cold War created for collaboration, DEFA sought international prestige through various initiatives. These ranged from film exchange in occupied Germany to partnerships with Western producers, and from coproductions with Eastern European studios to strategies for film co-authorship. Uniquely positioned between East and West, DEFA proved a crucial mediator among European cinemas during a period of profound political division.
Motion picture production, distribution, exhibition and reception has always been a transnational phenomenon, yet East Germany, situated at the edge of the post-war Iron Curtain, separated by a boundary that became materialized in the Berlin Wall in 1961, resembles nothing if not an island, a protected space where film production developed under the protection of government subsidy and ideological purity. This volume proposes on the contrary that the GDR cinema was never just a monologue. Rather, its media landscape was characterized by constant dialogue, if not competition, with both the capitalist West and socialist East. These thirteen essays reshape DEFA cinema studies by exploring inter...
East Germany's film monopoly, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, produced a films ranging beyond simple propaganda to westerns, musicals, and children's films, among others. This book equips scholars with the historical background to understand East German cinema and guides the readers through the DEFA archive via examinations of twelve films.
By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”
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Motion picture production, distribution, exhibition and reception has always been a transnational phenomenon, yet East Germany, situated at the edge of the post-war Iron Curtain, separated by a boundary that became materialized in the Berlin Wall in 1961, resembles nothing if not an island, a protected space where film production developed under the protection of government subsidy and ideological purity. This volume proposes on the contrary that the GDR cinema was never just a monologue. Rather, its media landscape was characterized by constant dialogue, if not competition, with both the capitalist West and socialist East. These thirteen essays reshape DEFA cinema studies by exploring inter...