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Re-Imagining DEFA

Author : Séan Allan

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 378 pages

File Size : 33,57 MB

Release : 2016-09-01

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 178533106X

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Book Description

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.”



Four-Color Communism

Author : Sean Eedy

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 230 pages

File Size : 47,53 MB

Release : 2021-02-03

Category : History

ISBN : 1800730012

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Book Description

As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime’s educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the “socialist personality” of young people and generate enthusiasm for state socialism. The East German children who avidly read these comics, however, found their own meanings in and projected their own desires upon them. Four-Color Communism gives a lively account of East German comics from both perspectives, showing how the perceived freedoms they embodied created expectations that ultimately limited the regime’s efforts to bring readers into the fold.



Don't Need No Thought Control

Author : Gerd Horten

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 415 pages

File Size : 40,34 MB

Release : 2020-06-05

Category : History

ISBN : 1805395572

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Book Description

The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.



Transactions with the World

Author : Adam O’Brien

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 228 pages

File Size : 32,27 MB

Release : 2016-02-01

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 1785330012

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Book Description

In their bold experimentation and bracing engagement with culture and politics, the “New Hollywood” films of the late 1960s and early 1970s are justly celebrated contributions to American cinematic history. Relatively unexplored, however, has been the profound environmental sensibility that characterized movies such as The Wild Bunch, Chinatown, and Nashville. This brisk and engaging study explores how many hallmarks of New Hollywood filmmaking, such as the increased reliance on location shooting and the rejection of American self-mythologizing, made the era such a vividly “grounded” cinematic moment. Synthesizing a range of narrative, aesthetic, and ecocritical theories, it offers a genuinely fresh perspective on one of the most studied periods in film history.



Fame Amid the Ruins

Author : Stephen Gundle

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 384 pages

File Size : 37,67 MB

Release : 2019-11-04

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 1789200024

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Book Description

Italian cinema gave rise to a number of the best-known films of the postwar years, from Rome Open City to Bicycle Thieves. Although some neorealist film-makers would have preferred to abolish stars altogether, the public adored them and producers needed their help in relaunching the national film industry. This book explores the many conflicts that arose in Italy between 1945 and 1953 over stars and stardom, offering intimate studies of the careers of both well-known and less familiar figures, shedding new light on the close relationship forged between cinema and society during a time of political transition and shifting national identities.



East German Film and the Holocaust

Author : Elizabeth Ward

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 259 pages

File Size : 25,66 MB

Release : 2021-04-01

Category : History

ISBN : 1789207487

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Book Description

East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.



Screening Art

Author : Seán Allan

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 29,27 MB

Release : 2022-02-11

Category : Art

ISBN : 180073204X

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Book Description

With internationalist aspirations and wide-ranging historical perspectives, East German films about artists and their work became hotly contested spaces in which filmmakers could look beyond the GDR and debate the impact of contemporary cultural policy on the reception of their pre-war cultural heritage. Spanning newsreels, documentaries, and feature films, Screening Art is the first full-length investigation into a genre that has been largely overlooked in studies of DEFA, the state-owned Eastern German film studio. As it shows, “artist-films” played an essential role in the development of new paradigms of socialist art in postwar Europe.



DEFA

Author : Seán Allan

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 364 pages

File Size : 35,50 MB

Release : 1999

Category : Motion picture industry

ISBN : 9781571819437

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Book Description

Traces the development of the state-sponsored company (DEFA), which was primarily responsible for film production in East Germany from 1946 to 1992. Most of the 16 essays were presented at a conference in Reading, England, at an unspecified date. Looking at specific films and scriptwriters, they analyze the representation of fascism and anti-fascism in the 1940s and 1950s, conflicts between the state and film makers in the 1960s, and social-political criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s. Paper edition (unseen), $25. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR



Cinema of Collaboration

Author : Mariana Ivanova

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 292 pages

File Size : 15,4 MB

Release : 2019-10-03

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 1789203449

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Book Description

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.



Documenting Socialism

Author : Seán Allan

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 402 pages

File Size : 11,11 MB

Release : 2024-08-01

Category : History

ISBN : 1805396595

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Book Description

More than 30 years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, its cinema continues to attract scholarly attention. Documenting Socialism moves beyond the traditionally analyzed "feature film production" and places East Germany's documentary cinema at the center of history behind the Iron Curtain. Between questions of gender, race and sexuality and the complexities of diversity under the political and cultural environments of socialism, the specialist contributions in this volume cohere into an introductory milestone on documentary film production in the GDR.