"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"--
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.
Recenzijos
This impressive collection of scholarly articles charts the tensions and complexities of an East German cinematic genre not easily accessible to English-language viewers. Highly recommended. Choice
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Documenting Socialism
Seįn Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke
Part I: Studios, Systems and Networks
Chapter
1. Mountains of Material: Gerhard Scheumann and the Cinéma Vérité
Debate in the GDR
Matthew Bauman
Chapter
2. The DEFA Foreign Ministry Films: Presenting the German
Democratic Republic to the World, 1962-1990
Thomas Maulucci
Chapter
3. Diary of the Ordinary Reinventing the Newsreel: DEFA Kinobox,
19811990
Reinhild Steingröver
Part II: Documentary Auteurs
Chapter
4. The Archives Testify: The Compilation Films of Annelie and Andrew
Thorndike
Helen Hughes
Chapter
5. How Far Can You Go? Everyday Lives in the Films of Kurt
Tetzlaff
Nick Hodgin
Chapter
6. Peter Voigt: Socialist Documentary and the Legacy of Brecht
Seįn Allan
Chapter
7. Critical Truths: Documenting Disillusionment in the Films of
Helke Misselwitz, Petra Tschörtner, and Angelika Andrees
Jennifer L. Creech
Part III: Transnational Documentary
Chapter
8. East German Documentary Films by and about Sorbs
Andy Räder
Chapter
9. Are These Pictures a Deception? Socialist Self-Reflexivity in
the Cambodia Trilogy of Studio H&S
Martin Brady
Chapter
10. Polycentric Images of Africa in East German Documentary Film
Sebastian Heiduschke
Chapter
11. East Germanys Anti-Racist Politics and Black Abjection in
Documentary Film
Priscilla Layne
Part IV: Documenting Alterity
Chapter
12. Ein Tagebuch für Anne Frank [ A Diary for Anne Frank, 1958]: The
GDRs answer to Alain Resnaiss Nuit et Brouillard [ Night and Fog, 1956]
Elizabeth M. Ward
Chapter
13. A Womans Work? Women Soldiers, Masculinities and Binary Panic
in Documentaries of the East German Army
Tom Smith
Chapter
14. The Queer Cipher in East German Documentary: In Sachen H. und
acht anderer [ In the Matter of H. and Eight Others] and Queer Activist Super
8 Films
Kyle Frackman
Part V: The Presence of the Past. Reconstructing the Socialist Imaginary
Chapter
15. The Socialist City and Utopian Temporality in Halle-Neustadt
Documentaries
Stephan Ehrig
Chapter
16. The Rubble of History. Searching for the German Past in a
European Present in Andreas Voigts Ostpreußenland [ Tales of East Prussia,
1995] and Volker Koepps Kalte Heimat [ Cold Homeland, 1995]
Jason Doerre
Filmography
Index
Seįn Allan is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews and holds a Joint Research Professorship in Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft at the University of Bonn. His publications include Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (co-edited with Sebastian Heiduschke, Berghahn Books, 2016), Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2019), and Inspiration Bonaparte: German Culture under Napoleonic Occupation (Camden House, 2021).
