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.”
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Re-Imagining East German Cinema
Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke
PART I: INSTITUTIONS & IDEOLOGY
Chapter 1. The State-Owned Cinema Industry and Its Audience
Rosemary Stott
Chapter 2. History and Subjectivity. The Evolution of DEFA Film Music
Larson Powell
Chapter 3. ‘Fatal Attractions’. Modernist Set Design and the East-West Divide in DEFA Films of the 1950s and early 1960s
Annette Dorgerloh
PART II: NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Chapter 4. DEFA and the Legacy of Film Europe. Prestige, Institutional Exchange, and Film Co-Productions
Mariana Ivanova
Chapter 5. Betting on Entertainment. The Cold War Scandal of Spielbank-Affäre [Casino Affair, 1957]
Stefan Soldovieri
Chapter 6. ‘Operación Silencio’. Studio H&S’s Chile Cycle as Latin American Third Cinema
Dennis Hanlon
Chapter 7. Deconstructing Orientalism. DEFA’s Fictions of East Asia
Qinna Shen
Chapter 8. Transnational Stardom. DEFA’s Management of Dean Reed
Seán Allan
PART III: GENRE & POPULAR CINEMA
Chapter 9. Walter Felsenstein and the DEFA Opera Film
Sabine Hake
Chapter 10. Dreams of ‘Cosmic Culture’ in Der schweigende Stern [The Silent Star, 1960]
Sonja Fritzsche
Chapter 11. The DEFA Indianerfilm. Narrating the Postcolonial through Gojko Mitic
Evan Torner
Chapter 12. Defining Socialist Children’s Films, Defining Socialist Childhoods
Benita Blessing
PART IV: DEFA’S LEGACY
Chapter 13. DEFA’s Last Gasp. Ruins, Melancholy and the End of East German Filmmaking
Nick Hodgin
Chapter 14. KLK an PTX. Die Rote Kapelle. DEFA’s Antifascist Myth Revisited
Sebastian Heiduschke
Chapter 15. DEFA’s Afterimages. Looking Back at the East from the West in Das Leben der Anderen [The Lives of Others, 2006] and Barbara (2012)
Daniela Berghahn
Bibliography
About the author
Sebastian Heiduschke is Associate Professor in the School of Language, Culture, and Society, and Affiliate Faculty in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. He has published the monograph DEFA: East German Cinema and Film History (2013) and essays on the marketing, distribution, and fan cultures of DEFA film.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
21,738 Ebooks in this category
