Special Topics: The East German Cinema, Crossing German Borders: PostWar, PostWall, PostCommunist

Syllabus, Spring 1997

Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny

In this essay I draw on close textual analysis to consider the interface between film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel / Divided Heaven (1964) and Solo Sunny (1979). Both films focus on women who have to confront painful processes of self realisa-tion in specifically East German contexts. They also show Wolf and his collaborators working in two very different modes, from a nouvelle vague-inspired mix of location shooting and self-conscious formal artifice to a more laconic style and mobile camera that borrow from documentary aesthetics. Viewed from the perspective of today, the films resist the reductive stereotyping of what Christa Wolf in 1991 called the 'phantom' East Germany, and offer a more productive haunting. As living ghosts in the post-reunification era, they are a reminder of the necessity of remembering, and so confound both a negative 'master narrative' of the GDR and a collective amnesia with no interest in this history

Anna Seghers: Steinzeit, Wiederbegegnung. Zwei Erzählungen

Berlin, Weimar: Aufbau, 1977. 123 p., 6,60 Mark

University of California Press eScholarship editions

Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet - who have lived and worked together for almost forty years - may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance , Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School.Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Holderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture