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1 - Post-unification (East) German Documentary and the Contradictions of Identity
- from Part I - History and Spaces of Resistance
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- By Barton Byg, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Edited by Camille Deprez, Judith Pernin
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- Book:
- Post-1990 Documentary: Reconfiguring Independence
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 26 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 24 June 2015, pp 23-37
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- Chapter
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Summary
In assessing what post-German Democratic Republic (GDR) documentary brings to independent documentary film culture in Germany, one is struck in general by the relatively privileged status the ‘independent’ documentary has long had. Despite being ‘marginal’ to the major media industries based on entertainment, documentary films in Germany enjoy considerable status, exhibition outlets and funding, even where topics are politically controversial and methods are either avant-garde or critical of the mainstream. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the position of secure employment, steading funding and guaranteed screening outlets even made GDR documentary filmmakers the envy of their Western counterparts. Granted, there were constraints and restrictions, but the principal difference in working conditions that German unification brought to former GDR filmmakers was a less secure, projectbased funding system and a shift in screening venues toward television – the West German media system, in other words.
But this chapter will not dwell on the process of integration of the former GDR documentary filmmakers into the new funding and production context, which has been achieved with remarkable success in many instances. Instead it will concentrate on three major themes that have helped make this integration successful and have contributed new strengths to German independent documentary as a productive and innovative enterprise. It will first illustrate the phenomenon of collaboration between filmmakers from both East and West Germany, which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and provides the basis for unique accomplishments in documentary. Then, partly based on these East-West collaborations, it will discuss examples of German documentary's frequent explorations of non-European topics, which challenge the clear separation of European and non-European in both politics and film art. Here, the film collaborations between Helga Reidemeister and Lars Barthel will serve as a case study. And finally, also as a result of decades of experimentation with the nature of the film medium's presentation of ‘reality’, ‘history’ and the individual human subject, Thomas Heise's German ‘portrait film’ Barluschke (1997) will be explored as an example of this defining quality of independent German documentary filmmaking in the context of the post-Cold War.
Regarding the filmmakers of the former GDR, since most of them now work with a well-subsidised medium in one of the world's wealthiest countries, it may seem disingenuous to categorise them as ‘independent’, let alone at the vanguard of outsider activism.
3 - Spectral Images in the Afterlife of GDR Cinema
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- By Barton Byg
- Edited by Brigitta Wagner
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- Book:
- DEFA after East Germany
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 22 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 December 2014, pp 24-48
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Summary
THE NOW VANISHED German Democratic Republic is both there and not there. The GDR cinema, too, haunts films of the present, but there are many ways in which the GDR was already a spectral apparition even while it existed. Of course, a country that no longer exists leaves behind a spectral presence—in histories that seek to uncover its “true” existence; in culture, where portions of its past reality persist, often invisibly, in the present; and in film, which is fictional even when it tries to “document.”
In a variety of ways both the films made during the GDR’s existence and those produced since its collapse in 1989 and subsequent merger with the Federal Republic of Germany (formerly West Germany and West Berlin) in 1990 have an aspect of unreality.
During its existence between 1949 and 1989, the GDR state presented such an abstract and rigid ideological construction of society that real life under such circumstances already entered the realm of fiction, often in surreal or fantastic ways. This posed an insurmountable challenge to GDR filmmakers. They could never dare to fully expose the truth of ideological charades but worked in a realm of tension between fiction and reality both in terms of political context and cinematic representation. The films were double-images of the desired world and the world as it may actually have been, and the cinema could only inadequately trace the specific difference between the two.
GDR cinema was thus partly a phenomenon of modernity but with a strong dose of postmodernity inherent in its multiple identities. The GDR was postmodern even before the term began to be applied in the West, in the sense that citizens lived in multiple levels of reality: individuals dissembled conformity while the state dissembled unanimity and general well-being.1 Much experience thus existed at two levels, requiring constant code-switching, depending on whether one was pretending to agree that socialism was working or whether, in more private settings away from state scrutiny, one was recognizing its failures. In the economic sense, too, GDR citizens lived in two realities. One was the planned economy with strict socialist controls, and one was the international one, based on Western currency (for those who could get it) and the market system; in the global sense, of course, even the state had to compete in the international market system.