Re-Imagining DEFA

Re-Imagining DEFA PDF Author: Séan Allan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533106X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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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.”

Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western

Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western PDF Author: Kendra Preston Leonard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351334158
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western examines the use and function of musical tropes and gestures traditionally associated with the American Western in new and different contexts ranging from Elizabethan theater, contemporary drama, space opera and science fiction, Cold War era European filmmaking, and advertising. Each chapter focuses on a notable use of Western musical tropes, textures, instrumentation, form, and harmonic language, delving into the resonance of the music of the Western to cite bravura, machismo, colonisation, violence, gender roles and essentialism, exploration, and other concepts.

Don't Need No Thought Control

Don't Need No Thought Control PDF Author: Gerd Horten
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789207347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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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

Transactions with the World PDF Author: Adam O’Brien
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785330012
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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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.

Gender and Sexuality in East German Film

Gender and Sexuality in East German Film PDF Author: Kyle Frackman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
The first scholarly collection in English or German to fully address the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of DEFA across genres and in social, political, and cultural context.

East German Cinema

East German Cinema PDF Author: S. Heiduschke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137322322
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
East Germany's film monopoly, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft, produced a films ranging beyond simple propaganda to westerns, musicals, and children's films, among others. This book equips scholars with the historical background to understand East German cinema and guides the readers through the DEFA archive via examinations of twelve films.

East German Film and the Holocaust

East German Film and the Holocaust PDF Author: Elizabeth Ward
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789207487
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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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.

Four-Color Communism

Four-Color Communism PDF Author: Sean Eedy
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800730012
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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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.

Screening Art

Screening Art PDF Author: Seán Allan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 180073204X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

Fame Amid the Ruins

Fame Amid the Ruins PDF Author: Stephen Gundle
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789200024
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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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.