DMost of these films are forgotten. At least in western Germany, where East German films are not considered very popular anyway. The fact that beyond the Wall, in East Berlin of course, but also in the DEFA animation studios in Dresden, there was also an alternative film culture, for which well-known names such as Lutz Dammbeck, Jürgen Böttcher and Sibylle Schönemann stand in the West, is still only known today quite unknown. So who names the names, shows the films? Who tells the tragic and ludicrous stories behind it?
In case of doubt, the Frankfurt film collective, which has always had a soft spot for daring, experimental and unjustly forgotten cinema. And where one could hardly have found a more competent curator than Claus Löser for the weekend packed with eight programs in the Pupille Kino. Not only did he shoot a series of films himself with the 1985 experimental film “Nekrolog” or “Victoria” about the independent Super 8 scene in East Germany. As the founder of the archive Ex oriente lux, which is dedicated to the “cinematic subversions in the GDR”, he is also one of the few proven film historians who never tire of telling the stories behind all the “basement films”, which are usually rarely shown .
Summer at the Baltic Sea
Destinies like that of the director Frank Vogel (1929 to 1999), who studied with Ernst Bloch and Hans Mayer before he went to the Moscow Film School and was therefore hardly suspected of dissidence. And which, according to Löser, was simply broken because “Don’t think about it, I’m crying”, the feature film produced by DEFA “with which he should have become famous”, was banned on the day of the premiere. Not only, one might assume, because he was not in line in terms of content, after all the protagonist embodied by the “James Dean of the East”, the young Peter Reusse, is anything but a hero of the proletariat. The film, which was shot in black and white and defamed as nihilistic, did not meet the real-socialist expectations of the state formally either.
Although they were produced under the umbrella of DEFA, the documentaries presented by Löser mostly fell victim to censorship. Be it because in Böttcher’s “Barefoot and Without a Hat”, the documentation of a summer’s day on the Baltic Sea in cheerful, carefree images, the jazz rhythms, beat music and rock ‘n’ roll that were frowned upon in the East and soon banned set the pace, be it that Richard Cohn-Vossen’s “In Matters H. and Eight Others” in 1972 broke several taboos with juvenile delinquency, “hooliganism” and homosexuality.
The short thaw that also affected the GDR at the beginning of the 1960s was history again. While Schönemann was arrested and ransomed in 1985 and the now 92-year-old Böttcher, who is also known as the painter by his stage name Strawalde, continued to shoot for DEFA, directors such as Cohn-Vossen and Lutz Dammbeck traveled to the West in the 1980s. The young Löser meanwhile did what was simply not officially envisaged in the GDR and produced his 16 millimeter films himself. And it was not until 1990 that he began his film studies in Potsdam.
Filmkollektiv Frankfurt, August 25th to 27th, “German Relationship Comedies 1989 to 2001”, further information at filmkollektiv-frankfurt.de
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