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Nick Hodgin

Cardiff University, School of Modern Languages, Faculty Member

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Address: * https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/991922-hodgin-nick
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School of Modern Languages
University of Cardiff
66a Park Place
Cardiff
CF10 3AS
UK

Uwch-ddarlithydd ac Dirprwy Bennaeth Ysgol
Ysgol Ieithoedd Modern
Prifysgol Caerdydd
66a Plas-y-Parc
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CF10 3AS

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Books by Nick Hodgin

SCREENING THE EAST Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory, it is a... more

The GDR Remembered Representations of the East German State since 1989 Edited by Nick Hodgin Edited by Caroline Pearce

Papers by Nick Hodgin

Futures Remembered: Kosmonauts, the GDR, and the Retrospective Impulse

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures , 2020

his article seeks to understand and speculate on the significance of certain visual features of t... more his article seeks to understand and speculate on the significance of certain visual features of the communist past after communism. Focusing in particular on East Germany, it considers the interplay of futures remembered and pasts experienced and the relevance of that interaction to our understanding of the GDR. It looks at the enduring appeal of cosmic culture and especially the figure of the cosmonaut as referenced across a range of media. Surveying its representation in both historical and contemporary culture, it traces the evolution of the cosmonaut as symbol, which was originally representative of socialist achievement and progressive humanism, and examines the ways in which it has come to be represented in visual and popular culture at a time when “the pendulums of the public mindset and mentality,” as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, have performed “a U-turn: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever too obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness.”

“Like a dream”: Film, fears, fantasies and nightmares of the Wende

This chapter explores the responses to the momentous changes taking place as the East German stat... more This chapter explores the responses to the momentous changes taking place as the East German state collapsed, looking in particular at the ways in which people struggled to make sense of the seemingly unimaginable. It considers the ways in which these responses were articulated, and concentrates on one frequently-heard simile, namely that the events were “like a dream”. The oneiric, it suggests, underpins some of the filmic representations of the Wende. The focus here is on Grönland (Jens Becker, 1990), which traces one man’s increasing alienation and abstraction from society, a film that is certainly as distinctive and genre-defying as some of the better-known films that counted as the last DEFA (East German) films. This chapter revisits and contextualises Becker’s film, the first to be nominated for a Student Oscar and the last DEFA production to be banned, paying attention to its formal properties – the hybrid styles (film noir, carnivalesque, grotesque), the excess and exaggeration – and to the thematic concerns underpinning the critical and surreal account of the regime’s final days and the dystopian vision of a unified state. 

DEFA's Last Gasp: Ruins, Melancholy and the End of East German Filmmaking

The quotidian fears of recrimination and punishment were naturally more acute in a state so tight... more The quotidian fears of recrimination and punishment were naturally more acute in a state so tightly regulated as was the GDR, but the films under discussion here are less a testament to those fears than they are representative of a pervasive melancholia, one that comprises complex, even contradictory emotions in response to the region’s finitude, personal loss, and physical and psychological exhaustion. Protagonists in the post-unification films and since are prone to geographical and cultural disorientation – themes that, surprisingly perhaps, connect comedies and dramas (from early treatments such as Andreas Kleinert’s Wege in die Nacht [Paths in the Night, 1992], or Peter Timm’s comedy hit, Go Trabi Go (1991) to Christian Schwochow’s 2013 film Westen [West]). The sites through which characters in many of the films pass are ghost sites: abandoned border watchtowers, empty factories, deserted buildings. Scarred landscapes, derelict industries and premises are the markers of a state that has crumbled, its leaders and custodians dispersed, imprisoned or redeployed, the symbols of a past rendered a foreign country. Ruins and debris confirm the end imagined and outlined in the earlier films. In the films discussed above, though, death has either not yet taken place, or is happening. The melancholy that characterizes many of the narratives is partly a response to what appears to be inevitable, death, pace Brecht, as the only thing certain in life. Such melancholy anticipates the mood identified in much post-unification discourse, whether the ‘melancholic paralysis’ of scholars who, as Julia Hell suggests, indulge ‘in memories of a lost country in which their dreams had been so heavily invested’ or the melancholic tone of post-GDR literature.

The cosmopolitan Communist: Joris Ivens, transnational film-maker before transnationalism?

The focus on transnational cinema has tended to privilege recent film, tracing film-makers' movem... more The focus on transnational cinema has tended to privilege recent film, tracing film-makers' movements across borders and cultures as a response to forced migration or in pursuit of translocated and/or transcultured subjects. This article seeks to redress the somewhat myopic historical perspective of such studies by extending the historical scope to focus on films made under the aegis of the East German regime by the Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens in the 1950s. It argues that Ivens' documentary work can be seen as an ambitious, proto-transnational project (highlighting Ivens' internationalism both in outlook and in terms of production), where the transnational is revealing of a committed cinema that celebrates the local and seeks simultaneously to surmount culture and geography as hurdles in promoting global understanding. [Extract of draft version will be uploaded in due course]

‘Only one noble topic remained: the workers.’ Sympathy, subtlety and subversion in East German documentary films

That the workers and working life should have been a regular topic of representation in East Germ... more That the workers and working life should have been a regular topic of representation in East German film, documentary film in particular, is no surprise given the significance of the worker in the state's self-understanding as the ‘first socialist state on German soil’. This article considers the role of the worker in East German film before focusing on those directors whose representations of workers either directly challenged or subtly undermined the state's preferred presentation. While many films used the worker in order to legitimise the state as the dictatorship of the proletariat and to promote a worker's consciousness in the German Democratic Republic, some filmmakers were more interested in de-anonymising their subjects, looking past the working environment to portray the worker as an individual, not an ideologically coded figure. The article looks in particular at a selection of films made by Jürgen Böttcher, including Drei von vielen/Three of Many (1960), Stars (1963) and Rangierer/Shunters (1981), and argues that some of Böttcher's portraits are simultaneously sympathetic and subversive, looking at both form (audiovisual composition) and content (in particular his focus on leisure, on individualism). Finally, I argue that the later films demonstrate the politics of silence and reflect on the implications of abandoning both voiceover and minimising dialogue.

In Praise of Authenticity? Atmosphere, song and Southern states of mind in Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus

It so happens' writes Michael O'Brien, 'that a disproportionate amount of American popular cultur... more

East Germany Revisited, Reimagined, Repositioned: Representing the GDR in Dominik Graf's The Red Cockatoo (2005) and Christian Petzold's Barbara (2012)

Alternative Realities and Authenticity in DEFA’s Documentary Films

Cannibals, carnival and clowns: the grotesque in German unification films

Screening the Stasi: the politics of representation in postunification film.

Eastern Blues, Southern Comforts: Searching for Heimat on the Bayous [ on Schultze gets the Blues and Germans' view of the Deep South]

Frequently portrayed as a mysterious place, inscrutable to outsiders, confounding even to its own... more Frequently portrayed as a mysterious place, inscrutable to outsiders, confounding even to its own inhabitants, "a place to love and a place to hate, a place impossible to figure out," the American South provokes strong opinions even among those who have no first-hand experience of the region and only a passing knowledge of its history (Ayers 63). The representation of the region and of its inhabitants in popular culture is undoubtedly one of the reasons for this; over the years the South, more than any other region in the United States, has been both glorified and vilified across a wide range of media. 1 Although the English director John Boorman's depiction of the South counts as one of the most enduringly negative portraits of the region-Deliverance is frequently referenced in British popular culture whenever the talk is of the South-Europeans have not always viewed the South through the prism of American history, as O'Brien has noted: Europeans were taught that the South was interesting, complicated, fecund, mobile, even as traditional American historiography told us that the South was backward, immoral, belated, inferior, frozen. Those old indigenous quarrels that go back to slavery and abolitionism were 1 Beginning with D.

Aiming to Please?: consensus and consciousness-raising in Wolfgang Becker's Good bye, Lenin

‘Marginalised Subjects, Mainstream Objectives. Insights on Outsiders in Contemporary German Film’

Berlin is in Germany and Good Bye Lenin! Taking leave of the GDR?

SCREENING THE EAST Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989

One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory, it is a... more

The GDR Remembered Representations of the East German State since 1989 Edited by Nick Hodgin Edited by Caroline Pearce

Futures Remembered: Kosmonauts, the GDR, and the Retrospective Impulse

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures , 2020

his article seeks to understand and speculate on the significance of certain visual features of t... more his article seeks to understand and speculate on the significance of certain visual features of the communist past after communism. Focusing in particular on East Germany, it considers the interplay of futures remembered and pasts experienced and the relevance of that interaction to our understanding of the GDR. It looks at the enduring appeal of cosmic culture and especially the figure of the cosmonaut as referenced across a range of media. Surveying its representation in both historical and contemporary culture, it traces the evolution of the cosmonaut as symbol, which was originally representative of socialist achievement and progressive humanism, and examines the ways in which it has come to be represented in visual and popular culture at a time when “the pendulums of the public mindset and mentality,” as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, have performed “a U-turn: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever too obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness.”

“Like a dream”: Film, fears, fantasies and nightmares of the Wende

This chapter explores the responses to the momentous changes taking place as the East German stat... more This chapter explores the responses to the momentous changes taking place as the East German state collapsed, looking in particular at the ways in which people struggled to make sense of the seemingly unimaginable. It considers the ways in which these responses were articulated, and concentrates on one frequently-heard simile, namely that the events were “like a dream”. The oneiric, it suggests, underpins some of the filmic representations of the Wende. The focus here is on Grönland (Jens Becker, 1990), which traces one man’s increasing alienation and abstraction from society, a film that is certainly as distinctive and genre-defying as some of the better-known films that counted as the last DEFA (East German) films. This chapter revisits and contextualises Becker’s film, the first to be nominated for a Student Oscar and the last DEFA production to be banned, paying attention to its formal properties – the hybrid styles (film noir, carnivalesque, grotesque), the excess and exaggeration – and to the thematic concerns underpinning the critical and surreal account of the regime’s final days and the dystopian vision of a unified state. 

DEFA's Last Gasp: Ruins, Melancholy and the End of East German Filmmaking

The quotidian fears of recrimination and punishment were naturally more acute in a state so tight... more The quotidian fears of recrimination and punishment were naturally more acute in a state so tightly regulated as was the GDR, but the films under discussion here are less a testament to those fears than they are representative of a pervasive melancholia, one that comprises complex, even contradictory emotions in response to the region’s finitude, personal loss, and physical and psychological exhaustion. Protagonists in the post-unification films and since are prone to geographical and cultural disorientation – themes that, surprisingly perhaps, connect comedies and dramas (from early treatments such as Andreas Kleinert’s Wege in die Nacht [Paths in the Night, 1992], or Peter Timm’s comedy hit, Go Trabi Go (1991) to Christian Schwochow’s 2013 film Westen [West]). The sites through which characters in many of the films pass are ghost sites: abandoned border watchtowers, empty factories, deserted buildings. Scarred landscapes, derelict industries and premises are the markers of a state that has crumbled, its leaders and custodians dispersed, imprisoned or redeployed, the symbols of a past rendered a foreign country. Ruins and debris confirm the end imagined and outlined in the earlier films. In the films discussed above, though, death has either not yet taken place, or is happening. The melancholy that characterizes many of the narratives is partly a response to what appears to be inevitable, death, pace Brecht, as the only thing certain in life. Such melancholy anticipates the mood identified in much post-unification discourse, whether the ‘melancholic paralysis’ of scholars who, as Julia Hell suggests, indulge ‘in memories of a lost country in which their dreams had been so heavily invested’ or the melancholic tone of post-GDR literature.

The cosmopolitan Communist: Joris Ivens, transnational film-maker before transnationalism?

The focus on transnational cinema has tended to privilege recent film, tracing film-makers' movem... more The focus on transnational cinema has tended to privilege recent film, tracing film-makers' movements across borders and cultures as a response to forced migration or in pursuit of translocated and/or transcultured subjects. This article seeks to redress the somewhat myopic historical perspective of such studies by extending the historical scope to focus on films made under the aegis of the East German regime by the Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens in the 1950s. It argues that Ivens' documentary work can be seen as an ambitious, proto-transnational project (highlighting Ivens' internationalism both in outlook and in terms of production), where the transnational is revealing of a committed cinema that celebrates the local and seeks simultaneously to surmount culture and geography as hurdles in promoting global understanding. [Extract of draft version will be uploaded in due course]

‘Only one noble topic remained: the workers.’ Sympathy, subtlety and subversion in East German documentary films

That the workers and working life should have been a regular topic of representation in East Germ... more That the workers and working life should have been a regular topic of representation in East German film, documentary film in particular, is no surprise given the significance of the worker in the state's self-understanding as the ‘first socialist state on German soil’. This article considers the role of the worker in East German film before focusing on those directors whose representations of workers either directly challenged or subtly undermined the state's preferred presentation. While many films used the worker in order to legitimise the state as the dictatorship of the proletariat and to promote a worker's consciousness in the German Democratic Republic, some filmmakers were more interested in de-anonymising their subjects, looking past the working environment to portray the worker as an individual, not an ideologically coded figure. The article looks in particular at a selection of films made by Jürgen Böttcher, including Drei von vielen/Three of Many (1960), Stars (1963) and Rangierer/Shunters (1981), and argues that some of Böttcher's portraits are simultaneously sympathetic and subversive, looking at both form (audiovisual composition) and content (in particular his focus on leisure, on individualism). Finally, I argue that the later films demonstrate the politics of silence and reflect on the implications of abandoning both voiceover and minimising dialogue.

In Praise of Authenticity? Atmosphere, song and Southern states of mind in Searching for the Wrong-eyed Jesus

It so happens' writes Michael O'Brien, 'that a disproportionate amount of American popular cultur... more

East Germany Revisited, Reimagined, Repositioned: Representing the GDR in Dominik Graf's The Red Cockatoo (2005) and Christian Petzold's Barbara (2012)

Alternative Realities and Authenticity in DEFA’s Documentary Films

Cannibals, carnival and clowns: the grotesque in German unification films

Screening the Stasi: the politics of representation in postunification film.

Eastern Blues, Southern Comforts: Searching for Heimat on the Bayous [ on Schultze gets the Blues and Germans' view of the Deep South]

Frequently portrayed as a mysterious place, inscrutable to outsiders, confounding even to its own... more Frequently portrayed as a mysterious place, inscrutable to outsiders, confounding even to its own inhabitants, "a place to love and a place to hate, a place impossible to figure out," the American South provokes strong opinions even among those who have no first-hand experience of the region and only a passing knowledge of its history (Ayers 63). The representation of the region and of its inhabitants in popular culture is undoubtedly one of the reasons for this; over the years the South, more than any other region in the United States, has been both glorified and vilified across a wide range of media. 1 Although the English director John Boorman's depiction of the South counts as one of the most enduringly negative portraits of the region-Deliverance is frequently referenced in British popular culture whenever the talk is of the South-Europeans have not always viewed the South through the prism of American history, as O'Brien has noted: Europeans were taught that the South was interesting, complicated, fecund, mobile, even as traditional American historiography told us that the South was backward, immoral, belated, inferior, frozen. Those old indigenous quarrels that go back to slavery and abolitionism were 1 Beginning with D.

Aiming to Please?: consensus and consciousness-raising in Wolfgang Becker's Good bye, Lenin

‘Marginalised Subjects, Mainstream Objectives. Insights on Outsiders in Contemporary German Film’

Berlin is in Germany and Good Bye Lenin! Taking leave of the GDR?