Alternative Realities and Authenticity in DEFA’s Documentary Films

Alternative Realities and Authenticity in DEFA’s Documentary Films Nick Hodgin Ten years after German unification the east German actor, writer and cabaretist, Peter Eniskat, published a book in which he reflected on the inter-German relationship and the relationship with, and representation of, the GDR past. Mischievous though its title is, ‘Hat es die DDR überhaupt gegeben?’ [Did a GDR even exist?] is revealing of the still continuing post-unification discourses concerning the GDR, which have sometimes been so tangled and contradictory that reflections of the past might almost become an ontological issue. Central to many debates has been the issue of authenticity as is evident in the suggestive titles of various documentaries about the GDR which seek to capture the GDR ‘as it was’. There is undoubtedly a greater, if naïve, expectation, that documentaries be authentic, reliable, and true. Bill Nichols suggests that the difference between documentary and fiction films is not ‘in their constructedness as texts, but in the representations they make’; the former, he suggests, are driven less by story than they are by argument (italics in original). Such representation, then, ‘is allied with rhetoric, persuasion, and argument rather than likeness or reproduction.’ These distinctions are useful but not entirely accurate – especially in the case of German film treatments of the GDR past where some fiction film’s representation is guided as much by argument (verging in some cases on the polemical) as it is by story. The director of the best-known feature film depiction of the GDR, Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2007) was equally concerned with being accurate, with providing a narrative whose details were correct and whose recreation of the SED-state should be faithful in order to advance his argument, a concern so concentrated that he would later muse ‘I spent almost too much time with the realities’ . What were the realities of the GDR state and to whom does one turn to seek corroboration of their correct representation? If subsequent depictions of the GDR are criticised as flawed because of their distance from the events they depict or because present circumstances obscure past contexts, where else might one turn to gain some insight into that past? One obvious but under researched area is East German documentary film. Documentaries tend not to stimulate the same critical attention that do feature films and the same is true of DEFA. The quantity may be a little overwhelming: around 10 000 documentaries were made as opposed to the 750 or so feature films. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of documentary film culture in the GDR, to highlight the contribution made by directors such as Joris Ivens (a transnational director avant la lettre) and Jürgen Böttcher, to draw attention to East German filmmakers’ awareness of, and reference to, developments in international film culture, and to show how, despite the close scrutiny of the medium, some filmmakers – a minority, admittedly – were able to document East German society in a way that defied the state’s self-image. ‘The most valuable art’ The Party both wanted to know people’s opinions and to mute those that might disrupt the imagined consensus. It also hoped to shape opinion, and film from the very beginning, even before the GDR was founded, was acknowledged as an important tool: film, acknowledged by Lenin to be the most valuable art, was to ‘transform consciousnesses’ . Documentary films of the early post war years served to educate, reassure and inform populations about a range of social issues as governments began to apply themselves to the varying challenges of life after the war. Such a utilitarian approach to the medium was not unique to East Germany; nor was it unique even to those states behind the iron curtain. John Grierson’s work for the Empire Marketing Board in the late twenties and thirties did exactly that: it sought to market the British Empire; and he and his film unit would continue to serve the government in various guises during and after the war through a ‘documentary film practice that persuaded more than informed, guided more than observed’ and with a ‘social orator [who] undertook the task of offering moral and political guidance to the confused masses by means of emotionally (rhetorically) compelling argument.’ In post-war Berlin, the speeches made at the first German Film Authors Congress in 1947 clearly indicated the socialistically purposive role (delineated according to a more ideologically fixed course than Grierson’s ‘socially purposive’ ideal) that film would follow and acknowledged Soviet cinema as the exemplar. Kurt Maetzig, one of the co-founders of DEFA, outlined the challenges facing filmmakers in the eastern zone, and emphasised realism to be the only route open to those determined to fight for freedom, stressing that realism was keine Schule, er ist kein Dogma […]. Er ist vielmehr eine Methode des Suchens und Forschens nach der Wahrheit – und eine neue künstlerische Haltung, die ohne Vorurteile das Leben in seiner Gesamtheit darstellt und gestaltet. [not a school, not a dogma […]. It is much more a method of enquiry and research into the truth – and a new artistic direction, which, without prejudice, portrays and shapes life in its totality] The cultural policies of early 1950s indicated how vain was Maetzig’s declaration. The pronouncements made against formalist tendencies in March 1951 and outlined in ‘The Struggle against Formalism in Art and Literature for a Progressive German Culture’’, expounded on formalism’s incompatibility with socialism, which its critics identified in recent poetry, design, architecture, and which served as a warning to artists, including filmmakers. The message was reinforced in other fora: the journal Aufbau reprinted some of Stalin’s letters sent to Soviet artists some twenty years previously in which he had railed against avant-gardism. A year later the SED’s Central Committee resolution, ‘For the development of progressive German film art’ reemphasized Socialist Realism as the ideal and only paradigm for filmmakers. By then, the doctrine of Socialist Realism had been in place in the Soviet Union for a decade and a half. East German ideologues were largely happy to adhere to the artistic guidelines first outlined by Zhdanov, Stalin’s ‘cultural thug’, in 1934 and many German intellectuals in the GDR were initially happy to oblige a vision of artistic practice which sought to make art accessible, which would be politically and ideologically unambiguous, optimistic and positive and thus counter the alleged negative effects of formalism. As a result, the films of this period largely eschewed the modernist impulses of the inter-war avant-garde even if those films had previously been held in high regard. Documentary now served a quite different purpose: it was intended to help establish what Bourdieu calls the doxa, to provide the east German citizens with audio-visual evidence that would confirm ideas and attitudes and thus reinforce and naturalize the socialist philosophy and practices. Documentaries thus engaged in a rhetoric of ideologically calibrated social persuasion which reiterated certain tropes – including the Socialists’ moral superiority, their historical evolution, their recent achievements and future goals – which would endure for as long as the GDR. Recent studies have shown that such limits did not necessarily preclude innovative artistic practices. Artistic momentum as well as exposure to international developments and dialogue with colleagues abroad led some artists to experiment with form and style in ways that either contravened or subverted the proscribed aesthetic model. Still, the assertion made by John T. Frey in 1953 that Socialist Realism ‘leaves no room for the art-for-art's sake approach’, an opinion that has long held currency, was not without foundation. Socialist Realism might have been an article of faith for many – though by no means all – cultural functionaries, but artists’ application of these tenets was neither consistent nor always sincere. Among those who did engage with Socialist Realism were some internationally celebrated artists such as Anna Seghers and Joris Ivens. The presence of a filmmaker like Ivens, who worked in the GDR until 1957, and the impact that this visionary director had cannot be overlooked. Dubbed with good reason ‘The Flying Dutchman’, Ivens was a supremely well connected figure within both the cultural elite and important leftist circles. In the GDR his political credentials, as evidenced by his antifascist films, The Spanish Earth (1937) and The 400 Million (1939), must have overshadowed doubts about any previous formalist preoccupations or his links to the European avant-garde. There was in any case the need for public figures to lend greater legitimacy to the young socialist state and it is a measure of his status that for Das Lied der Strömen [The Song of Rivers] (1954), which sought to foster international solidarity through the reflections on workers connected through their activities on different rivers of the world, he was able to draw on the talents of friends and admirers such as Paul Robeson, whose participation Musser describes as ‘a coup for the filmmakers, lending their film prestige and filling out its international character’ . Robeson was not the only famous name associated with the film. Brecht, Picasso and Shostakovich also contributed to a film said to have been seen by two hundred and fifty million people (discounting the US where it was banned). It prompted opposing evaluations which revealed audiences’ and critics’ post-war ideological orientation but still won Ivens the International Peace Prize in 1955, which may have come as a surprise to audiences in Britain and France who had seen only the truncated versions permitted by censors. Regardless of the huge audiences (remarkable even if only a tenth of the number claimed saw it), Das Lied der Strömen has, as Musser notes, ‘been doubly damned within Dutch-Anglo-American film culture: unseen yet always already relegated to the slagheap of Cold War propaganda.’ Ivens’ presence in the GDR loomed large and he brought with him not just two and a half decades of professional experience and critical kudos but passion, ideological conviction and international flair, which made an impression on important later DEFA directors such as Karl Gass and Konrad Wolf. Indeed the latter worked for a while as an assistant to Ivens and this may have helped nurture the documentary sensibilities he brought to bear in many of his feature films. Ivens’s follow up films were significant successes for the GDR, too. Mein Kind [My Child[ (1956) attracted one and half million people in the GDR within three weeks and did well on the international circuit, reaping prizes at film festivals in Mannheim, Kalovy Vary and Montevideo, whilst Die Windrose (The Wind Rose, 1957), an omnibus film for which he secured the talents of fellow directors Alberto Calvacanti, Wu Kuo-Yin, Yannick Bellon, Gillo Pontecorvo, Alex Viany, Sergei Gerasimov, some of whom were already well-known, and others who would become better known, to offer a series of global portraits of women at work. Shaped though they are by Cold War discourses, the international scope of Ivens’s films conferred on the GDR prestige and gestured towards internationalism. Accolades were not reserved only for such prominent names. Other East German directors were represented at international film festivals and won awards – even in the west. DEFA enjoyed success for example in 1955 at the first Mannheim Film Festival. Nevertheless, the destalinization that took place in the mid 1950s in neighbouring Poland and which proved beneficial for filmmakers who were able to apply themselves to previously taboo topics – including social and structural problems – which resulted in the creative and thematically controversial ‘black series’ of documentary films was less apparent in the GDR, where the post-Stalin course was slower to develop and where audiences would have to wait until a 1968 retrospective at Leipzig before they could see them. Political sensibilities were an important feature in the Cold War’s cultural war but the geopolitical realities did not always define the reception of eastern products according to a neat east/west binarism. The critical and audience responses in the west, for example, were occasionally at odds with national politics. While some DEFA films prompted hostile reviews at Oberhausen in 1956, they were also judged by others to be more aesthetically inspired compared with West German films. The festival there was occasionally criticised by West German commentators unhappy with the platform offered to GDR filmmakers by Oberhausen’s leftist intellectuals. Communist parties and other political sympathisers in non-Socialist states organised screenings of DEFA films at the National Film Theatre in London but also trade union clubs, factories and similar venues. In Britain, Stanley Forman, a life-long Communist, sought to profile Eastern European states through film and set up Plato films, later ETV (Educational & Television Ltd), which screened a number of East German documentaries over three decades, while Ivor Montagu, a fellow Communist and filmmaker/producer, arranged for screenings at the Edinburgh film festival from 1952 onwards . Forman occasionally ran into difficulties with the British authorities, either because of political concerns or legal questions – most notably in the libel case brought by a former SS officer and then mayor of Sylt, the subject of one of Andrew and Annelie Thorndike’s films, Unternehmen Teutonenschwert [Operation Teuton Sword](1958). Such scandals notwithstanding, the foreign interest in East German films in general was limited. This was not an attitude that applied to all films imported from the Eastern Bloc. Polish and Czech films, which benefitted from more lenient cultural policies than their East German counterparts, attracted art house audiences and were endorsed by British filmmakers such as Lindsay Andersen who organised screenings of the ‘black series’ and who would sustain that relationship with Poland resulting in a film about a Warsaw dance school Poland (The Singing Lesson, 1967). One East German documentary that did have some impact on foreign audiences was Du und Mancher Kamerad (Andrew and Annelie Thorndike, 1956), which according to one East German paper met with a favourable reception in Britain, but not so in West Germany where it was banned and still prohibited when students in Munich tried to screen it in 1961. The Thorndikes’ film is an expository, compilation documentary, a sophisticated history lesson, which through footage painstakingly gathered from diverse international sources details the horrors wrought on Germany and the world by the representatives of monopoly capitalism. Though it acknowledges some shared history – ‘So zogen wir durch Euopa’ [That’s how we moved through Europe] reflects one of the narrators as images show the German war machine’s progress) – the rhetoric, more insistent than polemical, repeatedly emphasises continuities between imperial Germany and the FRG. The Thorndikes’ presentation of history through film owes much to the Soviet compilation mode of documentaries that had begun with Vertov’s collaborator, Esther Shub’s silent masterpiece The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). Like Shub, the Thorndikes arrange the images to build a quietly persuasive narrative. The images are commented on by a voiceover carefully spoken by Matilde Danneger and George Wolff, whose tones range from the sober to the sympathetic and even regret (when recalling that it was the workers who produced the tools of war), provides a history of Germany whose narrative is structured around the class struggle and in which the workers are presented as victims and then arrogated as the victors. Partisan though such a film was, the achievement of its formal composition, which blends archival footage from a wide variety of sources, intertitles, maps, graphics (to analyse the imperialists’ conflict), and photography to provide visual evidence of injustice and abuse. It even recreates scenes in order to envision Friedrich Engels addressing an audience in 1893 (thus compromising one of the film’s opening statements that ‘‘Jedes Dokument ist ein historisch nachprüfendes Dokument’ [Every document is historically verifiable] in order to remind audiences of the GDR’s intellectual pedigree. Elsewhere the film presents a harrowing First World War scene in which German soldiers raid a trench and shoot and bludgeon their enemies; here the measured voiceovers give way to a tense musical arrangement of dissonant strings. The scene is convincing but impossible: a tracking shot retreats directly above and between the battles. As with Shub’s film some thirty years previously, it is the arrangement of the images that persuades; placed after actual footage of marching troops, fleeing civilians, and roadside corpses, these scenes appear chronologically coherent. The film fits with Nichol’s description of the expository mode according to which ‘images serve a supporting role’ and the argument is communicated via commentary which is ‘associated with objectivity or omniscience’. That the argument was clearly formulated according to a Socialist understanding of history did not detract from the filmmakers’ technical skill. The Thorndikes’ craft was indisputable and, according to Steinele, it influenced not just celebrated DEFA filmmakers such as the filmmaking team, Heynowski and Scheumann, but ‘served as a model for European documentary filmmakers such as Paul Rotha and Erwin Leiser’ . Its influence on west European documentarians may be exaggerated (Rotha’s career was on the wane by this time) but Du und mancher Kamerad was a confident, accomplished film, the cost of which demonstrated the significant role assigned to the documentary genre in the GDR and the power the form could exert. A new wave, nearly When the West German filmmaker, Volker Schlöndorff, remarked in 2008 that as the former Director of the revamped Babelsberg studios he had sought to distance the studios from its DEFA association because the films of the latter were so risible, he must have expected an indignant response from East German filmmakers; the attempt to dislodge Konrad Wolf’s name from the film school in Potsdam and the opposition to this some years earlier had demonstrated how protective was the attitude towards the DEFA legacy. The objections duly came and Schlöndorff clarified his statement: ‘Alles, was ich über die Filme sagte, bezog sich auf diese Zeit, als in Paris die Nouvelle Vague herrschte, als aus Polen, Ungarn und Prag aufregende neue Filme kamen, nur wir Deutschen aus Ost und West noch im Stil der Fünfziger Jahre gefangen waren.’ [Everything that I said about the films was a reference to the time when the nouvelle vague was dominant in Paris, when exciting new films were coming out of Poland, Hungary, Prague and only we Germans were still trapped in the style of the fifties] Schlöndorff ’s affinity with the French new wave is well known so it is hardly surprising that he would highlight these films as the yardstick by which to measure German films but his assessment of the film scene in East Germany is myopic. Paradoxical though it may seem, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 is widely regarded as having had a stabilising influence on the GDR. This is true also of the mood at the studios. The restrictions on movements across national borders signified a restriction, too, on movements across aesthetic borders. Only those enrolled at the film school and its well stocked film archive or well placed at the Leipzig festival could hope to see films not widely distributed. The state continued to invest in the exhibition of its films outside the GDR but diplomatic relations and the drive for international solidarity (especially with socialist states) was doubtless a precondition of such cultural exportation. In terms of DEFA’s impact outside East Germany, Katie Trumpener’s observation that ‘the most daring and aesthetically advanced film cultures in eastern Europe were utterly uninterested by – and presumably, generally uninterested in – developments or non-developments in GDR film culture’ is accurate. The cameraman and later director, Roland Gräf described the effect of this asymmetry: Ich erinnere mich, dass ich so manchmal auf den Treffen mit den Filmhochschulen Moskau, Prag und Wroclow ein bisschen gelitten habe. Von uns kamen immer formal relative anspruchslose Dokfilme, die von den Anderen vermutlich ein bisschen belächelt wurden. Von den Polen zumal, die meist sehr gelungene und experimentelle Arbeiten zeigten. [I remember that I suffered a bit at meetings with film schools from Moscow, Prague and Wroclow. We always produced films that, formally, were pretty undemanding and which were perhaps made fun of by the others, especially the Poles who often presented very accomplished and experimental films. Despite the state’s self-imposed isolation and the consequences for contacts with the outside world, some of the films made in the sixties indicated how much DEFA had been influenced by international film movements, though the application of new ideas and cinematic modes would be both compromised and finally short lived. This was particularly evident in one filmmaker’s career. For Jürgen Böttcher, the decade was as fertile as it was frustrating. A singular figure in the history of GDR documentary film culture, he operated outside the parameters of DEFA from the very beginning. His first encounter with prominent DEFA personnel at his Film School interview, where he explained his low opinion of DEFA films to Maetzig and others, showed how indisposed he was to disingenuousness. If Böttcher found no exemplars within DEFA, from whence did he then draw inspiration? Fortunately, he is forthcoming about his influences. The names cited read like a twentieth century roll call of international avant-garde artists and includes such contemporary or near contemporary visionaries as, Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker, Joris Ivens, whom he personally encountered either through DEFA or at film festivals, as well as artists such as Alexander Rodschenko, whose work he much admired. The restrictions on experimentation at DEFA mostly precluded Böttcher from engaging in the same kind of formal endeavours that characterised Brakhage’s work for example, or Marker’s, though he allowed himself greater room to develop his interest in the abstract through his twin role as the artist Strawalde, a pursuit that during the GDR could never quite be a vocation because of the official hostility that his art aroused and the limited opportunity to exhibit. There are exceptions; encouraged by Brakhage, he made a film of the postcards of works of Renaissance art by Paulus Potter, Giorgione and Emanuel de Witte on which he had painted and doodled and which resulted in the playful triptych, Frau am Klavichord [Woman at the Clavichord], Potters Stier [Potter’s Bull] and Venus nach Giorgione [Venus after Giorgione] (1981), DEFA’s first art film, whose surrealism and mischievousness found little favour with the authorities. Here Strawalde appears, grinning directly at the camera on his Plattenbau balcony before the close focus on the postcards of the same image to which the brush adds dots, strokes, scrawls; wings are added to Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus in one version, in others, additional clothing is applied, later stripes, polka dots; some of the images are projected on the director’s model who unzips her top or removes an item of clothing. This film project, the first to bear his nom de pinceau was, like his only DEFA feature, Jahrgang ’45 (1965), which had fallen victim to the 1965 Plenum, to enjoy greater acclaim only after the GDR had ceased to exist and has continued to be screened at high profile festivals – most recently the Vienna Film Festival (2012). While Marker’s and Brakhage’s work could have no obvious corollary in his film work, there are others whose work has a more obvious bearing on Böttcher’s documentaries (and in his one and only feature) and these are the Italian neo-realists, Rossellini, Visconti and de Sica especially, and lesser known but thematically related films such as Plus de vacances pour le bon Dieu [No more vacations for the good Lord] (Robert Vernay, 1949). There is the influence, too, of pioneering photographers such as Ernst Scheidegger, Robert Franck, and Eugene Atget (Jordan has also proposed August Sander), whose work made a powerful impression on Böttcher and some of his contemporaries. Different though the photographers and their subjects are, there are parallels nonetheless across their oeuvres, not just in terms of their aesthetic choices but also in terms of their social concerns, which they were to sustain throughout their careers. Böttcher has said that following the furore of Jahrgang 45, ‘da blieb eigentlich als einziges nobles Thema: die Arbeiter’ [only one noble topic remained: the workers]. One might infer ideological fidelity from this statement; identifying the worker as a worthy subject was hardly contentious, but Böttcher’s films are not a mere celebration of the worker of the kind found in other DEFA documentaries but focus much more on the experiential and the quotidian; his focus is less the role played than those who perform the roles. Apart from the various individual directors who are frequently cited as an influence (the respect for Soviet filmmakers is an acknowledgement of innovation rather than ideology and is one shared by directors around the world), the film style most often referenced by DEFA filmmakers is neo realism. Roland Gräf, when asked about his work also acknowledged the influence on him and his colleagues of Eisenstein, Vertov and Dovshenko (one imagines the latter’s earlier poetic work rather than the prosaic films made at the behest of Stalin), but emphasised above all the Italians’ films, recalling a remark made by cameraman Werner Bergmann that they were now ‘Ostzonenitaliener’ [Eastern Zone Italians]. East German directors were not alone in their admiration of the neo-realists. Ruberto and Wilson have suggested that the appeal for filmmakers around the world was a ‘refreshing postwar aesthetic that successfully brought engaging narrative technique to bear on social issues’ and offered the means for reimagining films in their own national contexts. Access to these films in the GDR later shrank as they did not fit the Socialist Realist doctrine but the impact that they made could not be undone. The neo-realist films’ ‘raw immediacy’ clearly resonated with those filmmakers seeking an alternative to existing styles. Their ‘ability to inspire politicized, ideological and aesthetic alternatives to Hollywood narrative techniques’ was less of an issue in the GDR given that American exports to the GDR were severely limited, but the neo-realist style as well as that of its later cognates (British Free Cinema, nouvelle vague for example) provided, if not a direct template, then at least a reference point for representing East German life in a way that countered, or steered clear of, DEFA conventions – both in fiction and non-fiction film. The British director Lindsey Anderson’s explanation that the Free Cinema with which he was associated was free because the films were made ‘without reference to the demands of distributors or producers’ and were ‘the free expression of the people who made them’, provides a clue for understanding some East Germans’ identification with Free Cinema’s independent impulse, which was as important as any formal correlation. The debates surrounding new forms among some of the younger filmmakers in the GDR in the early sixties echoed the discussions taking place elsewhere, east and west. Older colleagues’ suspicions of formal innovations which appeared to privilege style over substance was by no means confined to states with more rigid, ideologically grounded ideas about filmmaking. Grierson’s dismissal of Free Cinema as ‘baby stuff’ and his concerns about its influences (‘it was conscious too of the neo-anarchism of the beatnik movement in America’ ) aligns him with his East German counterparts in both sentiment and rhetoric. Barfuss und Ohne Hut: Impertinent Socialism? The representation of young people in DEFA film was a problem that dogged filmmakers for almost as long as the GDR existed. Filmmakers were caught between the desire to reflect young people in a way that would appeal to the target audience, an audience that increasingly distanced itself from domestic film production, and the need to satisfy functionaries and ministers. Many in the Party were fully aware of the consequences that alienating its young citizens would have; the 1953 uprising and subsequent disturbances and demonstrations in socialist and non-socialist states signalled the potential danger posed by a new kind of youth culture. Commentators in the GDR may have chosen to use ‘Rowdytum’ and ‘Rowdy’ rather than ‘Halbstarken’ when referring to young malcontents, a part anglicised neologism that would denote the threat to be Anglo-Saxon in origin, but the issue could not be resolved via semantics. The Youth Communiqué of 1963 was not intended to emulate the kind of reformist impulse discernible in Czechoslovakia but to strengthen East German socialism through the increased participation of the youth. By the time he came to make Barfuss und Ohne Hut [Barefoot and Without a Hat] (1965), Böttcher had experienced the displeasure of the Party as well as its approval. Drei von vielen [Three of many] (1960) his portrait of artists in Dresden was a fundamentally different kind of documentary for the GDR, for Jordan nothing less than ‘die Geburtsstunde des neuen DEFA-Dokumentarfilms’ [the birth of a new DEFA documentary film]. Self-consciously casual, hip even, it offered a view of Böttcher’s friends who are seen to combine professional work with private artistic pursuits and whose contented lives appear to have little to do with state socialism. Viewed today, one might wonder in what ways the film counters the state’s self-idealization, given that it ostensibly celebrates the social worlds presented, references the city’s destruction, the subjects’ labours of love, the ordinariness of its subjects and the overwhelmingly positive mood, and the film did indeed have important supporters, though these were unable to prevent its withdrawal. His next documentary, Ofenbauer [Oven Builders](1962), which traced the efforts to replace a huge industrial furnace, satisfied ideologues because of its industrial milieu and the perceived heroisation of the worker. That certain scenes arguably betrayed the influence of cinema verité was not enough to prevent it from winning the Silver Dove in Leipzig. Böttcher’s sincere interest in his subjects, especially in the context of the workplace, was to characterise his oeuvre at DEFA; and while the setting and the individuals on whom he concentrated seemingly corresponded with the GDR’s official self-image, his films are by no means conformist narratives. The director enjoyed further success with Stars (1962) his account of women workers in a light bulb factory, which received a valuable endorsement at Leipzig when it was complemented by the French filmmaker, Chris Marker, controversial recipient (though only after Ivens had intervened through a direct appeal to Ulbricht) of the Golden Dove for Le Joli Mai (1963) . Emboldened and inspired by both Marker and his film, Böttcher decided ‘dass endlich mehr und aufrichtiger über das Leben erzählt wird, dass man mit Jugendlichen über Krieg und Frieden, über Generationsprobleme, über Arbeit und Liebe und die Zukunft spricht’ [that life should finally be discussed more and more sincerely, that one should talk with young people about war and peace, about generational problems, about work and love and the future]. The film may have been inspired by Marker’s work but it would have been impossible without the brief period of liberalisation following the Communiqué. Barfuss und Ohne Hut does not signal a fundamental change in direction from his other films. Böttcher maintains his interest in everyday people but at a remove from their daily lives. He films his subjects, a group of young people – some apprentices, some students, some still at school – at the Prerow beach on the northern coast in a 26 minute film that captures young east Germans talking freely. What does distinguish the film from many other DEFA documentaries about young people, however, is its informality; that alone marks it as unconventional and connects it with the casual posture, the verve, whether natural or stylized, that was characteristic of the new wave cinemas. The opening shot pans from left to right following a young couple, looking unmistakably ‘beat’ (barefoot, in dark sweaters and tight trousers that looks more Left Bank than Eastern Bloc) as they chase across the shore, between sand and sea. The energy inherent in the image and in those that immediately follow (other couples playing in the water) is matched by the brisk guitar melody, a fast twelve bar blues, soundtrack of a generation, which the camera reveals to be diegetic (though in fact separately recorded) as it segues to a rock’n’roll number played by two of the teenagers on the beach, and which then slows to a latin melody as the film’s pacing lessens and before any dialogue is heard, some two and a half minutes later. Böttcher appears to allow his subjects free expression; the teenagers offer personal commentary, self-reflection and opinions. These are not presented simply as talking heads facing the lens. Christian Lehmann’s hand held camera captures gestures, facial expressions, hands playing with sand, images that work to reinforce the naturalness and spontaneity of the narrative. The topics discussed reveal the teenagers’ thoughts, hopes, desires and frustrations and is in a sense extraordinary for its ordinariness. The subjects reflect openly and with apparent ease about their work, with some commenting on poor working conditions, physically demanding labour (a comment made by one subject, a shunter, a profession to which the director would return in his celebrated 1982 film, Rangierer [Shunters]). Others muse on future careers, on inspirational teachers, and reveal attitudes to music, marriage, love. There are similarities here, perhaps, with some of Free Cinema’s films. Films like Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959), while different in their perspective, do overlap in their desire to capture the everyday, to avoid didacticism, to present people on their own terms. Whilst sympathetic to their subjects and determined to show the working class in a way that was more authentic, the directors associated with Free Cinema did not always rid themselves of the paternalism they found so dubious in documentary film. Reisz’s subjects are rather gauche and self-conscious in front of the camera; the narrator’s tone is occasionally patronising with the result that the commentary amounts to a kind of ironic ethnography. Böttcher, by contrast, was well-known for the good rapport he established with his subjects, one that in his films inspires confidence and intimacy. The director does not appear; his is an off-camera presence, neither seen nor heard but implied by the subjects’ glances to one side of the camera and by their responses to questions unheard by the viewer. These one sided conversations are surprisingly candid and revealing of the filmmaker’s and teenagers’ relationship as well perhaps of the national mood in the wake of the brief period of liberalization. Nevertheless, some observations are more frank than those familiar with DEFA films might expect. One young man reflects on his experience of education and in so doing offers a critique of both the older generation and the state. When remembering previous teachers, for example, he recalls ‘jedenfalls war das alles ‘n bisschen hart und dogmatisch auf der Schule bei uns, und ich hab’ mir vorgenommen, dass ich mit meinen Schülern später mal offen über solche Sachen diskutieren werde’ [anyway, it was all pretty hard and dogmatic at our school and I’ve decided that in the future I’ll speak openly about those sorts of things with my pupils]. Noticeable in this scene is the discomfort of his two friends, whose uneasy expressions Lehmann prioritises by shifting from the subject talking to close-ups of his silent companions. That the young man appends a more positive appraisal of current teachers to his negative recollections may signify liberalization in practice. Böttcher’s editing may have also been intended to appease censors likely to object to such criticism of civil servants qua representatives of the state for in the scenes that immediately follow some of the young women talk enthusiastically about exemplary teachers whom they regard as role models. The film is more than a series of cinema verité interviews or explanations. Around two thirds of the film is without dialogue; here the film is comprised of images celebrating leisure, youth, spontaneity; the state may be implied in the discussions about the future but the images reveal lives lived beyond it. Böttcher’s film is then a paean to youth culture, if not the youth culture that certain SED members preferred. The subjects’ group confidence and their independence reflect generational shifts not unique to East Germany. The youthful self-assurance of some of Böttcher’s subjects has echoes of some of the nouvelle vague and Britsh Woodfall films’ protagonists. Though the nouvelle vague films were not widely screened in the GDR, British films, which were perhaps less cynical and whose working-class milieus were presumably more acceptable, had been distributed, albeit some years after their native release. Viewers familiar with Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1960), may recall Arthur Seaton, its brash protagonist (‘what I’m out for is a good time’), when one of Böttcher’s interviewees comments, half grinning, that he likes being with girls but has no intention of staying with one. It is also a film that celebrates the abstract, that recalls, if only briefly, the visual poetry of the pre-war avant-garde (Ivens’s Regen [Rain] (1929), for example). Scenes show the subjects in the water or playing on the beach; but there are meditative moments, too, in which the camera captures the teenagers sunbathing, lovers’ tender caresses. The absence of commentary here is noticeable; there is no ironic paternal voiceover, no attempt to frame the actions according to any overarching socially purposive narrative. Instead, Böttcher relies on the score, now a cool jazz guitar melody (a genre whose West Coast origins had previously been considered problematic for the state’s arbiters of taste). The score throughout the film is intriguing and comprises a variety of genres, from rock’n’roll to different jazz styles, Dixie, West Coast, gospel moments and reflects the persistence of American culture that was evident, too, in other European states. At times, Lehmann’s camera abandons the subjects altogether and focuses on the natural made abstract, on movement and form, on light and dark: shells shifting beneath waves; still close ups of dune vegetation are juxtaposed with cirrocumulus clouds, which fill the screen, then give way to close-ups of Gaudi-esque sand sculptures; elsewhere the camera focuses on pebbles which the teenagers are seen to handle and turn, natural found artworks of the kind that inspired the British artists, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. The film’s reception revealed how diametrically opposed were the attitudes to the representation of young East Germans. Where functionaries and some DEFA colleagues grumbled about the film’s lack of direction, younger viewers at test screenings responded enthusiastically, praising its honesty and the accuracy of the representation, and remarked on the lack of didacticism. Indeed, the voiceover was notable by its absence. Earlier DEFA documentaries had been characterised as much by text as by image; the authority of the narrator removed any potential misunderstanding on the part of the viewer and thus established a one-sided relationship between film and viewer that did not correspond with the promise of impartiality implied in the slogan, ‘Sie sehen selbst – Sie hören selbst – urteilen Sie selbst’ [See for yourself – hear for yourself – judge for yourself!] attached to the weekly newsreel, Der Augenzeuge. Despite the overwhelming endorsement given by young audience members (a demographic, whose patronage of DEFA films the East German film industry could ill afford to lose), it was the opinions of the film’s detractors who expressed misgivings about its debt to western culture (evident in the music) and its too individual a take on East German youth that counted for more. The film was not to be distributed. That Barfuss und ohne Hut should have suffered at the hands of the censor is surprising. Not only did it match the brief laid down in the Youth Communiqué, it also clearly celebrated a section of East Germany’s youth (all of them articulate, positive, and affirmative) in a way that only the most sceptical or paranoid could consider to be subversive. One of the reports documenting the film’s reception reports that at one screening before the directors of DEWAG, the GDR’s official advertising agency, one audience member’s reference to the ‘Halbstarken’ depicted resulted in objections from others who were reported to have shouted ‘Weisst nicht mehr, was los ist. Warst lange nicht mehr an der See’ [You don’t know what’s going on anymore. You haven’t been to the beach in a long time]. Tempting though it is to order these polarities according to generational categorization or Party membership, such classifications and their implied antinomies are neither reliable nor accurate. The importance of Böttcher’s film was, for example, recognised by representatives from the ZK, who argued that whoever did not understand the film did not understand the state’s young people. Nor was the film one with which only younger people could identify. DEWAG’s General Director, for example, was moved to recall his own youth in the twenties and the US dance crazes in Germany. The ban was naturally painful for Böttcher. Its confiscation was indicative of a shift in mood, of politicians’ existential fear that the impulse to liberalize would allow too many changes to take place and risk the Party’s position. Böttcher’s personal appraisal of the situation, namely that everyone knew this to be an important film in terms both of form and theme and that its release would have consequences for East German filmmaking, is not immodest. Its inclusion in a film festival programme in France a year later, of which the director knew nothing, signified the peculiarities of cultural policy and was evidence of the contradictions between the GDR’s external self-promotion and its internal realities. Lost Opportunities and Narratives of Loss In 1969 the author reviewing a series of East German films screened that year at Oberhausen wrote favourably about films such as Ich war 19 [I was 19] (Konrad Wolf, 1968) and Abschied [The Farewell] (Egon Günther, 1968), but noted that the Plenum had resulted in only very few films from the GDR being seen in the west; he noted, too, the egregious consequences for DEFA and described the resulting films as a ‘socialist puppet show’, petit bourgeois in outlook and form. After the sixties, East German filmmakers would reflect on that decade and wonder whether they had not achieved more in those ten years than in all those that followed. Kurt Tetzlaff was not convinced that there had been much progress; Böttcher was little impressed by the new films’ privileging of text over image, commenting ‘jetzt wird endlich geredet, aber wo sind die Filme? [now people are finally talking but where are the films?]. The convergences and synergies with other film movements that was previously evident in some of the East German documentaries was less apparent in the seventies, a fact that was not only due to continued technical hurdles long since overcome in the West. The cultural political debates concerning the arts, literature especially, tended not to involve documentary film to the same extent. This was partly due to the genre’s lack of appeal and lower public profile (documentary films were screened before feature films and seldom the main attraction), which was exacerbated by television’s growing dominance, and the continuing view of documentary as a weapon for agitation. Despite the structural and technical challenges facing documentary filmmakers, the decade is important for depictions of the GDR Alltag, the workplace in particular, which seek out the ordinary, the unexceptional, and which thus distinguish these films from the celebratory depictions of the East German worker that were still commonplace. The films of this period not only look inward, into lives lived in the GDR, they also look beyond the GDR itself, whether through co-productions with other Socialist states or in films which report on conflicts and foreign cultures. The most remarkable of these were those made by Heynowski and Scheumann, whose films, many of which they were able to produce independently (until criticism of East German media policy compromised this unique position), combined anti-imperialist propaganda with investigative reportage, often using questionable methods to expose human rights abuses and the legacy of colonialism, whether in Vietnam or Chile, and later Cambodia, and which won them awards not just in Leipzig, where they also served on the jury, and in other Socialist states but at a range of international festivals including those in the FRG, Brazil, and Chile. There was a turn away, too, from the industrial locations that had predominated in the GDRs’ documentary film. Though the state saw itself as comprised of Arbeiter and Bauer, the latter had, with the exception of some propaganda about agricultural policies, been much neglected in screen accounts. The exploration of the East German hinterlands were thus new not only because they documented lives seldom explored but because some of these films allowed for meditative reflections, if only obliquely, on the state itself. Like Jürgen Böttcher, Kurt Tetzlaff’s new wave tendencies had resulted in a ban of one of his early films. Es genügt nicht achtzehn zu sein [Being eighteen is not enough] (1963), a documentary that can be seen as a companion piece to Barfuss und Ohne Hut, had suffered a similar fate for its depiction of young oil workers, whose irreverence and leisure time pursuits did not conform with the earnest portraits of the state’s industrial heroes. By the late seventies, Tetzlaff had developed an interesting portfolio of films. He, too, had been able to film abroad, documenting the GDR’s involvement in developing gas pipelines in the Ukraine (Begegnungen an der Trasse [Encounters at the Line], 1976). Towards the end of the decade Tetzlaff had, like the directors of what were to become celebrated longitudinal documentaries begun to focus his attention on the GDR’s rural inhabitants. The provinces had yielded some interesting portraits, the most remarkable of which were Winifred and Barbara Junge’s long-running study, which followed changes in Golzow between 1961 and 2007, a project not dissimilar to Michael Apted’s 7-up (1964 – ) and Volker Koepp’s Wittstock films begun in 1974. In Erinnerung an eine Landschaft - für Manuela [Memory of a Landscape - for Manuela] (1982) Tetzlaff portrays the dissolution of a community following the decision to begin open cast mining in an area south of Leipzig, and traces the clearance of Magdeborn and other neighbouring villages over three years (1979-1982). The film, which is bookended with scenes of the village’s last recorded birth and the third birthday of the eponymous Manuela, provides a poignant account of one community’s attempt to survive their material dissolution, capturing the inhabitants’ desperation and quiet resentment in words and elegiac images that challenge Böttcher’s aforementioned concerns. The film’s composition enables images to communicate the loss that cannot be directly articulated. Tetzlaff frequently uses incongruous juxtaposition with sometimes startling effect: the opening shot of a woman in labour gives way to a slow motion shot of a church being detonated before returning to the birth and then back again to more houses collapsing; a close-up of a hollyhock retreats to reveal the flower amid a series of ruined houses; the focus on farmers ruefully reflecting on the changes switches to a mechanical digger chewing up the ground. The life and death thus connoted is a motif throughout and never used as an affirmation of the state or invested with the rhetoric of Aufbau. Progress in the GDR comes here at a price. Though the film seeks ostensibly to document the real time disappearance of a place and the translocation of a community it works also to reflect on the past. The villagers’ nostalgia is palpable throughout. It is evident in the mementoes with which they decorate their rooms in the austere, barely complete Neubau homes, part of a huge building estate on the fringes of Leipzig; it is evident, too, in the photographs to which they cling. These function not just as reminders of their past but as potentially subversive relics – the punctum that Barthes means when he describes a photograph’s subversive power. Previously images of people and place, they now serve not only as reminders of loss, but as an indictment of a state that has obliterated a community’s home. Sabine Spindler has argued that the film is not critical of the re-housing scheme but considers instead ‘den Verlust einer Generation’ [the loss of a generation] . Arguably it is both. The urban-planning policies of the GDR could hardly have been explicitly criticised in the film (though one individual does openly remonstrate with the officials responsible for relocating his family, challenging their decision by producing a newspaper article which claims that all families will be taken care of). Tetzlaff’s film also, quite by chance, anticipates the future nostalgia felt by the wider East German community. The film is characterised by a rhetoric of loss (communicated visually and verbally): a giant oak tree where Napoleon once rested is seen felled; graffiti chalked across a wall reads ‘Es war schön hier’ [it was nice here]; loss is implied by the possessions left behind and in the facial expressions of the individuals, and heard, too, in the subjects’ comments (‘es ist vorbei, vorbei’ [it’s over, over]). But Erinnerung an eine Landschaft’s title now assumes a double significance, a reference to the lost landscape of its subjects as well as an unanticipated reference to the GDR’s disappearance. Though very different to Barfuss und ohne Hut and to Tetzlaff’s own early film, like them it offers evidence that the people in view are less defined by the state than the Party hoped, a disjuncture that Manfred Jäger summarised when he said the East Germans ‘fühlen deutsch und nicht “DDR-sch”’[feel German and not ‘GDR-ish’] . This prioritised identity is perfectly, if serendipitously captured (by cameramen Karl Farber and Eberhard Geick): the team moves through the adjacent village, the next scheduled for clearance, where they see, stretched between the half timbered houses, a banner announcing the village’s millennium celebration. It reads ‘30 Jahre DDR – 1000 Jahre Eylthra’. Tetzlaff’s film was not permitted officially entry at the Leipzig festival that year but after some ministerial wrangling was finally screened where it met with overwhelmingly positive response from audiences. Hans-Dieter Tok’s review in the local paper commented on the film’s truthfulness, highlighting especially the exceptional camerawork and comparing it with other recent authentic portrayals of GDR life in films by Gitta Nickel and Winfried and Barbara Junge. While the images presented and comments captured in some of the films made in the 1960s were considered at best inappropriate and at worst subversive, filmmakers in the two decades that followed were often more circumspect in their documentation of the GDR; but even those more cautious films could be withdrawn. The restrictions on travel and the control of cultural products from outside the GDR stymied East German filmmakers’ involvement in international documentary film culture. In contrast to some of its socialist neighbours, the SED’s cultural policies, were increasingly obsolete and difficult to advocate and ultimately hampered cultural cross-fertilization. There were exceptions. The Leipzig film festival, as Heidi Martini has emphasised, played an important role in terms of the state’s foreign policy and thus remained largely unaffected by domestic cultural policy. This is not to suggest that there was no political interference, quite the contrary. But the international guests who gathered there (from pre-war innovators to representatives of new tendencies in documentary films such as direct cinema or cinema verité and ‘third cinema’ filmmakers) most years were important to the GDR and the Party tried to manage the event and to use it in order to promote their version of the GDR. Despite this top-down organisation it was nevertheless an important opportunity for networking; that and the exposure to films from around the world (some of which were shown at clandestine screenings) enabled East Germans filmmakers to keep up with developments outside the GDR. The exhibition of international films may have provided some insight into new forms of documentary film practice but that did not mean innovations and developments could be easily applied to East German films. Yet despite the profound difficulties facing filmmakers, numerous documentary films from the late seventies onwards were critically inflected. As with those East German writers who used allegory, metaphor, whose critiques were sometimes subtle and occasionally oblique, so some filmmakers were able to probe social problems through suggestion or implication, though gesture, facial expressions and synechoche, and thus reveal what Foucault identifies as ‘the multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies’ which have the potential to disrupt hegemonic power. Heiner Müller’s confidence that east German audiences could ‘easily recognise, see or feel the silence between words, between sentences’ might apply, too, to film audiences. It would also apply to readers of reviews such as Tok’s, who might infer from his positive reference to other realistic documentaries an implied criticism of those affirmative and increasingly self-delusional documentaries celebrating the GDR. EXTRACT ENDS HERE This is an extract of a pre-publication draft of a chapter. The complete and final version can be read in DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion, ed. by Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (De Gruyter, 2014) http://web-15.dg.safaribooks.com/view/product/180334 16