Search

Presented here for the first time in English translation is one of Harun Farocki’s earliest publications in the journal Filmkritik, of which he later became editor. Composed largely of quotations, Farocki’s text reports on film courses at the Wannseeheim Youth Center, a form of adult and alternative education in Berlin West. The introduction to Farocki’s text connects with the New German Cinema and themes that remained central throughout his own work: collaboration and quotation, Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “learning plays,” using nonfiction to explore both social relations and the cinematic apparatus, and seeing film as a form of “productive thinking.” It represents a kernel of Farocki’s wish to put the tools of filmmaking into the hands of ordinary people, thus revealing both theoretical aspects of the cinematic apparatus itself and the interweaving of visual images with social relations. With a deadpan, whimsical tone, Farocki argues that all this is, or should be, film criticism—in German, Filmkritik.

This chapter focuses on the three major themes that have helped make the integration between East and West German documentary filmmakers successful and have contributed new strengths to German independent documentary as a productive and innovative enterprise. It first illustrates 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 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. 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) is explored as an example of this defining quality of independent German documentary filmmaking in the context of the post-Cold War.

Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's Antigone (1991–2) deserves wider exposure, including on DVD, as a culmination of many strands of their remarkable oeuvre. (The full title in English might be...

The post-Second World War history of German film academies, and even their history since German unification in 1990, is one of politics and paradoxes. As such, it reflects the deep contradictions inherent in Germany’s film and media industry, educational institutions, and administration of culture. Some of the consistent contradictions can be found neither at the level of aesthetics nor at the level of pedagogy, but at the level of policy and diplomacy. They are between centralized, top-down administration and regionalist and/or grass-roots decentralization; between art and commerce; between present-oriented production and an engagement with history (either of German cinema or of an individual film school); between institutional support for national legitimacy and resistance or alternatives to these institutions; between nationalism and internationalism, either on bilateral terms with a superpower such as the United States or Soviet Russia or globally, as in the present day; and between specialized training of personnel and general education, or Bildung.1

It is not merely a sign of continuing Cold War myopia, but it is at least partly that: Upon its release in 1999, Michael Apted's film 42-Up, the latest in his series of 7-Up films begun in 1964, was described in the U.S. as the "longest running documentary project in film history."2 But this distinction clearly does not belong to this English-language series, but to the long-term documentary project led by the East Germans Barbara and Winfried Junge: The Children of Golzow. Their project was begun in 1961 and consists of over 120,000 meters of film in the form of 16 separate film releases.3

International audience; 1976 konstatierte die französische Filmzeitschrift "Cinéma", dass "das Kino der DDR lange und für viele Filmfreunde eine 'terra incognita' geblieben ist". Und nicht erst seit dem Mauerfall wird unter deutschem Film in Frankreich ausschließlich westdeutscher Film verstanden Wie kam es zu diesem verpassten Rendezvous ostdeutscher Filme im Westen trotz der, im Vergleich zu anderen Ländern, nicht ungünstigen Ausgangsbedingungen? Die folgende Darstellung gibt einen ersten Überblick, wie und welche DDR-Produktionen nach Frankreich gelangten und in welchem Kontext sie gezeigt wurden. Im Zentrum steht dabei die französische Sicht, insoweit sie aus der Aktenlage und der Erinnerung von Zeitzeugen in ersten Ansätzen zu rekonstruieren ist. Zunächst werden kurz die Gemeinschaftsproduktionen zwischen DEFA und französischen Produzenten erwähnt und dann die Institutionen vorgestellt, die DEFA-Filme in Frankreich zugänglich gemacht haben (Festivals, Freundschaftsgesellschaften, Filmklubs und vor allem die KPF). Danach wird die vergessene französische Produktion "Vivre en paix, RDA 1974" (Daniel Karlin, 1974), die in Zusammenarbeit mit Camera DDR entstand präsentiert und abschließend mit den Chile Filmen des Dokumentaristen-Duos H&S der größte Erfolg von Filmen aus der DDR in Frankreich skizziert.