Screening Art - Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema

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.

About the author

Seán Allan is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. His publications include the co-edited volumes Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (with Sebastian Heiduschke, 2016) and DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992 (with John Sandford, 1999). He has published widely on the films of Konrad Wolf, Kurt Maetzig and Jürgen Böttcher, and on East German identity in post-unification cinema.

Product details

• Authors: Sean Allan, Seán Allan
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2021
• EAN: 9781800732049
• ISBN: 978-1-80073-204-9
• No. of pages: 302
• Series: Film Europa
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; East Germany, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Socialism & left-of-centre democratic ideologies, Left-of-centre democratic ideologies, Film Theory & Criticism, Film history, theory or criticism, Kunstlerfilm, DEFA, East German Films, Socialist Art, GDR, ART / History / 20th & 21st Century