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First monograph to explore connections between East German film and other art forms such as painting, sculpture and music
Explores a range of films that have only recently become available in (English) subtitled versions (including films by Jürgen Böttcher)
Transnational dimension: includes essays on DEFA’s relationship to arts/music beyond the GDR
First volume to expore the reception of C18 and C19 culture in East German film
Accessible to readers with no knowledge of German
List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Texts and Contexts
Chapter 1. German Classical Humanism and the Sovietisation of Culture
Chapter 2. Cosmopolitanism, Formalism, and Fantasies of National Culture
Chapter 3. Experiments in Modernism I: From Bitterfeld to Barlach
Chapter 4. Experiments in Modernism II: Responses to the Eleventh Plenum
Chapter 5. New Ways of Seeing: Jürgen Böttcher and the Transformation of Tradition
Chapter 6. The Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Romantic Turn
Epilogue: Art, Exile and the Socialist Imaginary
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
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.
Summary
Screening Art represents the first full-length study of films about art and artists produced by the state-owned Eastern German film studio DEFA. It investigates the essential role that these "art films" played in the development of new paradigms of socialist art in post-war Europe.
