The backstory of Held for Questioning (Der Aufenthalt) is the story of a film that was made against all odds, by a director that DEFA had, essentially, written off the books. Frank Beyer was one of the best filmmakers in East Germany. He proved this time and again, with movies such as Five Cartridges, Naked …
Category: DEFA
Miraculi
Throughout its existence, DEFA, East Germany's state-owned film studio, released movies that pushed the boundaries. Some of these, such as Divided Heaven, Farewell, In the Dust of the Stars, and The Airship would make it onto movie screens. A few were shelved, but it was usually for political reasons rather than a film’s style. It …
The Mistake
The final years of East Germany’s existence saw a relaxation of the restrictions on what could be filmed and what couldn’t. After the Wende, DEFA continued to exist for a few years, and continued to make films using the same stable of technicians and actors, but now they could make films about the one thing …
The Tango Player
Following the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, events in East Germany started happening fast. Faster than DEFA could keep up with. Less than a year after that first batch of East Germans streamed into West Berlin in their Trabants, the GDR ceased to exist. Yet DEFA soldiered on, buffeted mercilessly by …
The Crucible
At first glance, The Crucible (Die Hexen von Salem) doesn’t appear to be an East German film at all. It's directed by a Belgian, stars French actors, and has a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre, based on the Henry Miller play. Additionally, almost all of the technical crew are French. In this respect, it's reminiscent of …
Five Days, Five Nights
At the end of World War II, Russian soldiers went on a plunderfest across eastern Germany. Think Sherman’s March to the Sea, but with dividends. Houses were stripped of their valuables, stores were looted, and machinery was taken. Much of this looting was done on a personal level—soldiers helping themselves to the contents of the …
Girls in Gingham
In the years after World War II, there was a lot of soul-searching in East German films. At first, this took the form of the Rubble Films, which used the destruction of Germany as a metaphor for the German soul—blown to pieces and ready for reconstruction. Rubble Films usually focused on a few people and …
The 100th Post!
I was going to post about yet another film when I suddenly realized that this marks the 100th post on the East German Cinema Blog. When I started this project four years, I had no idea if anyone else in the world was interested in these films. Since then I have discovered a thriving community …
Latest from the Da-Da-R
Identifying the beginning of the East German movie industry is easy. It began in 1946 with The Murderers Are Among Us. That film—started before DEFA even existed—was the first of a long line of excellent films to come out of the GDR before the government came crashing down under the weight of its own ossification …
The Bridge
The Bridge (Die Brücke) was a 1949 film made by DEFA about displaced persons at the end of WWII. It has little in common with Bernhard Wicki’s 1959 well-known film of the same name beyond its approximate time frame. In this film, a group of evacuees in a resettlement encampment encounter hostility from the people …
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