Communists loved Dean Reed. Coming, as he did from America, but rejecting his home country’s imperialistic meddling in the affairs of others, he was the perfect poster boy for the superiority of socialism over capitalism. Reed, after all, had been performing in concerts all over South America, and saw firsthand how the CIA helped Onganía …
Category: The Seventies
Hey You!
While the rest of the world was undergoing huge cultural upheavals, East Germany’s leaders were busy battening down the hatches, shutting the windows, and stuffing cotton in their collective ears; anything to avoid acknowledging that somewhere between 1965 and 1971 the world had changed completely. The politicians in the GDR got a glimpse of these …
The Flight
One of the joys of East German cinema is watching the way film and reality slam into each other. A perfect example of this is The Flight (Die Flucht), the story of Dr. Schmith, a medical researcher who's torn between staying in East Germany and fleeing to the West. He initially decides to leave the …
The Dove on the Roof
In the early 1970s, the East German authorities made yet another U-turn in their attitude toward the arts. Honecker had replaced Ulbricht as the General Secretary, and he wanted to demonstrate that as long as a film “proceeds from the firm position of socialism, there can be no taboos.”>1 Artists, writers, and filmmakers took him …
DEFA Disko 77
In 1977, disco fever swept the world. The Bee Gees—formerly a Beatles-influenced band—had reinvented themselves as the kings of the nightlife, John Travolta was teaching people how to dance, and skin-tight polyester shirts were flying off the shelves. In West Berlin, an Italian music producer named Giorgio Moroder met an American singer named Donna Summer …
In the Dust of the Stars
Sometimes referred to as the “East German Barbarella,” In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne) is one of the strangest films to grace the movie screens of the GDR; or anywhere else for that matter. Featuring a cast that hailed from a number of different Eastern European countries, In the Dust of …
Her Third
For all of the problems inherent in East Germany’s political system, one area where the East decidedly surpassed the West was in its attitude toward women in the workplace. While women in West Germany and America were still relegated—almost forcibly—to the home and kitchen, East Germany and the USSR were allowing women to work alongside …
The Legend of Paul and Paula
The late 1960s were a time of great changes in German Cinema. Starting with Volker Schlöndorff’s Young Törless (Der junge Törleß) and followed soon after by the almost experimental films of Fassbinder and Herzog, filmmaking in the West was experiencing a creative renaissance. In the GDR, filmmakers were still trying to maintain their artistic freedom, …
East German Cinema Blog 