The East German film studio, DEFA, was founded in May 1946. During the first few years in post-war Germany, it was literally the only game in town. While the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) in the west dragged its feet on film production (mostly at the behest of Hollywood), the east got the …
Category: WWII
The Gleiwitz Case
The Gleiwitz Case (Der Fall Gleiwitz) is director Gerhard Klein’s 1961 film about an event in southern Poland that was used by Hitler to start World War II. Hitler knew he couldn’t start a war without provocation, and since none was forthcoming, he did what any good tyrant would do: he created one. After all, …
I Was Nineteen
Whether it’s Spielberg exploring the social dynamics of suburban children in E.T., or Paul Verhoeven recreating the horrors of war in Starship Troopers, a director inevitably brings some of his or her own past to a picture. Every so often, a filmmaker makes a movie that is completely personal. These run the gamut, from George …
The Architects
How a film fares at the box office is highly dependent on when it's released. A movie that will one day be recognized as a cinematic treasure might bomb miserably upon release simply because it wasn’t what people wanted to see at that time. A classic example of this is Billy Wilder’s Ace in the …
The Second Track
Film noir is not a term that is usually associated with East German cinema. It is used most often when discussing the Warner Brothers crime films of the 1940s. Noir comes with certain rules that must be followed. The main ones are: characters whose complexity keeps them from falling into easily identifiable categories of good …
Stars
For its first 25 years, two things kept the rest of the world from learning that East Germany was producing some of the best films in Europe. First was the country’s unfortunate tendency to ban its directors’ best efforts. Films such as The Axe of Wandsbek, Sun Seekers, Born in ‘45, and The Rabbit is …
Sun Seekers
In 1947, the Soviets began their mining operations in the Schlema Valley in the southeastern region of Saxony. They called their mining company “Wismut,” the German word for bismuth, because they didn’t want the U.S. to know they were really mining uranium. After what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Russians wanted to make sure …
Rotation
As its title suggests, a recurring image throughout Rotation is the wheel. The wheel in this case appears in various forms, from the cylinders of the printing press that act as the film’s Greek chorus, to the carousel at a fair where Hans Behneke, the film’s protagonist, is forced to work during the Weimar Republic’s …
The Axe of Wandsbeck
When reviewing the post-war films of East Germany (or West Germany, for that matter), there is a tendency to temper one’s reviews by limiting any comparisons to the other German films of the same era. That is to say, you can write lots of nice things about these films, but just don’t compare them to …
Carbide and Sorrel
By the early 1960s, the Cold War was hotter than ever. The Cuban revolution in 1959, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 led to a situation where people on both sides of the Iron Curtain were expecting World War III to start at any minute. So …
East German Cinema Blog 