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 …
Ursula
“Transgressive” is not a word one often uses to describe films from the GDR. With an industry so closely monitored, it was rare for a genuinely shocking film to get past the authorities, but Ursula is just such a film. To make it even more shocking, it was made for television. Ursula is directed by Egon Günther, …
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 …
Midnight Revue
Communist musicals are in a class by themselves. So much so that in 1997, filmmaker Dana Ranga made them the subject of her fascinating documentary East Side Story—required viewing for anyone interested in the films of the GDR or other Eastern Bloc countries. In a world as grim and gray as East Germany could be, …
The Kaiser’s Lackey
The Kaiser’s Lackey is based on a book by Heinrich Mann. The actual title, Der Untertan, doesn’t translate well into English. As a consequence, it's been rendered variously as The Patrioteer, The Loyal Subject, The Man of Straw, and The Underdog. IMDB calls it The Man of Straw, which does have a poetic quality to …
Marriage in the Shadows
Like Stars and Jakob the Liar, Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten) deals with the subject of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Unlike those films, however, this one came out in 1947, when the Nuremberg Trials were still going on and new revelations about atrocities at the concentration camps were arriving every day. The people …
Goya
Epic is not a term one often uses with East German movies. As a rule, DEFA's films stay on a human scale, charting life’s courses for ordinary people. Even the Märchenfilme (fairy tale films), while often dealing with fantastical kingdoms and imaginary worlds, keep the scale down to everyday proportions. But Goya or the Hard …
Seven Freckles
Seven Freckles (Sieben Sommersprossen) is the story of the love affair between Karoline and Robbi—two fifteen-year-olds who had been close two years earlier and meet up again at summer camp. Standing in their way is Marlene, an attractive but self-absorbed girl who also has the hots for Robbi. When one of the camp counselors decides …
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 …
Motoring Tales
Motoring Tales is the title translation used for this film by both the DEFA Library at UMass Amherst and Progress Film-Verleih in Germany. The actual title, Automärchen, works better in German. They could have just as easily called it Car Fables, or Auto Stories. If I were a lazy film critic/studio marketing wonk, I would …
East German Cinema Blog 