From the Erzgebirge to Eigensinn

What institutional, aesthetic, and political factors birthed East Germany’s particularly inflexible, antiformalist style of socialist realism? How did filmmakers square the circle of ideologically compliant surfaces and aesthetically resistant substrates coexisting in the same work? Taking Konrad Wolf’s controversial 1959/1972 film Sun Seekers as a center point, this talk will chart the structures, strictures, and resistant impulses of East German vernacular cinema, from its major studio productions to its minor underground practices.

Danny Pinto is a joint PhD candidate in the departments of Germanic Studies and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where he is preparing a dissertation on marginal corpuses and practices of the East German moving image. His work on the moving image culture of the GDR has been published in Film History and is forthcoming in the German Studies Review and the Bombay Film Colour Project.

 

This talk will also be live streamed on Zoom