Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 17, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The event takes place on November 19, 2009, at 17:00 in the cinema auditorium at HFF “Konrad Wolf” (Marlene-Dietrich-Allee 11, 14482 Potsdam). Admission is free.
The GDR has long since become history, yet our visual memory still draws on images and motifs that significantly shaped East German documentary filmmaking and recall a vanished society. Some of the films made across four decades remained in memory; others were forgotten or gather dust in archives.
While some documentary filmmakers at the time served the GDR and created images of history intended to support its ideological self-positioning and the formation of a historically grounded GDR identity, others tried to examine life and people in the first socialist German state more closely.
After 1989, many East German filmmakers felt called upon to document and reflect on the comprehensive political and social changes. The so-called “Wende films”, as well as later documentaries about the GDR, perform active memory work, collecting and preserving fragments and deconstructing the myths of both historiography and personal memory.
The recently published anthology DDR erinnern, vergessen. Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms, edited by Tobias Ebbrecht, Hilde Hoffmann and Jörg Schweinitz, takes a fresh look at familiar and almost forgotten documentaries from and about the GDR, accounting both for historical change and for the possibilities and limits of documentary film’s function as memory.
The new publication provides an occasion for a discussion among authors and filmmakers about the distinctive features of GDR documentary filmmaking. It will explore the difficulties of penetrating social reality through documentary work, as well as the possibilities of using the medium with critical intent. It will also address how today’s generations view documentaries from and about the GDR and what they discover in them.
Expected panel guests are director, HFF professor and academy member Helke Misselwitz; cinematographer Peter Badel, who holds a visiting professorship at HFF; documentary filmmaker and HFF professor Dr Kerstin Stutterheim; film historian and GDR-film expert Dr Günter Agde; and Dr Ralf Forster of the Potsdam Film Museum. Tobias Ebbrecht, research associate for media history and co-editor, will moderate the discussion.
The documentary “Sperrmüll” (Germany, 1991) by Helke Misselwitz will be screened afterwards. “Sperrmüll” is the name of four boys who grew up in Berlin’s newly built housing silos and drum out their discontent on objects discarded by others. What began as a portrait of a group of young musicians in early summer 1989 unexpectedly developed, through documentary observation, into a portrait of the political transition.
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