DEFA
and Eastern European Cinemas
 July
7-13, 2003
Film Screening Schedule
Over twenty-five educators and researchers
from around the world will participate in a week of film screenings, workshops
and panel discussions with specialists in the field. Led by Professors Barton
Byg (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Eric Rentschler (Harvard), and
Katie Trumpener (Yale) and attended by directors Dietmar
Hochmuth and Vojtech Jasny.
The Institute
Participants
Structure
Film Screenings
Workshop Conveners
Guest Scholars
Location
Amenities
Contact Info
NEW!
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Workshop & Screening Schedule
NEW!
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Recommended Readings
The Institute
As new members join
the European Union and as Europe itself begins to function increasingly
as a joint unit, its center of gravity has been moving East. Indeed, the
East is what is new in the new Europe, and what is new in the united Germany.
In the second decade after reunification a new perspective on the long period
of the Cold War is now possible.
To what degree do the
master narratives and formal techniques developed by East German and Eastern
European filmmakers during the decades of socialism continue to inform their
vision of cinema, even now? Are the various nationalist cinemas of the former
socialist bloc still linked to each other and to their socialist pasts?
What are the institutional continuities and discontinuities within these
cinemas? What cultural dialogues took place -- and still take place -- between
nationalities and between present and past? Such questions form the background
of the DEFA Film Library’s second biannual East German Summer Film Institute,
DEFA and Eastern European Cinemas.
The workshop will simultaneously attempt
an interdisciplinary approach to national culture and history and foster
modes of analysis which transcend national boundaries.
In particular we will investigate the complicated relationship between the
GDR cinema and the cinemas of USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria
and Romania. Although they have distinct histories, throughout the Cold
War the cultures of Eastern Europe and East Germany were also intertwined.
Each crisis in one country had profound, yet varied, repercussions in all
the others. We will be looking not only at co-productions, shared personnel,
and overlapping professional networks but also at questions of aesthetic
influence, institutional parallels and political divergences.
Over the course of a week of film screenings
and workshop discussions we will touch on a wide range of film styles, and
on an equally wide range of historical issues, from the building of socialism,
Stalinization and de-Stalinization, to the Eastern European New Waves and
the effects of Glasnost and Perestroika on Eastern filmmaking.
Our goal is to help participants place
these cinematic traditions relationally, and to facilitate the development
of new curricula integrating the study of DEFA and Eastern European cinemas.
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Participants
Twenty-Five educators at the university/college
and secondary levels have been selected from over 50 applicants. Each participant
has had some experience teaching film and/or cultural studies, and would
like to integrate the cinemas of Eastern Europe and the GDR into their work.
As this week-long seminar is interdisciplinary in nature, the scholars come
from a variety of disciplines, such as Film Studies, German and Slavic Studies,
History, Communications, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology, Art,
Art History and Literature.
Structure
Each day's discussion will use the collective
analysis of specific films as a way into aesthetic, historical, political,
cultural and pedagogical issues. All discussions will be facilitated by
workshop conveners (Barton Byg, Eric Rentschler and Katie Trumpener), and
by guest scholars with particular expertise
in GDR and in Eastern European cinemas. Workshop themes are "Memory of Violence,"
"Youth and De-Stalinization," "The Return of History As Film," and "Degrees
of Dissent." See the
schedule.
Film Screenings
All screenings are free and open to
the public.
Monday,
July 7
7:00 pm, The Cranes are
Flying / Letyat zhuravli
(USSR,
1957, Mikhail Kalatozov, 97 min., b/w, 16mm)
Wright Hall Auditorium,
Smith College
A
radical beginning for Soviet and Eastern European cinema. A young woman
is separated from her fiancé, her innocence is lost in wartime reality.
She is raped, marries a man she does not love, and is evacuated to Siberia.
Yet she refuses to lose faith in her fiancé, even when she hears of his
death. The Palme d’Or Cannes winner launched Kalatozov’s career in
Soviet idealist filmmaking.
8:50 pm,
Sun Seekers / Sonnensucher
(GDR, 1958/1972, Konrad Wolf, 110 min., b/w, 16mm)
Wright Hall Auditorium,
Smith College
One of the first films of the post-Stalin “thaw,” Sun
Seekers was nonetheless banned at Soviet request from 1957 to 1972.
“Atoms for Peace,” from an Eastern perspective, this was one of Konrad Wolf’s
most important films. Echos of Pabst’s Kameradschaft combine with
a “wild west” atmosphere, political controversy and German-Soviet mistrust
in a post-WW II uranium mining camp.
Tuesday,
July 8
2:00 pm,
The Passenger / Pasazerka (Poland,
1963, Andrzej Munk & Witold Lesiewicz, 62 min, b/w, 35mm)
Academy of Music, Northampton
A
great film by a genius of the Polish cinema of the ‘60s, Andrzej Munk, who
remains too little known only because he died young. On a cruise ship following
World War II, a former camp overseer recognizes someone who may or may not
have been one of her prisoners in Auschwitz. This chance meeting triggers
a series of flashbacks that ultimately speak to the complexities of domination
and suffering, but also to the possibilities for resistance.
3:40 pm,
Transport from Paradise
/ Transport Z Raje
(Czech, 1963, Zbynek Brynych, 93 min., b/w, VHS projection)
Wright Hall Auditorium,
Smith College
While
outwardly a seeming paradise for prominent musicians, artists, and intellectuals,
the Terezin ghetto was actually a way station to Auschwitz. This film
illuminates the conflict between appearance and reality in Terezin (or Theresienstadt),
as it captures the preparations for a visit by the Red Cross, the making
of a propaganda film featuring its happy and healthy inhabitants, and the
ensuing deportation. Based on the book “Night and Hope.”
7:30 pm,
Stars / Sterne
(GDR &
Bulgaria,
1959, Konrad Wolf, 92 min., b/w, 16mm)
Wright Hall Auditorium,
Smith College
Stars
is set in a Bulgarian transit camp during the Third Reich where thousands
of Greek Sephardic Jews await transport to Auschwitz. The film explores
the ambiguities of persecution in a hopeless love story between a German
officer and an imprisoned Jewish teacher. With a script by Angel Wagenstein
(who also adapted Feuchtwanger’s Goya), Stars established
Konrad Wolf’s international reputation. A Bulgarian / East German
coproduction, it won the Special Grand Jury Prize of the 1959 Cannes Film
Festival, where, for political reasons, it was billed as a Bulgarian film.
Wednesday, July
9
1:45 pm,
Structure of Crystals / Struktura krysztalu
(Poland, 1969,
Krzystof Zanussi, 74 min., b/w, 35mm)
Academy of Music, Northampton
Krzysztof
Zanussi’s debut feature tells the story of a metropolitan member of the
scientific elite who meets with a reclusive old friend to convince him to
return to the city and resume his scientific work. “It was the first of
a series of films [by Zanussi] that look at the scientific community [mainly
uncharted territory in the cinema except for science fiction] to make general
philosophical points” (The Faber Companion to Foreign Films).
3:10 pm,
Father / Apa
(Hungary,
1966, István Szabó, 98 min., b/w, 35mm)
Academy of Music, Northampton
This sensitive, intelligent
study of adolescence and maturation focuses on a young man whose defense
mechanism consists of idealizing the memory of his dead father. One of the
key films of the Hungarian film renaissance, Father is a daring,
emotionally charged film. By the director of Colonel Redl, Mephisto
and Sunshine.
7:30 pm, Born in 45 / Jahrgang
45 (GDR, 1966/90,
Jürgen Boettcher, 94 min., b/w, 16mm)
Wright Hall Auditorium,
Smith College
Alfred and Lisa, a young couple living in the Prenzlauer Berg district of
Berlin, have only been married a couple of months but decide to divorce.
Alfred takes a few days off to clear his head, riding through Berlin and
meeting friends and strangers. He ultimately returns to Lisa, perhaps a
good omen, but the ending remains open. The only feature film by the painter
and documentary filmmaker, Jürgen Böttcher, Born in ‘45 captures,
with its rhythm, its lacunae, and its disposition, the life of 20-year-olds
in Prenzlauer Berg and translates it into an elementary world language.
Banned in 1966, the film was first shown in cinemas in the spring of 1990.
Thursday,
July 10
2:00 pm,
Location Hunting / Motivsuche
(GDR, 1990, Dietmar Hochmuth, 112 min., color, 35mm)
Director Dietmar Hochmuth Present
Academy of Music, Northampton
The story of a documentary
film maker who begins a new project: Rüdiger Stein films Klaus and
Manuela, young expectant parents, for a film on “Starting a Family”.
As the project threatens to fall apart, Rüdiger becomes personally involved
in this family-to-be when, after the death of Klaus’s father, Rüdiger steps
in as his guardian. Thanks to his experiences with Klaus and Manuela,
Rüdiger is able to face his work and his life with open eyes. Released
in 1990, this is one of the last DEFA films.
4:30 pm,
Innocence Unprotected
/ Nevinost bez zastite
(Yugoslavia, 1968, Dusan Makavejev, 75 min., color & b/w,
VHS projection)
Wright Hall Auditorium, Smith College
In 1942 Innocence Unprotected debuted as the first Serbian talkie.
Over 20 years later, Dusan Makavejev retrieved the film from the archives,
tinted many of the sequences by hand, and interviewed the original cast
and crew in present day Yugoslavia 1968. The resulting cinematic collage
is a funny and daring (in both content and form) mix of a wide variety of
film footage – including documentary, narrative, agitprop, and various other
bits and pieces of found footage.
7:30 pm,
Man of Marble / Czlowiek
z Marmuru (Poland,
1976, Andrej Wajda, 160 min., color & b/w, DVD projection)
Wright Hall Auditorium, Smith College
Thirteen years in the making, Wajda’s film caused packed houses to rise
and sing the Polish national anthem when it finally premiered in Poland
in 1977. Denied entrance at Cannes by Polish authorities, it played nonetheless
at a commercial theatre there and won the International Critics’ Prize.
Man of Marble is the story of a young filmmaker trying to reconstruct
a truthful picture of the Stalinist past, a past obscured by 20 years of
shifting propaganda.
Friday,
July 11
1:45 pm,
Daisies / Sedmikrasky
(Czech, 1966, Vera Chytilová, 74 min., color, DVD projection)
Wright Hall Auditorium, Smith College
In this key film from the Czech New Wave, two uninhibited young women (both
named Marie) turn against the numbing state of society in a madcap flurry
of pranks and material destruction. Beneath the outrageous surface of this
avant-garde comedy is a defiant feminist statement and an acknowledgement
of the desperation that goes hand-in-hand with rebellion – a state of mind
represented by one girl’s attempted suicide. The film so unsettled Czech
government officials (and a great many other men) that its release was held
up for a year. “... the most adventurous and anarchic Czech movie of the
1960s” (The Faber Companion to Foreign Films).
3:20 pm,
Report on the Party and the Guests / O slavnosti a hostech (Czech, 1966,
Jan Nemec, 71 min., b/w, VHS projection)
Wright Hall Auditorium, Smith College
A miracle of the Czech New Wave, distinguished with being “banned forever”
shortly after it was completed. Voted one of the best films of the decade
by The New York Times, it is “an extraordinary allegory…evocative
of Kafka or Dostoevsky” (International Film Guide). A group of picnickers
are led to an elegant banquet, where the “guests” quickly turn collaborators
in this brilliant analysis of society and the individual.
4:45
pm, When You Grow Up, Dear Adam / Wenn du gross bist, lieber Adam
(GDR, 1965, Egon Günther, 72 min., color, 16mm)
Wright Hall Auditorium, Smith College
In a plot inspired by Cassandra Cat, a magical white swan gives nine-year-old
Adam a flashlight with special powers. When the flashlight is shined on
a liar, he flies up into the air. Banned in 1965 due to the sharp social
and political criticisms in the film, only the liar is partly disguised
in a fairy tale presentation. The production was stopped before the film
was completed, and only in 1989/90 was the director able to assemble a reconstructed
version. Missing sounds and images are replaced with inserts of the script.
8:00 pm,
Cassandra Cat / Az prijde kocour (Czech, 1963, Vojtech Jasny, 91 min.,
color, 35mm)
Director Vojtech Jasny Present
Sweeney Concert Hall, Sage Hall, Smith College
A small town is disrupted by a magical cat from a traveling circus who dons
special spectacles that sees people in their true colors. This enchanting
fairy tale and moving satire on hypocrisy and folly is a delight for people
of all ages. Winner of the Cannes Special Jury Prize.
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Workshop Conveners
Dr. Barton Byg, Founder
and Director of the DEFA Film Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Dr. Eric Rentschler, Professor
of German and Film Studies, Harvard University. Co-Director with Anton Kaes
of the German Summer Film Institutes and author of numerous publications
on German cinema, such as The Ministry of Illusion. Nazi Cinema and Its
Afterlife. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
Dr. Katie Trumpener, Professor
of English and Comparative Literature, Yale University. Author of numerous
publications in Anglophone and German Studies, such as the forthcoming book
The Divided Screen: the Cinemas of Postwar Germany (Princeton UP).
Guest Scholars
Dr. Oksana Bulgakova, Visiting
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University. Specialist
on Sergei Eisenstein, Russian exiles in Hollywood, and author of numerous
publications on Russian and Soviet cinema, such as two chapters in
the monograph Die Geschichte des sowjetischen und russischen Films (The
History of the Russian and Soviet Film): The Film of the Thaw, 1954–1968;
The New conservatism, 1969–1985. Ed. Chrtistine Engel. Stuttgart: Metzler,
1999.
Dr. Dina Iordanova, Reader
in Film Studies/History of Art at the University of Leicester, UK. Author
and editor of numerous publications on Russian and Balkan cinemas, such
as The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema. London:
British Film Institute, 2000 and Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture
and the Media. London: British Film Institute, 2001.
Dr. Catherine Portuges,
Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies, Associate Professor
of Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts Amherst. International
authority on Balkan film and author of many publications, such as Screen
Memories: The Hungarian Cinema of Marta Meszaros. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1993.
Dr. Erika Richter, Film
Scholar, Historian, and former DEFA Dramaturge, Berlin, Germany. Prominent
DEFA historian, former editor of Film und Fernsehen and current editor
of the DEFA-Jahrbuch.
Ralf Schenk, Independent
Film Scholar, Historian, and Restorer, Berlin, Germany. Prominent DEFA historian,
author and co-editor of numerous publications, including the authoritative
DEFA-overview Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg 1946-1992.
Berlin and Potsdam: Henschel and Filmmuseum Potsdam, 1994. Currently
co-editor with Erika Richter of DEFA-Jahrbuch.
Mark Svede, Art Historian
and Curator, Independent Scholar, Ohio. International authority on Latvian,
Estonian and Lithuanian visual arts, author of several publications and
museum exhibition catalogs, he was volume editor
for the Latvian component of a four-volume catalog
Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic
Expression under the Soviets, 1945-1991. 2002.
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Location
Located
in the beautiful Connecticut River valley of Western Massachusetts, the
Pioneer Valley is home not only to the University of Massachusetts, but
also to Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges. The Connecticut
River Valley is also full of hiking trails, scenic drives, fine restaurants,
interesting bookstores and shops, museums, galleries, movie theaters and
concert halls. We are located just east of the Berkshire hills, a two-hour
drive west of Boston and 3½ hour drive north of New York City.
Amenities
The event, organized by the DEFA Film Library
of University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be held at the Smith College
campus in Northampton, Massachusetts, where participants will be housed
in single, air-conditioned rooms in a dormitory. Participants will arrive
Monday, July 7 and depart by noon Sunday, July 13. There
will be a catered reception on Monday evening of the 7th, and a dinner and
dance party on Saturday night, the 12th.
Contact Info
Please submit inquiries to:
Betheny Moore, Event Organizer
DEFA Film Library
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
521 Herter Hall
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003-3925
filmtour@german.umass.edu
Tel: 413-545-6685
Fax: 413-577-3808
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