NEWS Scene from What Would Happen If?
Academics

DEFA Screenings at the Pacific Film Archive and Cinémathèque Québécoise this Month

The newly digitally restored East German film “WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF…?” (1960, dir. Gerhard Klingenberg) will be screened this month as part of the groundbreaking film series Cinema of the Absurd: Eastern European Film 1958-89. The DEFA Film Library is proud to present this farce that imagines the relocation of a village from East to West Germany.

The Cinema of the Absurd retrospective includes thirteen films from Eastern European countries, most of which were never shown in North America. After its premiere at the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California Berkeley (Jan. 12 - Feb. 25), the series will screen at the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal (Feb. 6-19).

The series curator, Gabriel M. Paletz (Prague Film School, Czech Republic), said of the retrospective: “These films evoke the liberties that Eastern Europeans only intermittently enjoyed in the twentieth century and that again feel fragile in the twenty-first. Glossy or stark, scathing and playful, these movies express the ludicrousness of authoritarian rule through creative varieties of absurdity.”

Read more about the screening: https://bampfa.org/program/cinema-absurd-eastern-european-film-1958-89 https://www.cinematheque.qc.ca/en/cycles/absurde-de-lest/