Screening art : modernist aesthetics and the socialist imaginary in East German cinema / Sean Allan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allan, Seán, author.

Series:

Film Europa ; 20.

Film Europa ; 20

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Socialist realism in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Germany (East)--Aesthetics.

Motion pictures.

Socialism and motion pictures--Germany (East).

Socialism and motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Germany (East)--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (294 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York ; Oxford : Berghahn Books, 2019.

Summary:

With internationalist aspirations and wide-ranging historical perspectives, East German films about artists and their work became hotly contested spaces in which filmmakers could look beyond the GDR and debate the impact of contemporary cultural policy on the reception of their pre-war cultural heritage. Spanning newsreels, documentaries, and feature films, Screening Art is the first full-length investigation into a genre that has been largely overlooked in studies of DEFA, the state-owned Eastern German film studio. As it shows, “artist-films” played an essential role in the development of new paradigms of socialist art in postwar Europe.

Contents:

Introduction: texts and contexts

German classical humanism and the sovietisation of culture

Cosmopolitanism, formalism, and fantasies of national culture

Experiments in modernism I: from Bitterfeld to Barlach

Experiments in modernism II: responses to the eleventh plenum

New ways of seeing: Jurgen Bottcher and the transformation of tradition

The dialectic of Enlightenment and the romantic turn

Epilogue: art, exile and the socialist imaginary.

Notes:

Description based on: online resource; title from pdf title page (JSTOR, viewed on March 14, 2023).

ISBN:

1-80758-321-X

1-78533-968-0

OCLC:

1347246542