Chapter 5 - Consuming Fashion on the Screens of the Early 1950s: Modell Bianka (1951), Frauenschicksale (1952), and Ingrid: Die Geschichte eines Fotomodells (1955)

Summary

THIS LAST CHAPTER revisits three films from the early 1950s—two DEFA productions and one West German work—that all took exception to the general trends in filmmaking in their respective industries and engaged in critical ways with the realities that it was their intention to address. More specifically, however, they engaged with the realities of the rise and establishment of postwar consumer culture in Germany on both sides of the Cold War divide.

In 1991, the unification of East and West Germany led to the dissolution of the DEFA studio in East Berlin, forty-five years after its founding. On the eve of this event, the East Berlin cinema Babylon organized a retrospective called “The Early Years, back then in Berlin” (“Frühe Jahre—damals in Berlin”). In a press release from April 15, 1991, the organizers emphasized their preference for stories of everyday life in the city that defied the strict ideological divide between East and West. Thus, they stressed, the 1951 Modell Bianka, “a unique DEFA film about the early development of the fashion industry in the German Democratic Republic,” was a perfect match for the series (it was screened on April 23, 1991). Yet this was not the first time that the film had been included in a commemorative retrospective. In 1979, Modell Bianka was re-released as part of the series “30 Stories for the 30th Anniversary” (“30 Geschichten zum 30. Jahrestag”) of the founding of the German Democratic Republic. It was shown along with Slatan Dudow's Frauenschicksale (Destinies of Women, 1952), a film that was made just a year later and was considered to be one of the “aesthetically most important films” of the time, according to the same 1979 re-release protocol. Both works were included in the anniversary retrospective in 1979: set in the fashion industry, both works reflected “women's yearnings in the first postwar years” and were considered worthy of a second look as valuable cultural documents.

In the context of West German filmmaking of the early 1950s, a comparable film is Ingrid: Die Geschichte eines Fotomodells (Ingrid: The Story of a Fashion Model, 1955, directed by Géza von Radvanyi), also set for the most part in the fashion industry.