2 - “Film Must Fidget”: DEFA's Untimely Poets

Summary

DEFA does not generally evoke notions of avant-garde film art— not just for dismissive Western critics and audiences after German unification but equally among GDR artists and viewers. Director Herwig Kipping, himself trained in Babelsberg, had already clearly stated this in his diploma thesis, Poesie und Film, in 1982:

Film is highly developed and diverse in all socialist states; socialist film art is a leader on the international stage. Only the GDR is a disreputable exception. Our films are boring, musty, and provincial. Film here has to yet achieve its active importance as artistic mass media; a new generation with bolder and more meaningful concepts is needed. Where is the avant-garde? Where are the poets of film?

Kipping and his generation of DEFA directors, sometimes referred to as the fourth (and last) generation or Nachwuchsgeneration tried to heed this call for a new aesthetic. the 1988 manifesto for the fifth congress of film and television workers (Verband für Film und Fernsehschaffende, VFF) that had requested more freedom and experimentation for younger film artists in the DEFA studio only expressed collectively for the last generation what slightly older directors such as Ulrich Weiß had struggled for in their individual careers. Rather than fulfilling genre expectations, Weiß developed a visual language that created visceral cinematic experiences, through evocative visuals, exacting camera work, and unusual soundtracks instead of didactic dialogue and explanatory voice-overs. His superiors considered the resulting interpretive ambiguity as aesthetically too open and thus politically diffuse.