6 - Asynchronicity in DEFA's Last Feature: Architects, Goats, and Godot

Summary

In 1988 documentary filmmaker Jochen Kraußer directed a short contribution to the Kinobox films, a series of short films that ran before feature films in GDR movie theaters between 1982 and 1989, about the mass production of plaster busts, in this case of Karl Marx. The five-minute film, entitled Der Auftrag (The Task), documents in straightforward fashion how plaster heads are serially produced, polished, and painted. in a deadpan voice-over, the filmmaker comments dryly on the manufacturing process: “The heads must become hard and sturdy.” It is difficult not to grasp the bitterly satirical subtext of this comment in regard to life in the late GDR in general and the DEFA studio in particular. Jochen Kraußer had already delivered a polemical farce that expressed his deeply felt alienation regarding the conditions in the studio with his memorable short film Die Leuchtkraft der Ziege, which he described as a summative good-bye to all illusions about realizing the dream of freely making films in the DEFA studio. By 1987 he had abandoned any hope of some day gaining the freedom from petty censorship and bureaucratic obstacles to make films that contributed to an open discourse about current social and political issues. In a 1993 interview Kraußer suggested that the imminent collapse of the GDR was already obvious in 1987. It would have been interesting, he mused, to make a film in the DEFA cafeteria at that time.