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Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts. Ed. by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 54, Issue 3, July 2018, Page 376, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqy040
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This edited volume takes in chapters by fifteen contributors on four strands of cultural exchange around DEFA films. All contributions are published for the first time in English; only one chapter has appeared previously in German. The editors introduce DEFA’s displacement from a mere national cinema as being sustained by globalized scholarship. Chapters of around twenty pages offer new comparisons within and beyond DEFA’s output, building a convincing case across the volume that DEFA output embeds creative dialogue. Chronological and thematic considerations determine the collection’s careful ordering, which facilitates linear reading, from the first chapter on scales of production and spectatorship (Rosemary Stott) to the last section on legacies of DEFA and nation. Endnotes for each chapter are rich in intertextual comparisons and are not excessive in volume. Transnational contextualization in the second section (pp. 83-188) is especially diverse, both geographically and thematically. Its chapters take in European co-production strategies (Mariana Ivanova), identity politics of treatments of East Asia (Qinna Shen), and Dean Reed’s embodiment in the GDR of American alterity (Seán Allan). This section also contains one of two chapters that concentrates primarily on non-DEFA films: the Chile cycle produced by the breakaway Studio H&S between 1974 and 1979 (Dennis Hanlon). The section on ‘Genre and Popular Cinema’ (pp. 191-267) includes chapters on opera (Sabine Hake), science fiction (Sonja Fritzsche), ‘Red Westerns’ (Evan Torner), and children’s films (Benita Blessing). The volume’s concluding chapter (by Daniela Berghahn) is the second to analyse non-DEFA films: in this case, two canonical films from the current century about the GDR, which are read as projections of the afterlife of DEFA. An error on p. 327, towards the end of this chapter and the book, classifies the closing music of the film Barbara (2012) as a ‘cover version of [a] 1980s song’: it is, in fact, performed by its original artists of 1978. Key German terminology is explained evenly across the discussions in the volume. Monochrome screenshots are integrated into several chapters. An extensive bibliography and a reliable index are provided.
