Winter 2006

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Silver-Screen Rebels UMass’ East German film collection is centerpiece of landmark retrospective

Gerhard Klein’s 1957 film Berlin - Ecke Schoenhauser (Berlin - Schoenhauser Corner) is about a group of disenfranchised teenagers who meet daily at the train tracks on Schoenhauser Street in East Berlin. It was one of 21 feature films from the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst showcased at a MoMA retrospective late last year. EAST GERMAN FILMS FROM THE DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst were featured at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) last October. The series of 21 films, entitled “Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany,” is the most comprehensive retrospective of East German films ever screened in the United States. “Rebels” is now touring theaters and film and art museums in the United States, Canada, and Germany. Last November, the library was awarded a 5,000 euro Program Prize from the DEFA Foundation in Berlin for the retrospective, calling it a “a high point for the post-unification representation of this cinema.” DEFA is the acronym for the state-owned film studios of the GDR, the former East Germany, which produced over 750 feature films and thousands of documentaries between 1946 and 1990. The DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst (DFL) got its inception during and after director Barton Byg’s Fulbright year in the GDR in 1988-89. “After German unification, we worked with the government agency privatizing the East German economy, as well as the international distributors of the films before and after unification, to secure the films and make them more available for teaching and research,” explains Byg. He has been teaching East German film since he was a graduate student in the 1970s. Since then, DFL has forged agreements with many partners for distribution and outreach. The DFL opened in Herter Hall in 1998, the only East German cinema archive and study center outside Europe. Several events supplemented the MoMA screenings, including “Lost in Unification—Placing East German Film in World Cinema,” moderated by Byg, and a screening of a new DVD release of the 1963 Naked Among Wolves, one of the most significant German films to treat the subject of resistance within a Nazi concentration camp. Films are available for rent and purchase in a variety of formats through the DEFA Film Library, www.umass.edu/defa.

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