Abstract
During the 1960s the East German state-controlled film studio DEFA drastically increased their production of popular genre films. This development was propelled by the competition from an unrelenting flow of western radio- and television signals transgressing the Berlin Wall. These East German genre films took their iconographical cues from the commercial genres of Western Europe and Hollywood, but filled the forms with appropriate socialist content.In this article I investigate this appropriation of internationally established film genres in the GDR as a point of convergence between the transsystemic discourse of popular culture and the strong isolationist efforts of the GDR state. Through empirically informed close analysis of the musical Heißer Sommer and the western Spur des Falken, I aim to show how these very awkward negotiations between isolation and integration led to a reinvention of the genres in question, and how this process can be traced in the films' narratives.
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