Abstract
On the occasion of a publication Sie – Regisseurinnen der DEFA und ihre Filme, Berlin, Schriftenreihe der DEFA-Stiftung, 2019, all female directors who worked for the DEFA studios in the GDR were identified for the first time. More than sixty women directors worked for DEFA between 1946 and 1992. They made feature films and documentaries, worked in advertising film and in the animation studio. Particularly among the smaller formats, there is a striking number of female directors who were able to accommodate their preferred themes in the slipstream of the major productions. They problematized the official reading of equal rights and created counter-images in their figures and portraits. To be added to the canon of female filmmaking are also the independent women filmmakers, who were only allowed to realize and show their works outside the official media structures. These were female artists who discovered the film medium for themselves and made Super-8 abstract films with elements of performance on very low budgets.
Highlights
Apart from the fact that a certain ignorance of the arts in the GDR still exists in principle, we have identified 64 female directors
The book is an inventory, and a pioneering work because all the women directors of the DEFA studio were researched and we created their first filmography for the vast majority of them
Just as most of the GDR industries was handled by the Treuhand-Commission in the 1990s, a federal trust to administrate large East German companies and real estate, the Animation Film Studio was dissolved without comprehensible reasons
Summary
The book is an inventory, and a pioneering work because all the women directors of the DEFA studio were researched and we created their first filmography for the vast majority of them. For such a venture with such thoroughness, an institution like the DEFA-Stiftung is indispensable as support and benefactor. The premise of our publication was not to focus only on feature film, which is usually treated as a “premium discipline”, but to include documentaries, advertising and animated films on equal footing All of these films were created under the roof of DEFA in various studios. In projects where smaller budgets were allocated, it has often been easier for the women directors to reveal their themes and their narrative style
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