Screening Art: Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema by Seán Allen

Abstract

 Reviews Schopenhauer, and Klee as well as on Kaa. While these analyses show neatly how there can be contagion between style and ideas, it would have been good to have a clearer sense of whether style is to be understood as a kind of supplementary embellishment of an idea or constitutive of it (and the implications of this for the stylistic idiosyncrasies of her own critical language—what might it mean to ‘excavate’ a critique (p. ), for instance, or for forces to be ‘virulent’ (p. )?). In her chapters on narrative prose, too, the discussions that properly contributed to her main argument in the end pertained for the most part to representations of (mostly human) uprightness, weight, falling, and so on, as opposed to aspects of form or style. Vernon Lee, as an adherent of empathy aesthetics who applied this approach to literature, could have made a helpful ally when addressing the slippage between metaphorical and literal ‘lightness’ (etc.). Maskarinec could also have made more of the idea that in thinking about literature, the analogue of Klee’s upright human viewers is not Franz Biberkopf or Gregor Samsa (who is, aer all, on Mark Anderson’s reading the ‘incarnation of aesthetic form’ (Maskarinec, p. )); it is the reader, who is, as she suggests (p. ), ‘embodied, bipedal, and energetic’, and whose physical engagement with writing and print, as with sculpture or painting, was, at the time, of heightened interest. S H’ C, O R C Screening Art: Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema. By S A. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. .  pp.£. ISBN ––––. Seán Allen has devoted a lot of his professional career to contributing to the establishment of research on East German film, and most notably on the state-owned film company DEFA. In all of these works, in particular DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and international Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, ) and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (New York: Berghahn, , with Sebastian Heiduschke), he not only sought to appreciate DEFA films for their aesthetic value within the system of one-party state socialism, but also to incorporate these analyses of individual films within wider aesthetic and political trends. With his latest book, Allen continues this path of establishing East German film studies as a subdiscipline, this time with a more specialized focus on the genre of Künstlerfilme, or artists’ films. As he summarizes in the Conclusion, ‘[f]ocussing on the East German Künstlerfilm not only throws light on the development of the careers of directors such as Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, Ralf Kirsten and Herwig Kipping, but at the same time opens up new perspectives on how we might approach DEFA and GDR culture generally’ (p. ). Accordingly, he has opted for a cultural-history approach that would allow him to reflect on the contribution of art to the building of a socialist society. Borrowing from Charles Taylor, Allen speaks of the ‘Socialist Imaginary’, in contrast to pure social theory, in order to make use of a structure that can be applied to something MLR, .,   that is shared by a much larger group of people than just experts. By socialist imaginary, Allen refers to the ‘way ordinary people “imagine” socialist society and seek to articulate this not in theoretical documents, but rather in terms of a set of images, stories, legends and other cultural products, including, above all, film’ (p. ). rough this, he argues that at the various junctures in the history of pre-war and post-war cinema, shiing paradigms in the fields of art and aesthetics impacted upon the socialist imaginary of the GDR. e role of the DEFA Künstlerfilm in both mediating and articulating such transformations is the subject of this study (p. ). Because of the strong similarities to the Künstlernovelle, many artists’ biographies produced by DEFA are not merely straightforward biographies but ‘treat the central protagonist as a fictionalised construct and as a springboard for an extended discussion of aesthetics and the role of art in socialist society’ (p. ). Choosing to write a cultural history of DEFA Künstlerfilme, furthermore, lends itself...