The Films of Konrad Wolf: Archive of the Revolution: 22 (Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual) - Hardcover

Powell, Professor Larson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1640140727 ISBN 13: 9781640140721

Publisher: Camden House, 2020

Synopsis

This is the first book in English on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925-1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context. Konrad Wolf (1925-1982) was East Germany's greatest filmmaker and also an influential public figure in his country's political and cultural life. As artist and representative of the GDR, he had to perform a complex balancing act between aesthetic conscience and political function, not unlike Brecht. His work covers almost the whole lifespan of the GDR, in a range of filmic styles and genres, from musicals to antifascist films to films of everyday life. This book, the first in English on Wolf's entire oeuvre, proposes that we understand his work as an archive both of his own personal experience and of the ideology of socialism, embedded in self-reflexive filmic forms and generic references that put Wolf in the vicinity of other filmmakers like Fassbinder, Wajda, and Tarkovsky. The book's comparativist dimension, as well as its larger examination of the problems of a politically committed artist in state socialism, will make it of interest to all readers concerned with late-twentieth-century film history, art under socialism, and the history of East Germany and Eastern Europe.

About this title

About the Author

Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Edition details

• Publisher: Camden House
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1640140727
• ISBN 13: 9781640140721
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320