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Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 01:55 authored by Thomas AustinThomas Austin
In this essay I draw on close textual analysis to consider the interface between film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel / Divided Heaven (1964) and Solo Sunny (1979). Both films focus on women who have to confront painful processes of self realisa-tion in specifically East German contexts. They also show Wolf and his collaborators working in two very different modes, from a nouvelle vague-inspired mix of location shooting and self-conscious formal artifice to a more laconic style and mobile camera that borrow from documentary aesthetics. Viewed from the perspective of today, the films resist the reductive stereotyping of what Christa Wolf in 1991 called the 'phantom' East Germany, and offer a more productive haunting. As living ghosts in the post-reunification era, they are a reminder of the necessity of remembering, and so confound both a negative 'master narrative' of the GDR and a collective amnesia with no interest in this history.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Studies in Eastern European Cinema

ISSN

2040-350X

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

3

Volume

7

Page range

274-286

Department affiliated with

  • Media and Film Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-06-28

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-02-24

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-06-28

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