Screening art: modernist aesthetics and the socialist imaginary in East German cinema

Introduction: texts and contexts -- German classical humanism and the sovietisation of culture -- Cosmopolitanism, formalism, and fantasies of national culture -- Experiments in modernism I: from Bitterfeld to Barlach -- Experiments in modernism II: responses to the eleventh plenum -- New ways of seeing: Jurgen Bottcher and the transformation of tradition -- The dialectic of Enlightenment and the romantic turn -- Epilogue: art, exile and the socialist imaginary.;With internationalist aspirations and wide-ranging historical perspectives, East German films about artists and their work became hotly contested spaces in which filmmakers could look beyond the GDR and debate the impact of contemporary cultural policy on the reception of their pre-war cultural heritage. Spanning newsreels, documentaries, and features, Screening Art is the first full-length investigation into a genre that has often been overlooked in studies of DEFA, the state-owned Eastern German film studio. As it shows, "art films" in fact played an essential role in the development of new paradigms of socialist art in postwar Europe.