Regional film culture in Brandenburg: the film archive of HFF "Konrad Wolf"

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Wahl
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2013 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 227522628

The research focus Regional film culture in Brandenburg is part of the larger Heisenberg Professorship for Audiovisual Heritage. Questions of audiovisual heritage are examined here in the form of an exemplary microanalysis of a regional film culture using concrete case studies. The subprojects are related to the cooperation between the Film University and Film Museum Potsdam. The HFF Konrad Wolf Film Archive (now: Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF) is one of the case studies with respect to the investigation of the regional film culture. It is home to approximately 4,000 student films that have arisen at the institution since its founding in 1954. The HFF is the oldest German film school and was the only training centre for East German filmmakers during the communist era; its film stock, which includes the entire student film heritage of the DEFA, is of some film-historical significance and will be scientifically evaluated for the first time within the project. It is primarily a contextualisation of the East German student films within the European film culture, which is first and foremost against a backdrop of relative freedom offered by the film school in Babelsberg. And to which, among others, the availability of films from throughout the international history of film and the current, especially European, developments in film, also belonged as an opportunity to experiment with the corresponding cinematic ideas. It's in this space that the first films by directors such as Jürgen Böttcher, Kurt Tetzlaff, Volker Koepp, Petra Tschörtner, and Andreas Dresen came to be and with them created different designs for a renewal of East German cinema. First and foremost, the project aims to prove the links between the European film culture from the 1950s to 1980s, beginning with borrowings from Italian Neorealism and continuing in various appropriations of auteur cinema from Eastern and Western Europe. Secondly, it seeks to work out the approaches typical among authors and film school to its own cinematic positions that emerged in the wake of the borrowings and beyond that, in response to ideologically motivated guidelines and censorship. Film historical and film aesthetic narratives and concepts will be developed that make it possible to not only look at the student beginnings of East German cinema in a perspective limited to the GDR, as has been customary for a long time in the DEFA research, but to also make it legible as a contoured portion of European film history and culture.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants