7 - The Desire to Be Desired? Solo Sunny as Socialist Woman's Film

Summary

SOLO SUNNY (1980), Konrad Wolf's last completed film, is significant not only within the director's oeuvre, but also in the history of DEFA film as a whole. It marks both a generic breakthrough for a director otherwise better known for his antifascist films of the Second World War, and also the tail end of a group of late-1960s and 1970s DEFA woman's films, and the last gasp of the final brief period of liberal cultural policy in the GDR at the end of the 1970s. That fleeting window of liberalization, moreover, ended right at the time the film premiered, so that its reception and unusually lively public discussion were choked off before they could properly develop. The emigration of the film's starring actress, Renate Krosner, to West Germany only a few years later (1985) further diminished its public resonance, for those who “fled the republic” immediately became personae non gratae, put under a ban of public silence, once they left.

The film thus offers an unusual wealth of interpretative problems in terms of production (its aesthetic form) and of reception and spectatorship. It can be read both generically, as a melodrama and star vehicle, and also sociologically, as an intervention (Eingriff) into public discourse on women and private life. The “local genre” of the woman's film, in its ambiguous relation to melodrama and star vehicle, will be seen as the vehicle for this intervention, as the ground where questions of form and reception intersect. As will become evident, some of the formal and generic questions raised by the film can only be answered through its reception. Other tensions or contradictions may be illuminated by a comparative look at a recent debate on public and private politics (Judith Butler's influential reading of Antigone).

Although it is possible to view Wolf's film through an auteurist lens, what follows will seek to complement such attention to the immanent surface of the film with its reception history. Documenting that history is, in the case of the GDR, much more difficult than with Hollywood or New German Cinema, since public discussion of films was so highly regulated and even manipulatively staged by the state.