Introduction

Summary

IN FEBRUARY OF 1987, the East Berlin filmmaker Thomas Werner issued a call for contributions to the first issue of Koma-Kino, a periodical on independent and experimental filmmaking he planned to begin self-publishing that summer. In Koma-Kino, that inaugural message promised, ‘the principle of self-representation will be preserved.’ The magazine would also exhibit ‘openness for ALL independent filmmakers,’ Werner continued, as ‘films WITHOUT communication are stillborn.’ Responding to the request for submissions, ten individual filmmakers and one filmmaking collective offered Werner material for Koma-Kino's first issue, which appeared later that year, in May. Though all made films, the contributors did not work within the Deutsche Film AG (DEFA) studio system, which had managed the East German cinema since 1946. Sent in from cities throughout the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the submissions ranged from critical assessments of films screened at Filma Morgana, a meeting of independent filmmakers in Dresden the previous year, through storyboard excerpts and film stills from individual works in progress, to more reflective contributions on the specific role of independent filmmaking in advancing East German cinematic practice as a whole.

To this last category belonged ‘Der Stand der Dinge oder Wie ich den Schmalfilm lieben lernte’ (The State of Things, or How I Learned to Love the Small Film), by the East Berlin filmmaker Cornelia Klauß. In this piece, which takes stock of the state of independent experimental film in East Germany, and raises a host of larger-order concerns about the institutional situation and aesthetic possibilities of independent filmmaking itself, Klauß contends that smaller film formats, especially Super 8, have transformative, democratizing potential. By making the small formats available to consumers, she argues, ‘the film industry–whether tyrannized by ideology or by commerce–undermined its own claim to totality.’ Though technological and economic conditions will always force independent cinema to exist in a relation of dependency to its industrial counterpart, Klauß suggests, the small film will always haunt the major motion picture from the margins. With a rhetorical flourish that sandwiches the DEFA film concern owned by the East German state in between the acronyms of major Western studios, she imagines the small film as a ‘little rat,’ dancing around the feet of the ‘giant MGM-DEFA-CBS.’