Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film (Routledge Focus on Film Studies) [1 ed.] 1032701242, 9781032701240

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Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film

Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film introduces the reader to this eastGerman filmmaker who, despite having made 40 films from the east side of the Berlin Wall, is practically unknown. Through the comparison of films made in the same year, one by an American and one by Böttcher, the author places him as ahead of his time in regards to technology, content, and style, and neck-and-neck with contemporary American filmmakers in cinéma vérité/direct cinema. The book moves beyond Böttcher’s dramatic biography to explore his role in the history of film. Was it actually the Germans who created sync sound for documentary? When and how were women featured? Offering a concise journey through the history of documentary film within this cultural context, but also a deep-dive into specific case-studies that show the nuances and complexities of classifying film texts, this volume will interest students and scholars of film studies, German cinema, cinéma vérité, film production, film theory, and world cinema. Elizabeth Daggett Matar is Assistant Professor in the College of Mass Media and Communication at American University in the Emirates, teaching media production, and adjunct professor at Middlesex University, Dubai teaching immersive storytelling. In 2011, Matar was named an “expert” in documentary film by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs’ Documentary Showcase Program. She completed this work as part of a Doctorate in Media and Communication at Universität Hamburg.

Routledge Focus on Film Studies

Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry James Fenwick Indian Indies A Guide to New Independent Indian Cinema Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram Migration and Identity in British East and Southeast Asian Cinema Leung Wing-Fai Con Artists in Cinema Self-Knowledge, Female Power, and Love Joseph H. Kupfer The Body in Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave Films Francesca Minnie Hardy Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film Documentaries, Contemporaries, History Elizabeth Daggett Matar

URL: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Focus-on-Film-Studies/book-series/RFFS

Jürgen Böttcher and Documentary Film

Documentaries, Contemporaries, History

Elizabeth Daggett Matar

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Elizabeth Daggett Matar The right of Elizabeth Daggett Matar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Daggett Matar, Elizabeth, author. Title: Jürgen Böttcher and documentary film : documentaries, contemporaries, history / by Elizabeth Daggett Matar. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge focus on film studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023047852 (print) | LCCN 2023047853 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032701240 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032701257 (paperback) | ISBN 9781032701264 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Strawalde, 1931---Criticism and interpretation. | Documentary films--Germany--History and criticism. | LCGFT: Film criticism. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.B6846 D34 2024 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.B6846 (ebook) | DDC 791.430943--dc23/eng/20231023 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047852 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047853 ISBN: 978-1-032-70124-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-70125-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-70126-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Figures and Table Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

ix x 1

1.1 The GDR 1 1.2 Jürgen Böttcher’s German Reputation as a Filmmaker 1 1.3 Documentary 6 1.4 Direct Cinema, Cinéma Vérité, and Observational Documentary Terminology 7 1.5 Overview of Uses 9 2 The Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9

Early Years  13 Higher Education 15 Drei Von Vielen (Three of Many) 16 DEFA Film Studios, Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, and Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders) 16 Stars 18 Barfuß und ohne Hut (Barefoot and Without a Hat) 20 Jahrgang 45 (Born in 1945) 20 Der Sekretär (The Party Secretary) 21 Tierparkfilm (A Film About a Zoo) 22

13

vi Contents 2.10 The Wolf Biermann Petition 22 2.11 Martha 23 2.12 Verwandlungen (Transformations) Tryptic Film: Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull), Venus Nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione), and Frau Am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord) 24 2.13 Local and International Political Concerns 25 2.14 Rangierer (Shunters) 26 2.15 International Travel and In Georgien (In Georgia) 27 2.16 Die Mauer (The Wall) 27 2.17 Transition to Painting 28 3 Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962: Jürgen Böttcher’s Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders) and Robert Drew and Richard Leacock’s The Chair

35

3.1 The Transition Between Expository Mode and Observational Mode 35 3.2 Technology, Observation, and Drew Associates 36 3.3 The Chair and Ofenbauer 39 3.4 The Hero’s Journey in Documentary Film 40 3.5 Multiple Protagonists in Ofenbauer 44 3.6 Neorealism 46 3.7 The Chair and Ofenbauer in Regard to Nichols’ Modes 51 4 The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema: Richard Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s Happy Mother’s Day (Director’s Cut) and Jürgen Böttcher’s Stars, 1963 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Women in DEFA 58 Women Editors of Documentary 60 Mode in 1963 61 Stars Motivation 62 Happy Mother’s Day 64

58

Contents  vii

4.6 Women in Stars 67 4.7 Mode in Stars and Happy Mother’s Day 68 4.8 Female Content throughout the Filmmaker’s Career 71 5 Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman: Institutions and Workplace in Observational Documentary Films in 1984

75

5.1 Modes 75 5.2 Böttcher’s Films 1963–1984 76 5.3 Rangierer (Shunters) 78 5.4 Wiseman Films, 1967–1984 80 5.5 Racetrack 81 5.6 1984 82 5.7 Philosophy 83 5.8 Belonging to Cinéma Vérité or Direct Cinema 84 5.9 Institutions 85 5.10 Funding 87 5.11 Contemporaries and Perception as a Progressive Filmmaker 88 6 Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple and Reform in Participatory/Reflexive Documentary in 1990

94

6.1 Participatory Mode to Reflexive Mode in the 1970s and 1980s in Böttcher and His Contemporaries 95 6.2 American Dream 97 6.3 Die Mauer: Demontage Eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare) 100 7 Conclusion: Documentary Contrasts in Structure, Subject, Place, and Change in Group Identity, and an Expanded Definition of Documentary Modes 7.1 Limitations 106 7.1.1 The Amount of Narration is an Inaccurate Way of Determining Mode 106 7.1.2 Misidentification by the Technology 107 7.1.3 “Hollywood Default” 107

106

viii Contents 7.1.4 Positivity Default 108 7.1.5 Modes, Typically Chronological, Do Not Work as Well for Someone Who Has a Varied and Vibrant Career, Such as Böttcher 108 7.2 Discussions for the Future 109 7.2.1 Greater Consideration for the Editors of Documentary Film as Co-Directors 109 7.2.2 Relationship between Director and Audience 109 7.3 Böttcher Beyond Region and Country, and into the Future 110 Index

112

Figures and table

Figures 3.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 6.1 6.2

Crew and documentary subjects during the filming of Ofenbauer ©DEFA-Stiftung/Lehmann, roßkopf, dumke, münch, gerstmann. From Stars. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Christian Lehmann, Gerhard Rothe. From Wäscherinnen (Laundresses). ©DEFA-Stiftung/ Werner Kohlert. Jürgen böttcher (right) directs during the shooting of the film Rangierer ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert. Böttcher (right) with two GDR guards after the fall of the Berlin wall. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert, Michael Loewenberg. From Die Mauer (The Wall). ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert, Michael Loewenberg.

44 64 71 79 101 102

Table 1.1

List of Films to Be Compared and Contrasted

6

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professors Joachim Friedmann, Maren Möhring, Annette Friedmann, Kerstin Stutterheim, Ruth Olshan, and Caroline Moine, who all supported the work and helped me to find my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Thomas Weber. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Weber for his willingness to undertake the supervision; his insight, advice, and patience has been invaluable. I would like to thank Ben Levin, Melinda Levin, Muffie Meyer, Jill Drew, Juliane Haase, the DEFA-Stiftung, Jasmin Kermanchi, Dr. Konrad Gunesch, and Erica Özkan for information, support, and encouragement during the writing process. And personally, I would like to thank Charlotte Newman Locke and Bryan Daggett, and my husband, Motaz Matar, as well as Adam Matar and Maya Matar and Lovely Reyes for generously giving their time and support. Lastly, I would like to thank Jürgen Böttcher, whose career and way of capturing others captured my imagination.

1

Introduction

1.1  The GDR The German Democratic Republic (GDR), known in German as the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was founded on October 7, 1949, describing itself as a worker’s and peasant’s state, with a state-controlled economy. A wall to prohibit free crossing between the GDR and West Germany was constructed beginning in 1961. Travel, communication, and trade between the GDR and West Germany, and the west in general, were greatly restricted or prohibited. In 1989 internal and international protest and pressure led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a year later a free and fair election was held, and Germany was reunited into the Federal Republic of Germany, which has the boundaries of Germany that we know today. Jürgen Böttcher lived in the GDR through its entire existence. Jürgen Böttcher, also known as the artist STRAWALDE, made over forty films for the state cinema studio, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), from 1962 to 1990. Böttcher’s films were on the progressive edge of documentary filmmaking at the time of their release, although they are largely unknown, both inside Germany and globally. The upcoming chapter presents the detailed biography of Jürgen Böttcher. This is because knowing the circumstances of Böttcher’s background, his censorship within the DDR, and the political and social situation after the fall of the wall is critical to understanding why he made the work that he did and provides clues as to why the reception for his work is as it is.

1.2 Jürgen Böttcher’s German Reputation as a Filmmaker Significant work has been done regarding the narrative films of DEFA, but there is a lack of research regarding DEFA documentaries and the role of these documentaries in the international context. Kannapin1 emphasizes in a footnote of his 2005 article that “…[DEFA documentaries] have not to date been subjected to close study. A worthy pioneering study of German-- images DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264-1

2 Introduction in documentary films is Steinle.” Steinle’s 2007 article does closely examine the GDR documentaries but in the comparative context of the “other Germany.”2 Similarly, Caroline Moine looks at three DEFA documentary filmmakers, Böttcher included, but in the narrowed scope of the way they presented memories of Nazism.3 In a review of the top ten English-language books and textbooks about cinéma vérité published since 1974, I searched for a reference of Böttcher. Of these books referenced, none contained Böttcher’s name, and only one4 referenced DEFA. Typically, the only German filmmaker mentioned would be Leni Riefenstahl5, but Barnouw also mentions East German filmmaker Sibylle Schönemann, who made a film in 1990 about her time spent in an East German jail.6 By contrast, Canada and France have multiple documentary filmmakers who are mentioned in most of the texts, which have a similarity across the board. Indeed, even in books such as DDR-Erinnern, Vergessen: Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms, Böttcher’s award-winning Die Mauer was mentioned as one of nine films in a list that spanned only a half a page.7 Other German-language documentary books, such as Der Dokumentarfilm ist tot, es lebe der Dokumentarfilm: Über die Zukunft des dokumentarischen Arbeitens, Alltagsbeobachtung als Subversion: Leningrader Dokumentarfilm im Spätsozialismus, and Das Gefühl des Augenblicks: Zur Dramaturgie des Dokumentarfilms all do not feature Böttcher prominently.8,9,10 According to Brambach and others: …even studies of the most important DEFA directors such as Konrad Wolf and Jürgen Böttcher or of those who grew up in the GDR such as Thomas Heise – are still few and far between. Accordingly, and considering the school’s long tradition, only little research has been done regarding the early work of the university’s “autoren.” [“Autoren” is German plural for the French term, also used in English-language film studies: “auteur.”] This can be perhaps seen as an indication that the historical status of East German films and of the DEFA’s most interesting figures has still to be clarified.11 Richard Kilborn, in his chapter “Jürgen Böttcher: A Retrospective” in the book DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946 – 1992 notes Böttcher’s place within the field, noting that “from the mid-1970s, he enjoyed growing international recognition in documentary circles. His work was discussed at a number of international festivals, culminating in a major retrospective at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1988.”12 Falko Seidel, in his doctorial dissertation in the Faculty of Politic and Social Sciences/Sociology at the Free University of Berlin entitled “Die Lebenswelt der DDR im Spiegel der Filme des DEFA-Dokumentaristen Jürgen Böttcher” (“Life in the DDR as reflected in the Films of the DEFA Documentary filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher”), reflects on what Böttcher’s films say about

Introduction  3 the DDR, rather than their place in a global context or through theoretical comparison and analysis.13 “Filmzensur und -politik in der DDR. Untersuchung an ausgewählten Filmen von Jürgen Böttcher in den sechziger Jahren” (“Film Censorship and Policy in the GDR. Examination of selected films by Jürgen Böttcher in the sixties”) by Astrid Hartmann for her master’s thesis, is obviously limited in scope and inward-looking, although it does help provide some important context about the constraints that Böttcher functioned within.14 In their Re-imagining East German Cinema, Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke discuss the complicated history of DEFA, including how “the films of DEFA… are primarily valued as evidence for the history of the German Democratic Republic,” and that scholarship “suffers from the tendency to see film simply as a window onto social reality rather than as an aesthetic product in its own right.”15,16 Scholars such as Klaus Finke argue that DEFA films must be examined in terms of the ideological context of their creation, and their use as propaganda. Allan and Heiduschke point out the difficulties that German scholars seem to have in stepping away from the political prism, even though there were great variations in DEFA’s political control over the films by directors, periods in time, and other variables, which make generalizations problematic. The authors note: Given the complexity of the conditions under which films were made in the GDR, it comes as no surprise that, increasingly, scholars have moved on from the study of DEFA as an isolated phenomenon and sought instead to situate East German cinema within a broader context of German-German relations.17 But, particularly to an outsider, this “broader” context still feels very narrow. Addressing this, the authors follow with this conclusion: By providing a more nuanced complement to the (often lukewarm) appreciation of DEFA in Germany, scholars in Austria, Australia, Japan, the UK, the United States, and other locations have opened up innovative avenues of research that, in turn, have led to new discoveries and, generally speaking, [promote] a more balanced view.18 This call for scholarship and study in this area was a large motivator for the work that follows. My analysis will be based on Bill Nichols’ documentary modes, from his 2010 Introduction to Documentary,19 because of its scientific approach and because it is regarded as a canonical text. Nichols begins by systematically honing in on the documentary in a taxonomic-rank-style analysis beginning with motion pictures in general. This is useful for our scientific question, in

4 Introduction order to determine at what level the comparison of Böttcher to other observational filmmakers should occur. Nichols points out, via a Venn diagram, that there is an overlap of fiction and non-fiction where the following film types reside: neo-realism, reenactments, mockumentaries, and docudramas.20 This is notable in regards to Böttcher when we consider that his fiction works were very neo-realistic. Böttcher has stated that he purposely worked in the neorealistic tradition, selecting unknown actors who were often directed only to react naturally to a pre-planned scene, or even, in the case of the scene in Jahrgang 45 where tourist busses arrive, to react to the unexpected within character.21 So, while Böttcher is unlike his contemporaries because his work is the furthest outside of the documentary modes, it is worth remembering that what is considered his “fictional work” is actually fairly equally positioned between fiction and non-fiction. And it is also important that he made only two narrative or fictional films featuring actors, and he made only a few experimental films, but he made 35 documentary films during this time, which is quite a large filmography. Within non-fiction is another Venn diagram, distinguishing between documentary film and non-documentary film, in which mere, unedited footage, newsreels, television news reports, and industrial or sponsored films exist. One could argue that many of the early expository films have characteristics of news reports. Robert Drew, the American direct cinema filmmaker, had a background in journalism and his first documentaries were made in conjunction with LIFE magazine, so there were clear links to journalism in his work philosophy, but these faded over time as documentary as the genre solidified in the early 1960s. In regards to sponsored films, Nichols explains further: “here sponsorship is akin to that of governments when they underwrite documentaries: the film promotes a perspective or way of seeing the world than a more specific act of consumption.” This is a difficult area, because most documentaries are financed in some way, but it is about the level or degree to which censorship or influence over content occurs that push a film from being categorized primarily as a sponsored work or a documentary. In Chapter 5: The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema – Richard Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s Happy Mother’s Day (Director’s Cut) and Jürgen Böttcher’s Stars, the two films Stars (1963) by Böttcher and Happy Mother’s Day (director’s cut and station edit) are compared, and the role of sponsorship by the State and a commercial station are examined and compared. The independence both films and filmmakers exhibit in this example serve as evidence that both are firmly within the area of documentary film, rather than sponsored films. Nichols continues to narrow the classification of documentary by providing “two major ways of dividing up documentaries”: “preexisting nonfiction models,” such as essays and reports and “distinct, cinematic modes” such as expository or observational which “did not pre-exist the cinema.”22 Nichols goes on to explain that the modes, unlike the models, determine the “shape

Introduction  5 and feel of the documentary film” regardless of the model.23 But he points out that a given documentary can be classified by either the “model it adopts from other media” and/or the “mode it contributes to as cinema.”24 For the purposes of determining Böttcher’s position with the scholarly history, the modes are the most useful, although Nichols is careful to point out that the categorizations “reflect individual judgement”25 and often modes are combined. Nichols’ six modes of representation function something like sub-genres of the documentary genre itself: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, and performative. “They set up conventions that a given film may adopt; and they provide specific expectations viewers anticipate having fulfilled. Each mode possesses examples that we can identify as prototypes or models: they seem to give exemplary expression to the most distinctive qualities of that mode.”26 “The order of presentation for these six modes corresponds roughly to the chronology of their introduction.”27 Nichols is careful to note that these modes are flexible and do not provide an exact history, as a film that might be classified as one mode might have large portions that are of another mode, and some stories lend themselves toward an earlier mode. “Once well-established through a set of conventions and prototypical films, a given mode remains available to all.”28 But despite these cautions, Nichols notes that “to some extent, each mode of documentary representation arises in part through a growing sense of dissatisfaction among filmmakers with a previous mode… The observational mode of representation arose, in part, from the availability of mobile 16 mm cameras and magnetic tape recorders in the 1960s.”29 But, Nichols cautions that “a new mode is not so much better as it is different, even though the idea of ‘improvement’ is frequently touted.”30 Modes do not imply quality, but rather “a new dominant to organize a film, a new ideology to explain our relation to reality, and a new set of issues and desires to preoccupy and audience.”31 Naturally, the auteur theory of cinema is valid within documentary film, but genre theory and the six modes “establish a loose framework of affiliation within which individuals may work.”32 Böttcher, and the observational cinema genre of the 1960s, is naturally identified primarily with the observational mode, but a closer look at the entire bodies of work of filmmakers who are known as observational filmmakers reveals that their film modes often correspond with these modes out of technological necessity and in historical chronology, as well as to adapt to sensibilities of the time. For example, when Leacock worked with Flaherty, the work was more poetic and/or expository because the equipment was not portable, there was not sound at all or sync sound, and because of audience expectations at the time. D. A. Pennebaker, Robert Drew, Al and David Maysels, and others follow this same timeline through the modes, with their goals always being no unnecessary narration (“Kommentar” in German), filming action as it happens, and the ability to move while filming. In the 1950s there was no choice but to tell,

6 Introduction Table 1.1  List of Films to Be Compared and Contrasted Set 1- (Chapter 3) Expository/ Ofenbauer (1962) observational, contains narration Set 2- (Chapter 4) almost Stars (1963) entirely observational but some narration Set 3- (Chapter 5) purely Rangierer (1984) observational, no narration Set 4- (Chapter 6) Die Mauer (1990) participatory

The Chair by Ricky Leacock, Robert Drew (1963) Happy Mother’s Day by Ricky Leacock (director’s cut) (1963) Racetrack by Fredrick Wiseman (1985) American Dream by Barbara Kopple (1990)

as observing wasn’t possible, and by the late 1960s viewers did not want to be told what they were seeing, but instead wanted to just watch events unfold. In the 1970s, more frequently the presence (and bias) of the filmmaker is explicit. In watching enough documentary films, you can almost guess the year of production based on the characteristics of the mode. This makes sense in terms of the western documentary filmmakers collaborating together and watching each other’s films as soon as they were completed. But often Böttcher would not see these films until years afterward, if at all. Moine carefully documents what films were showing at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, where Böttcher regularly attended, but because of ideological concerns not all films were shown.33 Some notable filmmakers, such as Fredrick Wiseman, never screened any of his films at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, so Böttcher had no official venue in order to see them.34 This seems to strengthen the validity of Nichols’ modes as historical and/or technological reactions, rather than a “bandwagon” effect, as Böttcher maps fairly well with the progress from expository to observational to participatory despite not always being able to see this evolution happening globally. To further interrogate this scientific question, the films will be compared and contrasted in four sets:

1.3 Documentary Bill Nichols, in his book Introduction to Documentary, begins by pointing out the variety of documentary films that have been made, consumed, and awarded throughout the history of film, and asks the question: “…do they [documentaries] tell stories that, although similar to feature fiction, remain distinct from it?”35 Ultimately, he answers that yes, documentary is distinct, because they are “about reality,” “about real people,” and “tell stories about what happens in the real world.”36 He then lists six principal modes of documentary: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative. Cinéma vérité and direct cinema are housed within the observational mode, although

Introduction  7 films from these subgenres can contain aspects from all modes.37 The modes, and their historical timeline, will be discussed thoroughly throughout the following chapters.

1.4 Direct Cinema, Cinéma Vérité, and Observational Documentary Terminology Direct cinema is a sub-genre of observational documentary film practiced primarily in America in the 1960s, by filmmakers such as Al and David Maysles, Robert Drew, D. A. Pennebaker, and Richard Leacock. These filmmakers sometimes worked together, in different combinations, or alone. Contrary to the more expository documentaries of the time, which were shot on one static camera in a studio, direct cinema films typically focus on real, unacted events happening in real time in front of the camera. The camera is not on a tripod and can move freely. Another hallmark of direct cinema, initially, is that it rejects on-film conversation or interaction between the filmmaker or crew and the subject. In one of the earliest direct cinema examples, Primary (1960, by Robert Drew, D. A. Pennebaker, and Richard Leacock), the filmmakers are “invisible,” and thus direct cinema is known as a more a “fly-on-the-wall” style. Some direct cinema practitioners initially claimed some scientific objectivity, especially once technology allowed them access into spaces to film with little intrusion for the first time, but, of course, a deeper analysis reveals that the many choices of the filmmaker (who or what to film, when to film, and how to edit and condense time) limit this objectivity greatly. Cinéma vérité is a separate sub-genre of documentary, also practiced in the 1960s, but primarily by French filmmakers, including Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, and Chris Marker. The term “cinéma vérité” was coined with Jean Rouch’s 1961 documentary film Chronicle of a Summer. Cinéma verité, like direct cinema, eschews the tripod and utilizes light and mobile technology to meet people in the real world, but one could argue that cinéma vérité films are more topic-driven than character-driven. Cinéma vérité, in contrast to direct cinema, all but mandates clear interaction between the filmmaker and the subjects. Cinéma vérité practitioners, because of this transparency, felt they had a stronger case in their claim to objectivity because the viewer at least knew that what the filmmaker was claiming to portray was what one filmmaker saw on a given day and time, but ultimately issues of selection of subject and editing also made true objectivity impossible to claim in cinema verité. However, relative to the entirety of cinema, the differences between the sub-genres of direct cinema and cinéma vérité were always slight. Both seek to have as little voice-over narration or “Kommentar” as possible, and typically do not employ a musical score, unless the scene or the subject involves music. In terms of content, both can be topic, character, or location-based, but typically focus on the macro, or one isolated variable that is visible in

8 Introduction real-time in front of the camera, rather than any type of broad or historical overview. Both strive to provide the viewer, in the words of Ricky Leacock, the “feeling of being there.” Betsy A. McLane and Jack C. Ellis, in A New History of Documentary Film discuss the terms and their approaches: Nowadays, the term cinema verité (sic) is frequently used generically for nondirected filmmaking (and in the United States usually without the French accents, as in the title of Mamber’s book), but originally it was applied exclusively to the Rouch/French approach, to distinguish it from the Drew-Leacock/American direct cinema.38 Ellis and McLane discuss a 1963 meeting in Lyon, France, with filmmakers from France, the US, and Canada, present, where “the greatest excitement was generated by a lively ongoing debate between [Jean] Rouch and [Ricky] Leacock.”39 Leacock thought he could capture this same obscured reality by photographing people without intruding; that subjects would reveal what they really felt and were like when unself-consciously relaxed or deeply involved in some activity. Rouch attempted to unmask truth through a process of deliberately encouraged self-revelation… During the arguments animosity developed and the two positions remained essentially unresolved… Leacock claimed that Rouch prevented people from being themselves, that he forced meanings from them according to a pattern he had arbitrarily set. Rouch faulted Leacock for being too uncritical, for accepting whatever came along as part of “the American way of life.” Rouch and Leacock, however, did eventually become close, so much so that when Rouch died in 2004 at the age of eightyseven, Leacock was occupying Rouch’s Paris apartment.”40 This personal conflict and eventual mutual respect and collaboration is a very good microcosm of the difference between cinéma vérité and direct cinema in general. Changes in both subgenres in the 1970s made the distinction between the two terms obsolete. Al and David Maysles’ film Salesman (1969), for example, is fairly classical direct cinema, but by their film Grey Gardens (1975), the filmmakers are interacting with the subjects like that of a cinéma vérité film. In the 1976 review of Grey Gardens in The New York Times, the Maysles themselves offer a definition of the genre that drops the “no interaction” difference between cinéma vérité and direct cinema: “Albert and David Maysles, exponents of cinema verité, or “direct cinema” as they prefer to call it, documentaries without a narrator or a musical score, filmed and recorded with lightweight portable equipment.”41 Most observational filmmakers, throughout their careers, made or make films that fit into both categories.

Introduction  9 By March 2005, filmmakers known as “direct cinema” filmmakers (Richard Leacock, Robert Drew, and D.A. Pennebaker) were on a panel entitled “Cinéma Vérité” and were discussing how they were moving past the term “cinéma vérité” for their work because it began to be a parody of itself, with pointless shaky following shots.42 The view of many is that much of the debate about direct cinema and cinéma vérité was had in full in Leipzig and Lyon in 1963 and 1964; at the aforementioned panel discussion in Hot Springs, the filmmakers themselves noted this, and said that they had little interest in repeating the conversation, declaring the categorization to be unhelpful or outdated.43 For this reason, in the following chapters, the term “observational cinema” will be utilized as the general term for both subgenres unless there is a clear reason to specify one or the other subgenre specifically. “Observational cinema,” as a broader umbrella term, encompasses a documentary film or video that is made with the purpose of creating a cinematic story from non-scripted reality. This does not include, for example, observational footage (i.e., a security camera feed), but only images that are further crafted and refined in order to create a narrative arc. Given the topic of the study, it is helpful to consider how Böttcher would have fit into these subcategories. Böttcher most frequently uses a tripod, which is against the “rules” of both, but one could argue that an exception could be made because he was shooting with 35 mm film and 35 mm cameras, which were often considered too heavy for the camera operator to support for long periods of time. 35 mm film is far more expensive than 16 mm film, so most direct cinema/cinéma vérité filmmakers could not even consider shooting with 35 mm; Böttcher similarly was not given a choice, as 35 mm was given to filmmakers in the DEFA documentary division, and 16 mm was to be used by news reporters unless the filmmakers specifically requested otherwise. Viewing Böttcher’s work, it does not appear that utilizing a tripod was a personal preference because he is setting the camera up in the world in several locations and frequently moving it, and sometimes we even see this movement in the shot (as in Die Mauer). Also, later in life, we see Böttcher carrying a small hand-held video camera for filmmaking and personal use.44 As will be discussed in “Chapter 3,” there are some less obvious rules or tendencies that observational films have that Böttcher does not abide by. Böttcher, like the Maysles, made some films that would be considered direct cinema, and some cinéma vérité, as Rangierer has no interaction (direct) but Georgian has a lot (cinéma vérité or participatory mode).

1.5  Overview of Uses The following chapters focus on what, technically and conceptually, Böttcher was doing, relative to his observational filmmaking contemporaries in order to place him within the global cinema context. His films are analyzed and

10 Introduction compared in regards to dramaturgy and structure, and their content’s progressivity in regards to gender, institutions, and reform. In addition to the qualitative and quantitative study at hand, these comparisons also serve as an unconventional way to journey through documentary film history, and have the potential to be a more guided, practical way of discussing the theory of documentary modes. In addition, the comparisons of filmmakers and the choices that they made speak to very contemporary issues of auteurship in documentary and present case studies of the choices directors made in production and in the editing room.

Notes 1 Detlef Kannapin, „GDR Identity“in DEFA Feature Films“, Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 13:2 (2005): 185–200. https://doi. org/10.1080/09651560500306861 2 Steinle, Matthias, “Visualizing the Enemy: Representations of the ‘Other Germany’ in Documentaries Produced by the FRG and GDR in the 1950s.” In Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, ed. John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 120–136. 3 Caroline Moine, ‘Un passé resté hors champ? Mémoire et oubli dans les documentaires de la DEFA (1961–1990),’ Cinémas: Revue d'études cinématographiques 18, no. 1 (2007): 135. https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/017850ar 4 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 176–178. 5 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 50–52, 94–96, 170–171, 177–178, 191–192; Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 68, 130; Barnouw, 100–110, 157, 160, 287; Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary, Visible Evidence, Vol. 16 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 51, 135; Betsy A. McLane and Jack C. Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012), 69, 113–114; Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, eds., New Challenges for Documentary: Second Edition, (New York: Manchester University Press ; Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2005), 186, 228. 6 Barnouw, 327. 7 Tobias Ebbrecht, Hilde Hoffmann, and Jörg Schweinitz, eds., DDR - Erinnern, Vergessen: Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms (Marburg: Schüren, 2009), 289. 8 Matthias Leitner, Sebastian Sorg, and Daniel Sponsel, eds., Der Dokumentarfilm ist tot, es lebe der Dokumentarfilm: Über die Zukunft des dokumentarischen Arbeitens (Marburg: Schüren, 2014). 9 Aglaia Wespe, Alltagsbeobachtung als Subversion: Leningrader Dokumentarfilm im Spätsozialismus, Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte Osteuropas, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). 10 Schadt, Thomas. Das Gefühl des Augenblicks: Zur Dramaturgie des Dokumentarfilms, Praxis Film, Band 60, 4., überarbeitete Auflage. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2017. 11 Ilka Brombach et al., “Walls Have Never Held Us Back”: 60 Years of Student Films at the University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf », Cahier Louis-Lumière, no. 9 (2015), 83. 12 Richard Kilborn, ‘The Documentary Work of Jürgen Böttcher: A Retrospective’, in DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992 (New York: Berghahn Books), pp. 267–282 (p. 274).

Introduction  11 13 Falko Seidel, „Die Lebenswelt der DDR im Spiegel der Filme des DEFADokumentaristen Jürgen Böttcher,“thesis (Freie Universität Berlin, 2006). https:// www.diplom.de/ 14 Astrid Hartmann, Filmzensur und -politik in der DDR – Untersuchung an ausgewählten Filmen von Jürgen Böttcher in den sechziger Jahren, 2008. https://nbnresolving.org/urn:nbn:de:101:1-201008251088 [accessed 28 March 2021]. 15 Barton Byg, “Introduction: reassessing DEFA today”, in Moving Images of East Germany, ed. by Barton Byg and Betheny Moore (Washington, DC: AICGS, 2002), 1–23 (1). 16 Seán, Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke, eds., Reimagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 5. 17 Allan and Heiduschke, 6. 18 Allan and Heiduschke, 9. 19 Nichols. 20 Nichols, 145. 21 ‘Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957--2001’ (Nirwana Events, Berlin), 31. 22 Nichols, 148. 23 Nichols, 148. 24 Nichols, 148. 25 Nichols, 154. 26 Nichols, 99–100. 27 Nichols, 158. 28 Nichols, 159. 29 Nichols, 159. 30 Nichols, 161. 31 Nichols, 162. 32 Nichols, 198. 33 Caroline Moine, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955–1990, ed. by John Barrett and Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs, Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018). 34 Moine, Screened Encounters, 192. 35 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 6. 36 Nichols, 6–10. 37 Nichols, 31–32. 38 Betsy A. McLane and Jack C. Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012), 216. 39 McLane and Ellis, 217. 40 McLane and Ellis, 217–218. 41 Goodman, Walter, Grey Gardens: Cinéma Verité or Sideshow“, The New York Times, Feb 22, 1976. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/22/archives/grey-gardenscinema-verite-or-sideshow-cin-ma-verit-or-sideshow.html 42 ‘Panel Discussion, Hot Springs, Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker.’ 2005. 43 ‘Panel Discussion, Hot Springs, Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker.’ 44 Christian Beetz, Ma Vie/Mein Leben - Jürgen Böttcher (ZDF/ARTE, 2010).

References Allan, Seán and Sebastian Heiduschke, eds., Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Contexts. 1st ed. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

12 Introduction Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Byg, Barton. “Introduction. Reassessing DEFA Today.” In Moving Images of East Germany, Barton Byg and Betheny Moore (eds.), 1–23. Washington, DC: AICGS, 2002. Hartmann, Astrid, Filmzensur und -politik in der DDR - Untersuchung an ausgewählten Filmen von Jürgen Böttcher in den sechziger Jahren, 2002. https://nbn-resolving. org/urn:nbn:de:101:1-201008251088 [accessed 28 March 2021]. ‘Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001’ (Nirwana Events, Berlin). Kilborn, Richard, ‘The Documentary Work of Jürgen Böttcher: A Retrospective.’ In DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992 New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 267–282. 1946. McLane, Betsy A. and Jack C. Ellis. A New History of Documentary Film. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2012. Moine, Caroline, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955–1990, John Barrett and Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs (eds.), Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. ‘Panel Discussion, Hot Springs, Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker.’ 2005. Renov, Michael, The Subject of Documentary, Visible Evidence, volume 16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Rosenthal, Alan and John Corner, eds., New Challenges for Documentary. 2nd ed. Manchester ; New York : New York: Manchester University Press ; Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 2005. Wespe, Aglaia, Alltagsbeobachtung als Subversion: Leningrader Dokumentarfilm im Spätsozialismus, Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte Osteuropas, volume 1. Göttingen: VetR-Unipress, 2014.

2

The Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist

2.1  Early Years Jürgen Traugott Hans Böttcher was born on July 8, 1931 in Frankenberg, Saxony, Germany. He spent his childhood in Strahwalde, a village in Eastern Germany between the Elbe and Oder rivers. His father was a teacher who was forced by the Nazis to retire in 1936. Böttcher recounts that his father, who was very well-read and knew several languages, did not really attempt to find another position. He was frustrated to be taken away from his work and by the poverty that followed.1 Jürgen Böttcher has two siblings, and he is the youngest. He describes his mother as a great storyteller, who used creativity and humor to try to transcend their current situation. He notes that he believes that he benefitted from the combination of his parents’ traits of practicality and escapist creativity; his mother’s storytelling helped him craft his stories and witnessing his father weather professional disappointment turned out to be an invaluable example for the successive professional setbacks Böttcher would encounter. Many of Böttcher’s films would feature working people who suffer and overcome professional indignity. Böttcher describes his childhood after his home was destroyed in the ZDR/ ARTE documentary Jürgen Böttcher – Ma Vie/Mein Leben, which aired in 2011 on the occasion of Böttcher’s 80th birthday: We were sent away from the village to a former windmill. There was no water in this little house. There were refugees from Upper Silesia, … who all lived downstairs and we lived upstairs. They were a family of shepherds.2 They helped us! We would’ve frozen to death. They showed us how to find pine trees with resin inside. Without them, we would’ve died. Böttcher then explains how his brother, who was a soldier, had been shot by friendly fire after having returned from Russia, and his coffin arrived at the strain station there. This happened in February 1944. He describes a memory DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264-2

14  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist of his family walking behind the coffin and that it felt like a scene from the movies, with horses dressed in black.3 “And I just knew, in there [the coffin] is my brother. This was my first dead [loved one]. I was 12 and it was my brother. And about one year later there were many dead people there. The news was full of dead people.”4 Böttcher later states that it was the loss of his brother that he believes fueled years of creating creative groups and communities around art, seeking the fraternity that was lost after the death of his brother.5 Up to 1945 the war raged, and the 14-year-old Böttcher retrieved bodies from the fields and helped to bury them. He says that as a child he first discovered his creativity through music, but at the age of 14 he discovered drawing.6 He joined the Free German Youth (FDJ), and “I had to paint these giant banners. I passionately painted portraits of Rosa Luxemburg, Wilhelm Pieck, Lenin, even Stalin!”7 Böttcher joked that he was known as the painter of the town, and he was “never as famous as then.” “You never know why people become artists. And what is talent? What is it that seduces people into this arrogance of not baking bread, not building machines like other people do? Instead, they become chroniclers of life. That’s curious, isn’t it? Böttcher said.”8 Böttcher’s winning entries to art competitions brought money and prizes that helped his family eat. The DDR/GDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik/German Democratic Republic), self-described as a “socialist, workers and peasants state,” existed from 1949 to 1990, after the eastern portion of Germany became part of the eastern block during the Cold War period. The Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 as a physical and ideological division between the Allied occupied zone of West Berlin and the Soviet Union occupied zone of East Berlin. Böttcher has often expressed guilt for the atrocities of the Nazis, having been a part of the Hitler Youth, along with all of the children in the village. In the hopes of creating a new Germany with a different future, at the age of 17 he joined the Communist Party. Böttcher calls it his “great kick in the ass: the awareness of the duty to make reparations and to help the country, so a terrible thing like this will never happen again.”9 “Regardless of what one thinks about Stalin,” Böttcher said, “if you respect what the Russians did – helping you escape the worst things in Nazi Germany – then you then can’t just go over to the other side [presumably West Germany] to the richer people.” He then speaks about how the Russians’ sacrifices were bigger than the Americans’, without wanting to denigrate the Americans.10 One might say that this, Böttcher’s interpretation of the end of the war, gives great insight into the loyalty to the GDR/DDR that Böttcher bores throughout his life, and the pain that is felt when they later question his loyalty.

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  15 Böttcher explains why he did not cross the wall, but instead stayed in East Germany, even as friends left. I was my parents’ youngest child. And at a certain point in time, they were already 80 years old or older. And they would’ve never left [presumably Eastern Germany] to live a nice life in the West. And I on the other hand… I was the youngest who had survived. If I had left them, I could’ve just as well as poisoned them. And who wants to do that? If you want to, well then do it.11

2.2  Higher Education In 1949, Böttcher was admitted to study art in the then completely bombedout city of Dresden. Böttcher studied painting from 1949 to 1953. He had to abandon his studies at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1953 after being accused of “cosmopolitanism, existentialism, and formalism.”12 This is the first of the aforementioned professional pains. From 1953 to 1954 he taught classes as an independent artist. He was a drawing teacher at the Dresden Volkshochschule (a school for adult and alternative students). Ralf Winkler, who has since become world-famous under the name A. R. Penck, began taking his courses at 14 years old. Winkler, Peter Graf, Peter Herrmann, Peter Makolies, and others formed and influenced the Dresdener Freundeskreis. In 1953 they also formed the artists’ group Erste Phalanx Nedserd, together with other artists.13 This relationship with Winkler/A. R. Penck continued and is important for nearly 40 years. During this time, Böttcher came to transition from painting to filmmaking, noting that painting, theatre and literature could not quite capture things like a walk through a decaying suburb, but film could, because film could capture the sounds and give one the feeling of being there. This is coupled with the fact that his type of painting and everything he liked about painting was either not in demand or not allowed in the GDR/DDR at this time. He cites several early Soviet and Italian neo-realistic films as being influences (Earth by Dovzhenko and Paisa by Rossellini). “These films left me drained and shattered, because they had so much to do with what I’d gone through.14 He notes that they showed real people, similar to the people that he was sketching each day, such as those waiting in a room after being evicted from their homes.” “When I realized that I would get nowhere with painting I understood that the films of Rossellini and de Sica, as well Dovzhenko, which I saw a lot of, reflected life pretty much as I saw it.”15 “Van Gogh rediscovered the world by painting old shoes and potatoes. The sun shone on it! With his great sensitivity he made humble articles suitable for art. And that’s got a lot to do with the documentary too.”16

16  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist “I love all art that doesn’t ignore this dialectic.”17 In 1955 he began studies at the newly established film school in Potsdam­ Babelsberg. Böttcher stood out amongst the students, most of whom came directly from high school, because he was already so experienced. He made three student films before his thesis, which are named and described in the filmography appendix. Böttcher made 46 films from 1955 to 2001. For brevity only selected titles are mentioned in this biography.

2.3  Drei Von Vielen (Three Of Many) In 1961, Böttcher completed his senior thesis film from the film school, Drei von vielen. He describes it as “a documentary film about a friendship, and about people who are producing something and at the same time falling in love or working at something that expresses their life in pictures.”18 The film was quite a departure from documentaries in the GDR at that time. The authorities banned it from being shown in the DDR/GDR. Böttcher notes that he believes it was banned because the apartment in the film, with a bathtub in the living room and pictures tacked onto the walls, did not look like what the GDR wanted to portray of its citizens. Winkler and A.R. Penck make an appearance in the film, as he and the trio look at one another’s artwork and try to decide what works to put forward for an exhibition. The film exhibits technical perfection and beautiful compositions which are akin to the landscapes, and in content, through subject, music, and narration a feeling of those who are appreciating life and its beauty fully, in their work and personal life. It is hard to imagine what more a government could want of its people, which makes the DDR/GDR’s rejection of the work particularly confusing. “The people who – as one says so naively – “make the decisions,” acted as if I had been motivated by particular malice against the GDR.”19 Böttcher said. “I almost died of anger and pain.”20

2.4 DEFA Film Studios, Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, and Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders) Böttcher began a job at DEFA Film Studios, and this work created a pathway to enable him to continue professionally despite this disappointment. DEFA stands for Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft; it was conceived on September 25, 1944 in Moscow. With several name changes and changing or expanding missions, DEFA was essentially the umbrella film production for the DDR/ GDR. Böttcher was hired by the DEFA Studio for Newsreels and Documentaries directly from the film school in Potsdam-Babelsberg. DEFA filmmakers were salaried, and at times could pitch story ideas and sometimes were assigned topics or events.

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  17 As it so happened, Joop Huisken, who had been made Böttcher’s mentor, was also hired as the General Director of the “Ironworks Combine East,” and told him of the imminent and dramatic blast-furnace replacement. Huisken gave the project to Böttcher, which, in the words of Böttcher, gave him (Böttcher) “a bit of firm ground under (his) feet” – a new project and opportunity.21 And it was a resounding success. In 1962, Böttcher’s film about the furnace replacement, Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders) was selected for the Leipzig Film Festival. Böttcher was a regular attender of the Leipzig Film Festival throughout his career, which was essentially the only festival that it was possible for him to attend annually. It was very important in terms of being a place to see international films and to show his work, as well as to connect personally with filmmakers and have robust dialog about everything from the use of equipment and new technologies to political and social systems. Böttcher describes that much of the importance of the festival was outside the official venues, as younger filmmakers would move from the official screenings to the Astoria Hotel, where the festival celebrities stayed and parties happened until dawn. Sometimes there would be gatherings in the university’s student club, or even in the early morning hours parties continued in the Leipzig train station, ending in eating oatmeal at dawn.22,23 A group photo, taken at the then-named “Internationale Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwoche für Kino und Fernsehen” in 1964, shows some of the most famous documentary filmmakers in history, including Basil Wright, Paul Rotha, Frances Flaherty, Richard Leacock, John Grierson, Karl Gass, Joris Ivens, Annelie Thorndike, and Saad Nadim.24 For the 1962 festival, John Grierson, considered to be a “grandfather” of documentary film, spoke to the festival. Grierson was blunt in his feedback regarding the festival in his speech, “stating that “anything to do with self-reflection, … or that suggests a tedious formal report is foreign to me,” thereby criticizing the official selection at the Leipzig Festival.” He went on to say that the reality of East German life was not being presented in the films. However, offering something positive in the summation of his remarks, he said, “In the meantime you have shot some fine documentaries, like the one about the furnace builders. But it’s still not enough. You could and should film more about what you do and produce in your life.”25 Naturally this professional compliment, from such a prominent figure, shone the spotlight on Böttcher. Ofenbauer (Furnace Makers) focuses on a difficult, time-sensitive group project: a fifty-six-meter tall blast furnace weighing 2,000 tons had to be moved eighteen meters26. The film crew moved its equipment onto the site during the initial stages of the operation, in order to familiarize itself with the universe of the steel mill. It was very desirable at this time in the DDR/GDR to make work that would help the intellectuals understand and feel in harmony with workers, and this film was quite successful

18  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist in that, not only through the subject but in several strategies in craft. For example, the film’s commentary is written in the first-person plural: “We have only eight short meters ahead of us.” Furnace Makers differed from other propaganda films of the time however, in part because the task at hand evolved into a pretext to experiment with a new style. All the technical means available at the time were deployed to recreate the atmosphere and difficulty of the work. The director reduced the commentary to an absolute minimum, preferring to use direct audio takes; the soundtrack thus conveys the harsh din produced by steel ropes and machines under tension. The filmmaker imposed his vision of constant struggle: “I had to hold my ground to the very end to retain the ambient sound of the working conditions just as they were … and those alone: they were determined to add … as an illustration … segments of Beethoven’s [Sonata] Pathetique, as was the convention at the time.”27,28 Furnace Makers won the first prize at the 1962 Leipzig Festival.

2.5  Stars Stars (1963) is a collective portrait of a team of women working at a lightbulb plant in East Berlin. The title and the narration hint at the irony of the glamour of the cinema and the seemingly mundane job of the women, but also that the DDR emphasized that such women were indeed the stars of their society, and so they were being profiled as such. Shot at the factory, both while they were working and during breaks, the topic naturally evolves to that of the professional identity of mothers and the role of women in the workplace. “According to Böttcher’s cinematographer, Christian Lehmann, conditions on location were challenging. While the camera, an Arriflex, did allow them to shoot with synchronized sound, it wasn’t silent, and they had to wrap it in blankets to reduce the noise it made.”29 This meant some clever audio techniques were used in editing, but the dialog is certainly clear enough to understand. It is not only the technicalities that set the film apart, it is the authentic way that working people are portrayed, contrary to the propagandistic documentaries that were common at that time. Stars was selected for screening at the 1964 Leipzig Documentary Film Festival. This once again brought Böttcher in contact with cinéma vérité filmmakers from the west. Richard Leacock attended the festival in 1964 with his film A Happy Mother’s Day (1963), about the first surviving quintuplets in US history, which was awarded second prize in the full-length features category.

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  19 Moine notes that Albert Maysles also came to Leipzig in 1964. “He and his brother David worked from 1954 to 1963 with Robert Drew, founder of Drew Associates, where many observational documentary directors worked together, before forming their own production company in 1962.”30 (The terms cinéma vérité and direct cinema are discussed in detail in Chapter 1). Two of their films were screened at Leipzig in 1964. The first, Showman (1963), is a portrait of a businessman which had also screened at UNESCO in 1962 during a debate about direct cinema (Rouch 1963). The second, What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964), was screened in a shortened twenty-minute version adapted for theatrical release, having initially been shot for television; indeed the American directors quickly transitioned to working primarily for television, which ensured both broadcasting and funding.31 The presence of these Americans at Leipzig was, according to Moine, quite important for the DEFA documentary filmmakers, including Böttcher. Moine writes: As the East German director of photography Werner Kohlert, born in 1939, declared in 1984: “In my youth Eisenstein served as a model for all my work. Then, about twenty years ago, I saw the cinéma vérité films that Richard Leacock brought to Leipzig, and from that moment on my camera work blended Leacock’s freedom of style and Eisenstein’s stylistic formality!”32 …Marker and Lhomme shot The Lovely Month of May with a prototype of the lightweight Eclair film camera. Synchronized sound, a quiet camera and a light camera created a new sense of fluidity.33 The Lovely Month of May made a strong impression on East German filmmakers and journalists. The West German critic Enno Patalas (1964) observed, “For young East German documentarists, Marker’s film contains numerous references to their own attempts. Some of them even saw it as a manifesto for what they want to attain. For them, the fact that Marker was awarded the Golden Dove unquestionably represents encouragement.”34 Moine notes that Jürgen Böttcher was among those East German documentary filmmakers profoundly influenced by Marker. The particular impact of The Lovely Month of May came from the original sound and the extended interviews with authentic heroes from the streets.35,36,37 The respect and admiration between Böttcher and Marker, co-director of The Lovely Month of May, was a two-way affair. Marker declared: Before I conclude, allow me to mention one more film, which seems to me to admirably represent the new trend, which reflects reality as it is and ushers the viewer toward a better understanding of reality. I am referring to the film Stars by Jürgen Böttcher, and in this way I would like to publicly state that I consider his film to be one of the best of its kind.38,39

20  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist 2.6  Barfuß und ohne Hut (Barefoot and Without a Hat) Barfuß und ohne Hut (Barefoot and Without a Hat) was shot in the summer of 1964. “I wanted to tackle several themes: old age and youth, generational issues, love, the past, [and] dreaming about the future,” recalled Böttcher.40 The film contains casual interviews with young people as they have fun and socialize on the beach. Despite the fact that the government had made a push to involve the youth of the DDR and include pop music, a swift reversal meant that the film was not officially banned but “the projected full-length feature film was cut down to a twenty-minute version, after protracted and difficult negotiations between the film crew and HVFilm. Authorities deemed that the young people portrayed in the film in no way represented East German reality and resembled young vacationers on the French Riviera more than on the Baltic.”41,42 The film was also not approved for as wide a distribution as had been expected. It had already been announced for the November 1964 Leipzig Festival, but then it was not selected. Instead, following a typical strategy deployed by the regime, it was sent abroad, without Böttcher being informed, to the Short Film Festival held in Tours, France.43,44

2.7  Jahrgang 45 (Born in 1945) In 1966, Böttcher’s first and only feature film, Jahrgang 45 (Born in 1945), was banned. Böttcher cites two main reasons: the gruffness of the “actors” who, rather than studio actors, were normal people from the street in the neorealist style, and again the supposed shabbiness of his locations, which Böttcher notes that, rather than seeking the worst examples, were actually the nicer, and more tidy ones that he could find. But the second reason, and what Böttcher says was the first scene cut, involved the theme of the wall, the socalled “democratic wall of protection,” which was not allowed to be filmed. Böttcher filmed a scene in which his protagonists are sitting and talking: …in front of them is this strange scene of ruins, so empty and depressing. And then these glittering double-deckers from the West (sic) appear. We shot the scene secretly, from inside a construction worker’s truck. The visitors were mainly Japanese women with their Leicas, who came flapping out of the bus, chirping like little birds. And my young men were sitting on the steps, watching the scene skeptically.45 …People could come from the West to stare at us, but we were not allowed to repay the visit. That for me was the heart of the film: creating symbols reflecting the period and demonstrating that it’s possible to express something important non-verbally. Nothing remotely comparable had ever been captured in a GDR film.46

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  21 After the banning of Jahrgang 45 Böttcher went back to making documentaries, a series of films in what he calls his “penance work,” including several reports and memorials. We weren’t very free all those years, to put it mildly. And with an official medium that’s so strongly subject to authorization procedures, you develop a certain – not exactly self-censorship – but a strategy of simply trying out things in a shrewd way, of trying to find a space where you can do things without withholding too much…47 “So it became a sort of internal programme of mine to prefer going to people who were challenged most and worked hardest.”48 The question was who was responsible for the war, who had imposed the war on whom. Those who were worst off, the simple misled people, they had given their lives. The little apartment they had had was bombed to smithereens, they crawled around in the ruins, and it was they who rebuilt everything… I wanted to bring more honesty into our socialist project. It was clear to me that I couldn’t achieve that if I stuck to cultivated people – that simply didn’t interest me. I said to myself: We call ourselves the State of Workers and Farmers – well, let’s see then what the true ruling class is up to!49

2.8  Der Sekretär (The Party Secretary) According to Moine, the film was scheduled for opening night at the Leipzig Festival in November 1967. “Contrary to all expectations however, the film was not included in the selection of films that DEFA sent to the festival. It appeared that by the time the film was finished, Grimmer no longer represented the image of a party secretary that the SED wanted to put on view,” at this time they preferred to show more of a white-collar manager.50 Film clubs in the DDR/GDR were active and had an important role, especially in this time; they allowed the viewing of films from the west and banned or discouraged films from the east, and facilitated more open discussions.51 In August 1967, in view of its scheduled screening at Leipzig, Film writer and Leipzig Film Club head Fred Gehler had interviewed Jürgen Böttcher about The Party Secretary in an article that was ten pages of the forty-page magazine. The author was reprimanded by the DDR/GDR for having accorded such prominence to Böttcher and for “publishing an interview that was ideologically unsatisfactory, playing as it did with allusions and innuendos. Furthermore, Böttcher’s printed filmography listed his feature film Born in ‘45, which had been banned. Lastly and above all, Gehler

22  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist was accused of having deceived and double-crossed the organizers of the Leipzig Festival.”52,53 Moine continues: When it became clear that The Party Secretary had been withdrawn from the festival programme, the Leipzig Film Club took the initiative to organize a screening in its own venue, the Casino art house theater, at 10 p.m. during the festival, after the official screenings were over. Word of mouth did the rest and Böttcher’s film was shown to a packed house. Many foreign guests were in the audience, including Chris Marker. Those who were involved with putting on the screening were punished, or even barred from the rest of the festival. “It also reveals just how vague (and changeable) the limits actually were: two years later The Party Secretary was included in a festival retrospective devoted to East German documentary film.”54

2.9  Tierparkfilm (A Film About a Zoo) In A Film About a Zoo, Böttcher took what could have been a dry assignment, and through cinematography and a kind of choreography with the animals, created something quite contemporary. Böttcher notes that the topic is not so important: “Because the character of the shots, the rhythm and background of such an event are all within the boundaries of art.”55

2.10  The Wolf Biermann Petition On November 16, 1976, news broke that the DDR/GDR had stripped singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann of his citizenship. According to sources quoted by Moine, the Stasi established an operative group wholly dedicated to monitoring the East German intellectual and artistic scene, including Böttcher.56 A petition deploring Biermann’s fate was produced, and six filmmakers, including Jürgen Böttcher, signed it and, as Moine points out, the five others, while varying in age, had one factor in common: they all knew or worked with Böttcher.57 According to Moine, Biermann, already settled in the West German FRG, wrote of his friend at the end of 1976: What a shame, what a crime that a filmmaker as great as Jürgen should have to eternally contend with adversity and the primitive stupidity of the studio! Here [in the FRG], he is known to many of the finest, and he could certainly work here as never before in his life. But, of course, it would be in a society that is foreign and perhaps uninteresting to him, which means that the effort involved would outweigh the benefits, and that he’d still

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  23 be standing there, his hands full of nothing. At least he should know that many people here admire him and would like to work with him. He should bear that in mind, in case they ever pull the plug on him.58,59 Between 1977 and 1982, Böttcher witnessed the departure of some thirty authors as well as stage directors and actors; “in 1979, it was Ralf Winkler – alias A.R. Penck – Böttcher’s former student and friend from his years in Dresden.” Only one filmmaker left, though, according to Moine, which she notes can be explained by the economic constraints of the film industry – in the west one must “pitch” film ideas and raise money, whereas the east offered steady salaried employment.60,61 But Böttcher does not mention finances as the reason for remaining, on the contrary: “Because of my friends, and my elderly parents who were in their nineties at the time… there was no question for me of going to the west. And that’s how I lost my shirt in the east, it was also responsible for what happened there.”62

2.11  Martha In 1978 Böttcher completed the film Martha, about one of the last “TrümmerFrauen” or “rubble workers,” who were women who moved and sorted rubble after WWII destroyed much or most of the buildings. Following the war, Martha explains how she was initially in a twenty-woman bucket brigade being paid 72 pfennigs an hour, but then moved to construction work in order to get better food vouchers for her and her two sons. Martha, aged 68 in the film, is still working sorting rubble, we see her working in the snow, as well as seeing her retirement party, as she chooses to retire, a good eight years past when she could have retired. We see the teasing banter between Martha and her colleagues, who are all male, and hear Böttcher as he asks her questions about her career. Martha typifies a strong German worker, who went from a bombed-out home to a flat with furniture and two sons who studied trades and have good jobs. The film has a very brief narration from Böttcher introducing Martha, and then the rest of the narration is by Martha herself. Böttcher says that the success of that film is due entirely to Martha’s character, and that she did the voice-over herself in only a few takes.63 “I happened to live right next to that rubble dump,” said Böttcher, who noted that the other directors tended to live in nicer areas in the suburbs, …I had observed the work with rubble and ruins, I attempted to draw it as a student; but I found drawing an inadequate medium, one was ashamed of oneself, one couldn’t come to grips with the subject. Basically, a pile of rubble is a metaphor; in such a giant pile are the traces of thousands of dead people, bombs, women, and children – everything is in there. And that is also the case in the film Martha; that is what touches you.64

24  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist Böttcher notes that one very good thing about DEFA was that they did not put time pressures or cost-saving pressures on filmmakers. “We waited for weeks because I knew we needed snow” for a dramatic aesthetic that emphasizes Martha’s strength.65 In 1978, Martha won the “Award of the World Peace Council,” Leipzig International Film Festival for Documentary and Animated Films, and the Award of the Festival Organizers, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.

2.12  Verwandlungen (Transformations) Tryptic Film: Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull), Venus Nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione), and Frau Am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord) These three films, made in 1981, each lasting about 16 minutes, make up the only full-length experimental film shot in the DDR/GDR with state funding.66 It was inspired by Stan Brakhage, the well-known American avant-garde filmmaker, who insisted that Böttcher make it. Brakhage had a retrospective in Amsterdam in the Stedelij Museum, and Böttcher said that the DDR/GRD sent him and he met with Brakhage there. Böttcher notes that he did not have a catalogue or anything to show Brakhage other than his over-painted postcards, but they met in a hotel and spoke of their work and Brakhage said, “you must make a film about these cards.”67 Böttcher and crew show experimentation and skill in several areas of filmmaking. Böttcher has taken the same artwork of the title’s name, and painted over it in 22 ways, so that we see 22 versions of the image, each featuring paint, ink, color, tape, crayon, and other media which change the image. Sometimes we see the live painting take place, a brush creating lines and shape reminiscent of Alexander Calder or Picasso, and sometimes we see a completed over-painting. We hear a vocal and diegetic-sound-layered soundtrack that is rhythmic and abstracted. We also see the images projected on several objects and textures: a burlap curtain, a woman’s jacket that is being opened, a television with a football match playing, and a car standing outside, playing with scale as the film cuts between close-ups and wide-shots. The object the painting is being projected onto is not always immediately revealed. While one might not consider this work progressive within the field of experimental film, being made in 1981 and exhibiting a lot of techniques that were explored by various avant-garde filmmakers in the 1960s, it is a quite complete catalogue of these techniques. They are employed very well, indicating that this was most likely a way of working that the artist had built up over quite a span of time. And unlike many of the well-known experimental filmmakers, who tend to lock the variable of the camera, and focus on the changes that can be made on the film stock, projected materials, or other media, Böttcher and his crew show an ease and mastery of the filming process

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  25 as well, more akin to Bruce Conner or even William Kentridge, but the work is unique and stands well on its own. In the words of Claus Löser, “Böttcher created an enduring and unique work that has few, if any, counterparts in the entire history of GDR cinema.”68 By comparing them with the career trajectory of Stan Brackhage for example, one would reasonably believe that these films would have certainly been lauded, exhibited, and recognized in the west. Instead, they were not only dismissed, but completely misunderstood and virtually banned. Böttcher explains: They saw any over-painting as an attack on the Politburo’s housing programme. I hadn’t thought of anything as big as that. And it became really bad with my film; ‘Frau am Klavichord’. Then the world collapsed. They said that I was undermining the peace policies of the GDR and the Soviet Union with the film, and so on.69 Thus, Böttcher was somewhat forced back into documentary filmmaking, although at this point his work would shift to contain less interviews or have a less defined topic than previous work (see Chapter 6).

2.13  Local and International Political Concerns On November 18 1983, thirty minutes before the opening ceremonies of the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 20–50 people held candles in a silent protest outside of the Capitol movie theater. Police and Stasi members intervened and forcibly arrested seventeen people, six of whom were detained for several days. Festival-goers from the east, but particularly from the west, were dismayed, and on the November 20th, as Moine recounts, based on a Stasi dossier report of the incident, a group from west Berlin presented a letter from concerned people who demanded a meeting to find out what had happened to the people who had been “beaten and taken away” by police.70,71,72 According to Moine: Among those who had witnessed the Stasi’s forceful intervention on November 18 was DEFA dramaturg Tamara Trampe, a regular festivalgoer since the early 1970s. She had just arrived in Leipzig and wanted to leave right after the events, but Jürgen Böttcher, who had also been present at the Capitol theater, suggested she stay so she could testify: “Stasi, everywhere! They were well able to observe. But I can observe even better,” he reputedly said.73,74 The people concerned about the arrests of the protestors discovered that several of those who protested were still in custody days later. But concurrent to

26  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist this, November 22 was the day in which the West German government was voting on whether to station rockets in West Germany, and many thought that the arrests in front of the Capitol theater were a small and distracting matter compared to international cold wars and nuclear armament. Böttcher fell in this second camp. “He retorted that the key issue was not the fate of those arrested at the Capitol, but rather the rearmament policy of the FRG and the West; for him, this was a higher priority”75,76 Many years later, in an interview with Günther Gaus, Böttcher elaborates further on this local/international perspective on conflict: …When I see reports that I can hardly hear, in ARTE [German media], for example, about the Nobel Peace Prize winner Kissinger and what he has on his conscience, with so many hundreds of thousands of murders. When I look at the reports about what touched us deeply at the time, about Chile and so on. If you see that raiding countries is completely legal for reasons of business, power, then – I’m really not protecting Honecker – but those sad wall dead are such a small number, aren’t they? But it is on the agenda, for reasons of power, for reasons of property, for reasons of the multiplication of billions, to simply exterminate entire nations. And we live with that and can do almost nothing. It is horrible.77

2.14  Rangierer (Shunters) Böttcher said, regarding Rangierer: At this time I no longer wanted to make films with people talking politely. I didn’t want to engage people in a dialogue which could only be a coverup for what they weren’t allowed to say. They were almost all furious about the Stasi and felt insulted and humiliated. Or they couldn’t bear the Wall anymore.78 Rangierer is a beautifully shot short documentary that shows the railway switchers at work in the harsh cold. There’s no interview, narration, or music; instead, the story is etched into the faces of the workers as we watch them at work. For the film Rangierer, Böttcher did not want too much comradery or familiarity between himself and subjects, so he was careful not to do introductions, whereas with most other films there was a good deal of time spent getting familiar with the subjects. “I knew that if I befriended them, the film would be crap.”79 In November 1984, Rangierer was selected at Leipzig, where “it caused a sensation,” according to Moine. “It had the merit of offering an original

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  27 take on the world of work – a theme that was omnipresent in DEFA documentaries – while making a contribution to the evolution of the language of documentary filmmaking.”80 The film received several awards in both the east and the west.

2.15  International Travel and In Georgien (In Georgia) A few times in his career Böttcher was given the permission and funding to travel. In the late 1970s, a delegation from the Film Association of the GDR was invited to Iraq, and visited Bagdad, Barsa, and Babylon. Böttcher said of the trip: “just the flight there almost made me mad with joy.”81 In 1986, Böttcher was given a great retrospective screening of films in Paris, coordinated with the help of Joris Ivens. He also traveled to London and Edinburgh for smaller retrospectives. While Böttcher was in the west, he also participated in a co-taught course with Ricky Leacock in West Berlin and Hamburg.82 The 1987 film In Georgien is his first international film in his thirtyyear career. Throughout the 103-minute color 35 mm documentary, we see Böttcher and his crew encountering local people and customs of the thenUSSR country: observing, interacting and informally questioning through an interpreter. While there is some exposition at the beginning of the film, it is quite reflexive throughout, as is common in cinéma vérité at the time.

2.16  Die Mauer (The Wall) Die Mauer (The Wall) is an observational documentary regarding the fall of the Berlin Wall. While there are occasional remarks by Böttcher from behind the camera, these are infrequent and aimed at refocusing attention on the people being filmed, and allowing them to provide their own unprompted insights and reflections. Whether New Year’s Eve partiers or East German soldiers, Böttcher gathers and presents their perspectives and experiences equally, to present a complex, moving and reflective film. This work will be discussed extensively in Chapter 6: Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple and Reform in Participatory/Reflexive Documentary in 1990. This is certainly Böttcher’s most known and awarded work. The film opened the Leipzig Film Festival in 1990. Moine writes: With it Böttcher – then fifty-nine and having worked at DEFA for nearly thirty years – offered a visual reflection in the form of an overview that ultimately belonged to an entire generation. Throughout the ninety-minute documentary, the public’s boisterous joy alternates with prolonged periods of silence.83

28  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist Die Mauer won the International Film Critics Award at the 1991 Berlinale. Böttcher then announced that he would retire from filmmaking to concentrate on painting.

2.17  Transition to Painting Böttcher noted that there are “7 or 8 painters named Böttcher” and another artist from the west named Jürgen Böttcher, so the name change to Strawalde was a practical move, but he selected the name of his hometown (minus the letter h, which he notes makes it sound even harder which he liked), because of his memories of it turning from an idyllic place to a nightmare.84 As an artist, STRAWALDE struggled to get his work seen or printed. He discusses getting four-color reproductions printed in Sybille magazine, which he notes almost always sold out very quickly and he managed to get a few copies of it.85 Böttcher had a friend who wanted to make a book of his overpaintings, but these were not approved. This lady did manage to include six of the overpaintings as illustrations to a children’s book of fairytales by GDR authors, called New Fairytales About Love.86 The book also sold out in a few days, and Böttcher only managed to get a few copies.87 In 2000 Böttcher was given a retrospective at the Leipzig Documentary Festival. An article about this, called “Muted tones, word fragments, half sentences, hardly a laugh” begins with: “Why is Mr. B. unhappy?” asked Kraft Wetzel, after Böttcher was dedicated as part of the retrospective International Documentary Film Festival Leipzig in 2000. “What more can you do? Could Jürgen Böttcher (…) not be satisfied with so much recognition? However, in Leipzig, he responded in the conversations with the audience to any hint of criticism irritably and violently. Friends who wanted to appease him counselled serenity, sovereignty and coolness, but he appeared displeased. Why is this man so unhappy?”88 In an interview in 2019, Böttcher placed emphasis on the feeling of betrayal due to his commercial success in the art world, and one might wonder if it was simply the most recent hardship, or if it was truly the most painful experience for Böttcher.89 His interview with Gaus gives the background to why Böttcher called this “the hardest blow”. Böttcher describes going to the Berlinale, and his former student Wolf Winkler (A.R. Penck, 1939–2017), who was successful in the west, would attend Böttcher’s screenings and take him to a fancy dinner with wine. There is a 1991 video of them making a large painting together collaboratively, which

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  29 shows both their existing friendship but also the strain of creative differences and the distance between the two as their lives diverged.90 Böttcher describes having trouble getting into the art trade fairs, and when he was officially barred by the admissions committee of the Cologne Art Fair, their lawyer sent a letter that said, according to Böttcher: Strawalde is Penck’s teacher, but Penck sees it differently. Penck thinks he robbed him spiritually from the start, this Strawalde. When Penck was 14 Strawalde had already robbed him. The painter, this Strawalde, only started to paint after the fall of the Wall and before that he was so strange that he made films for the GDR. And everything that he painted afterward was all stolen from Penck… And that’s why we said years ago that I shouldn’t go to the fair. And to experience that as a 70-year-old is the greatest brutality for me. I have been to people in the GDR – Kurella, Abusch, Sindermann – the greatest leaders of this policy … And they were angry with me, they forbade me to go. But do you know what they did? They always said: you are brilliant … you were angry that I did not give you my strength. You basically punished me and it was tough. But they still named me a so-called artist, so to speak … And what happens to me when I’m almost 70? That these people say I’m a plagiarist, I’m nothing, right? And only for business reasons or because they think that someone who made films in the GDR must not now act as a painter. And you know I was also ill for a few weeks and had heart cramps and things were bad for me. I endured these other things and it was difficult – when the films were banned, when the painting … But that was the hardest blow. And I will never forget that kind of capitalism. But I’m not saying that socialism is better.91 Despite these problems his work has been exhibited widely. His paintings form part of important art collections, including those of the National Gallery in Berlin, the Albertina in Vienna, the Boston Public Library, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. In addition to internationally known German museums, his paintings have been exhibited in Canada, France, Brazil, and Singapore. In 2012, the LindenauMuseum in Altenburg hosted a retrospective entitled “Strawalde and Jürgen Böttcher.”92 And Böttcher said he has found his two careers as a filmmaker and artist, to be rewarding – a kind of “living two lives”: “I’ve expressed them as an abstract painter and then realistically. And I’ve made this tribute and paid homage to hard-working people, primarily… one

30  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist could say it’s a form of compensation. I’m old now and I’ve not got long left, and it’s no problem if I soon depart, because I’ve done my thing.”93 Gaus and Böttcher discussed death as well in their interview: Gaus:

Yes. At the end – what is it like when you think about death? Or don’t you? Strawalde: You don’t have to call it thinking, I’m in contact with it. And I think that would be silly – there are so many who have to bite the grass so young. When we see the reports almost every day, don’t we? The boys there, the young Russians, back there because of a shitty war. Iraq – we don’t want to talk about how many children are murdered all the time, do we? Always for any reason. Then we 70-year-olds should not despair that we may soon be gone. Böttcher has continued to make work into his 80s.

Notes

1 Günter Gaus, Günter Gaus in conversation with Jürgen Böttcher, 2003. 2 Beetz, 00:10:56. 3 Beetz, 20:44:22. 4 Beetz, 21:09.60. 5 Gaus. 6 Christoph Hübner, Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1: Wildenhahn/Böttcher/Nestler/ Koepp (Goethe-Institut Filmmuseum München, 2008), 00:21:17. Translation made within film subtitles. 7 Hübner, 00:29:05. 8 Hübner, 00:26:52. 9 Hübner, 00:34:12. 10 Beetz, 00:23:40. 11 Beetz, 00:25:00. 12 Caroline Moine, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955-1990, ed. by John Barrett and Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs, Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), p. 84. 13 “Synopsis: Strawalde und Penck malen ein Bild” https://ecommerce.umass.edu/ defa/film/37390. 14 Hübner, 00:30:00. 15 Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker - Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 2005, 03:58:00. 16 Hübner, 00:49:47. 17 Hübner, 00:51:43. 18 Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker - Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 04:55:00. 19 “Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001”, 27. 20 Hübner, 00:01:54. 21 “Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001,” 28. 22 Volker Koepp, in Reiseziel Leipzig, 1997, 99–100 (99). 23 Moine, Screened Encounters, 148.

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  31 24 Andreas Kötzing, ‘ESSAY ON THE FESTIVAL HISTORY: LEIPZIG IN THE AUTUMN’, Leipzig Website, Festival History, 1 https://www.dok-leipzig.de/en/ festival-history. 25 Hermann Herlinghaus, Dokumentaristen der Welt in den Kämpfen unserer Zeit Selbstzeugnisse aus zwei Jahrzehnten (1960–1981). (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1982), 55–56. 26 Caroline Moine, “Ouvriers et réalisme socialiste: les films documentaires estallemandes,.” in Les images de l’industrie, de 1850 á nos jours, ed. by Denis Woronow and Nicolas Pierrot (Paris: Comité pour l’Histoire Economique et Financiére de la France, 2002), 68–79. Translated by author. 27 Moine, Screened Encounters, 85. 28 Jürgen Böttcher and Erika Richter, ‘Filmsplitter. Fragmentarisches über die Anfänge.’, in Apropos: Film 2000. Ed. Ralf Schenk, Erika Richter, and Claus Löser. (Berlin: Verlag Das Neue Berlin, 2001), 10–16 (12). 29 Moine, Screened Encounters, 88. 30 Moine, Screened Encounters, 86. 31 Herlinghaus. 32 Stephen Peet, ‘Documentaries, the Leipzig Festival’ (Leipzig, 1984). 33 Fred Gehler, ‘Le Joli Mai.’, Sonntag, 49, 1963. 34 Enno Patalas, ‘Leipzig: Ein Weg zum Nachbarn’, Filmkritik, 1 (1964). 35 Christian Lehmann, Moine, Caroline. Interview with Christian Lehmann, Berlin, Germany, 2000. 36 Herlinghaus. 37 Moine, Screened Encounters, 88. 38 Chris Marker, ‘Beitrag auf dem Freien Forum in Leipzig’, in Filmwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen, 1964, 1, 201. 39 Moine, Screened Encounters, 88. 40 Lehmann. 41 Jürgen Böttcher, Moine, Caroline. Interview with Jürgen Böttcher, Karlshorst, 2000. 42 Moine, Screened Encounters, 120. 43 Böttcher, Moine, Caroline, interview with Jürgen Böttcher, Karlshorst, 2000. 44 Moine, Screened Encounters, 120. 45 “Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001,” 31. 46 “Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001,” 32. 47 Hübner, 00:19:08. 48 Hübner, 00:19:40. 49 “Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001.” 29. 50 Moine, Screened Encounters, 138. 51 Fred Gehler, “Über die Anmeassung des Künstlers.” in Seismogramm(e) des Augenblicks: Texte zu Jürgen Böttcher, ed. by Claus Löser and Peter Nau (Leipzig: Leipziger Dok-Filmwochen., 2001), 4–6. 52 Gehler, 4–6. 53 Moine, Screened Encounters, 139. 54 Moine, Screened Encounters, 139–140. 55 Hübner, 00:08:33. 56 Moine, Screened Encounters, 219. 57 Moine, Screened Encounters, 224–225. 58 Claus Löser, ‘Jürgen Böttcher und sein Film Baruß und ohne Hut’, in Seismogramm(e) des Augenblicks: Texte zu Jürgen Böttcher., ed. by Fred Gehler, Claus Löser, and Peter Nau (Leipzig: Leipziger Dok-Filmwochen, 2001), 7. 59 Moine, Screened Encounters, 225–226. 60 Frank Beyer, Wenn der Wind sich dreht: Meine Filme, mein Leben, List-Taschenbuch, 1. Aufl. (München: Ullstein-Taschenbuchverl., 2002). 61 Moine, Screened Encounters, 226.

32  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist 62 Böttcher, Moine, Caroline. Interview with Jürgen Böttcher, Karlshorst 2000.’ 63 Katrin Teubner and Ferdinand Teubner, Zeitzeugengespräch: Jürgen Böttcher (Filmmuseum München, Goethe-Institut München, DEFA Stiftung Berlin, 2015), 00:17:54. Translation within subtitles. 64 “Jürgen Böttcher FilmsFilme 1957–2001,” 33. 65 Teubner and Teubner, 00:13:09. 66 Claus Löser, ‘Late DEFA Works (1978–1988) Edition Filmmuseum 104 DVD Insert’ (Filmmuseum München, DVD Set). 67 Jürgen Böttcher, Elizabeth Daggett Matar interviews Jürgen Böttcher, 2019. 68 Löser, ‘Late DEFA Works (1978-1988) Edition Filmmuseum 104 DVD Insert’. 69 Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker - Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 08:54:00. Translation within subtitles. 70 An das Komitee der Internationalen Leipziger Dokumentarfilm und Kurzfilmwoche, 2. 71 Capt. Heinig, Captain Heinig, Information, Leipzig, 20 November 1983, 20 November 1983, 46. 72 Moine, Screened Encounters, 234. 73 Jutta Voigt and others, ‘Leipzig in der Filmkritik’, in Gehler and Steinmetz, 1998, 67–82 (79). 74 Moine, Screened Encounters, 238. 75 Tamara Trampe, Moine, Caroline. Interview with Tamara Trampe, DEFA dramaturg and scriptwriter, 2004. 76 Moine, Screened Encounters, 238. 77 Gaus. 78 Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker – Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 00:10:02. Translation by Goethe-Institute. 79 Teubner and Teubner, 00:16:08. 80 Moine, Screened Encounters, 227. 81 “Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001,” 21. 82 Böttcher, “Elizabeth Daggett Matar interviews Jürgen Böttcher.” 83 Moine, Screened Encounters, 301. 84 Hübner, 00:39:10. 85 Hübner, 00:39:34. 86 Hübner, 00:40:45. 87 Hübner, 00:40:53. 88 DDR – Erinnern, Vergessen: Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms, ed. by Tobias Ebbrecht, Hilde Hoffmann, and Jörg Schweinitz (Marburg: Schüren, 2009). Translated by Lisa Niestroj. 89 Böttcher, ‘Elizabeth Daggett Matar interviews Jürgen Böttcher’. 90 Strawalde und Penck malen ein Bild, directed by Heiner Sylvester. (Germany, 1991), DVD. 91 Gaus. 92 “DEFA Film Library: Jürgen Böttcher Biography,” 1 https://ecommerce.umass.edu/ defa/people/450. 93 Teubner and Teubner, 00:24:44.

References An das Komitee der Internationalen Leipziger Dokumentarfilm und Kurzfilmwoche, BStU BVfS Leipzig XX/269/01 Beyer, Frank. Wenn der Wind sich dreht. meine Filme, mein Leben. München: Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag, 2002.

Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist  33 Böttcher, Jürgen, “Böttcher, Jürgen - Günter Gaus in conversation with Jürgen Böttcher “interview by Günter Gaus, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, November 12, 2003, TVSeries. https://www.rbb-online.de/zurperson/interview_archiv/boettcher_juergen.html ———, interview by author, Karlshorst, 2019. ———, Moine, Caroline, interview with Jürgen Böttcher, Karlshorst 2000. Böttcher, Jürgen, and Erika Richter, “Filmsplitter. Fragmentarisches über die Anfänge. “In Apropos: Film 2000, Ralf Schenk, Erika Richter, and Claus Löser (eds). Berlin: Verlag das Neue Berlin, 2001. “DEFA Film Library: Jürgen Böttcher Biography” https://ecommerce.umass.edu/defa/ people/450 Ebbrecht, Tobias, Hilde Hoffmann, and Jörg Schweinitz, eds., DDR - Erinnern, Vergessen: Das visuelle Gedächtnis des Dokumentarfilms. Marburg: Schüren, 2009. Gehler, Fred, “Le Joli Mai, ” Sonntag, 1963. ———, “Über Die Anmeassung Des Künstlers, “in Seismogramm(e) Des Augenblicks: Texte Zu Jürgen Böttcher, Claus Löser and Peter Nau (eds). Leipzig: Leipziger DokFilmwochen., 2001: 4–6. Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker - Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 2005. Heinig, Capt., Captain Heinig, Information, Leipzig, 20 November 1983, 20 November 1983: 46. Herlinghaus, Hermann. Dokumentaristen der Welt in den Kämpfen unserer Zeit: Selbstzeugnisse aus zwei Jahrzehnten, 1960-1981. Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1982. Hübner, Christoph. Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1 - Wildenhahn/Böttcher/Nestler/Koepp. Goethe-Institut Filmmuseum München, 2008, DVD. “Jürgen Böttcher Films/Filme 1957–2001” Nirwana Events, Berlin. Koepp, Volker, in Reiseziel Leipzig, 1997: 99–100. Kötzing, Andreas. “Essay on the Festival History: Leipzig in Autumn,” Leipzig Website, Festival History https://www.dok-leipzig.de/en/festival-history Lehmann, Christian, Moine, Caroline, interview with Christian Lehmann, Berlin, 2000. Löser, Claus, “Jürgen Böttcher und sein Film Barfuss und ohne Hut”, in Seismogramm(e) des Augenblicks: Texte zu Jürgen Böttcher, Fred Gehler, Claus Löser, and Peter Nau (eds). Leipzig: Leipziger Dok-Filmwochen, 2001. ———, “Late DEFA Works (1978–1988)” Edition Filmmuseum 104 DVD Insert Filmmuseum München, Goethe-Institut und DEFA-Stiftung, 2016. DVD Set. Marker, Chris. “Beitrag auf dem freien Forum in Leipzig, in Filmwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen I. Selbstverlag Berlin, 1964. Moine, Caroline, “Ouvriers et Réalisme Socialiste: Les Films Documentaires Estallemandes,” in Les Images de l’industrie, de 1850 á Nos Jours, Denis Woronoff and Nicolas Pierrot (eds). Paris: Comité pour l’Histoire Economique et Financiére de la France, 2002; 68–79. ———, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival 1955-1990 (Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1). Edited by Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs and translated by John Barrett. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. “Patalas, Enno, “Leipzig: Ein Weg Zum Nachbarn,” Filmkritik, 1: 1964. Peet, Stephen, “Documentaries, the Leipzig Festival.” Leipzig, 1984. “Synopsis: Strawalde Und Penck Malen Ein Bild” https://ecommerce.umass.edu/defa/ film/37390

34  Biography of Jürgen Böttcher, Filmmaker, and STRAWALDE, Artist Teubner, Katrin, and Ferdinand Teubner, Zeitzeugengespräch: Jürgen Böttcher Filmmuseum München, DEFA Stiftung Berlin: Goethe-Institut München,, 2015. DVD. Trampe, Tamara, Caroline, Moine interview with Tamara Trampe, DEFA dramaturg and scriptwriter, 2004. Voigt, Jutta, Heinz Kersten, Heinz Kluncher, Wilhem Roth, Hans-Dieter Tok, and Ralk Schenk, ‘Leipzig in Der Filmkritik’, in Gehler and Steinmetz, 1998: 67–82.

3

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 Jürgen Böttcher’s Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders) and Robert Drew and Richard Leacock’s The Chair

3.1 The Transition Between Expository Mode and Observational Mode Often based on topic and most analogous to journalism, the expository mode, according to Nichols, “assembles fragments of the historical world into a more rhetorical frame… The expository mode addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that propose a perspective or advance an argument.”1 Often, in the expository mode, the images are merely to support the words of the “voice-of-God” narrator, assumed to be all-knowing and objective. Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, filmmakers throughout the world sought control of the filmmaking technology in order to produce the style of documentary film they desired to make, and what they desired to do was to move away from word-logic, static images, and an unknown authority telling the audience what to think. One might wonder which force led the other: was it the independent-minded individuals coming of age in the 1960s who created societal change or did alreadybrewing social change create a fundamentally different filmmaker and audience? Perhaps the two cannot be separated. WWII, naturally, impacted everyone. Many of the filmmakers of this generation had fought or suffered, becoming fully responsible for themselves, their countries, and the lives of others at a young age – seeing things that other generations would not see; perhaps it was this experience that led them to believe that they did not need an interpreter or a specialist to tell them what to think. They believed in the power of people to see and deduce for themselves. They were watching neorealist cinema, and they were experiencing a period of peace and free education, and the mass-production of machines that had not been created twenty years before. This generation was open and receptive to a new way of living and seeing the world. However, the media gatekeepers of the time, often from an older generation, did not trust that the audience wanted such a different viewing experience, and urged a slow transition from the heavily scripted, narrated, journalistic structure of non-fiction motion images to the observational mode. This was universal – and by looking at two films from 1962: a DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264-3

36  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 film by Jürgen Böttcher called Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders) and a film by Drew Associates and Ricky Leacock called The Chair, we see a similar middle ground between the modes. Both Robert Drew and Ricky Leacock served in the US military during the war, witnessing and filming fighting and death on the front lines in Burma, China, and Italy; Böttcher experienced poverty, death, and destruction from his devastated hometown and Dresden in Germany. Despite being on opposite sides of the war, and then opposite sides of the Berlin Wall and the cold war, there are remarkable similarities in the two films.

3.2  Technology, Observation, and Drew Associates Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane summarize the many technical changes that happened in filmmaking in this short amount of time: plastic was substituted for metal to become more lightweight and noiseless, cameras were made with reflex viewing (looking through the lens while shooting), zoom lenses were utilized (meaning that the cinematographer could go from close-up to wide shot without having to stop to change lenses), and film stock became about ten times more light sensitive, meaning that lights were not required for everyday situations. In regard to sound, transistors replaced vacuum tubes and “the weight of sound recorders was reduced from 200 pounds to 20 pounds. Crystal sync technology allowed the cinematographer and the sound recorder to no longer be connected by a cord.”2 These innovations were made by several people around the globe, often piecing together German, American, Canadian, and British parts and innovations. Robert Drew was one of the most pivotal people in this movement for technical advance. Drew was a journalist for LIFE Magazine; he was both a picture editor and reporter. In 1953 NBC asked him to produce a half-hour television motion-picture news show. According to Stephen Mamber’s Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary, this pilot film, called Key Picture was “to use his [Drew’s] word, “catastrophic.””3 He asked LIFE Magazine to grant him a year’s leave to discover what made the piece so awful and how to make what he envisioned, and he secured a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard for this purpose. During this year, he discovered a film, Toby and the Tall Corn (1954) by Ricky Leacock. In the film, Leacock is able to show the entire process of a tent show seamlessly. There are wide shots of a tent being erected and people entering, medium shots of them sitting, close ups of the presenters, close up reaction shots of the audience, and then shots of the show ending and the audience leaving. The film succinctly gives the viewer the experience of all aspects of a real event. Drew found Leacock and asked him how he did it. The film was shot with 35 mm cameras and a tape recorder that weighed over 200 pounds (90 kilograms).4 The answer: he filmed the same tent show multiple times, each time getting the parts of the process that he could from one camera and audio setup. So, Leacock was, for documentary, treating the filming like classic narrative filmmaking in which

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  37 the same actions are performed by actors numerous times in order to capture wide shot, medium shot, and close up in continuity for editing options which the film viewer has become accustomed to. What Drew and Leacock wanted was for the technology to be portable and unintrusive enough that they could move quickly and capture the essence of what was happening when it was only happening once. It was only then, they felt, that they could “capture reality.” P. J. O’Connell, in his book Robert Drew and the Development of Cinéma Vérité in America,5 notes that almost all the Drew-Leacock-Pennebaker equipment was based on pre-existing equipment – Auricon cameras, Uher and Perfectone recorders, and watches. By adapting equipment, rather than designing it, Drew and his associates had cut months, probably years, off the development process and saved significant sums of money.”6 The watches mentioned were Bulova’s “Accutron” wristwatches, with “one on the camera and the other on the recorder, used a tuning fork circuit to provide an extremely stable timing pulse to synchronize the camera and recorder involved.”7 Brian Winston, in his chapter entitled “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription” in Renov’s Theorizing Documentary, discusses how documentary filmmakers engage with the concept of scientific experiment through capturing reality, and the role that technology played in this. Inappropriate studio apparatus was seen as being the big impediment to realizing the full observational potential of the form. All it required, in the minds of North American filmmakers at least, was the arrival of more suitable equipment – handholdable cameras and battery-powered tape recorders, enabling instantaneous filming in almost all circumstances. By the mid-fifties, television news had created a large enough market for 16mm sync-sound apparatus for an R&D program to be sustained. By the early sixties, this program had produced the machines of which the Griersonians had long dreamed.8 At least, this is the American, or English-language version of the history. In reality, sync sound was achieved in Germany in 1953. The only time this is mentioned is in a footnote in Renov’s Theorizing Documentary. Winston gives the history of this technical adaptation: By 1953, Südwestfunk–Fernsehen, the TV station in Baden–Baden, had adapted all three cameras in the American “Auricon” range (built by Walter Bach) by taking out the optical system and inserting a “Klangfilm” magnetic recorder instead. The adapted cameras used mag. Stripe film [sic]. The station had projectors, kinescope, and editing rooms all equipped to work with mag. Stripe.9 [Ann-Ruth Martin, “Magnetic Sound on TV Newsfilms in Germany,” Journal of the SMPTE 65 (June 1956), 336.]10

38  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 But, Winston notes that at 26 pounds, or 11.7 kilograms, this system was still too heavy to be carried with ease, so the “American Direct Cinema pioneers” (Leacock, Pennebaker) began working on making it lighter. Bach himself responded, producing the same audio recording device, but in a lightweight body “especially for documentary filming” [Anon, “A new lightweight version of the Pro-600,” Journal of the SMPTE 69 (September 1960), 701].11 Winston goes on to note that in 1958 André Coutant adapted a cinematographic device that he had developed for the French missile program into a self-blimped, or self-muffled camera designed to be carried: the “Eclair,” which was introduced commercially in 1963 as the “Eclair NPR” which was widely adopted.12 Winston notes that “unlike Bach, Coutant made no attempt to build a sound system into the “Eclair.” The camera required a separate audio recorder to be run in sync with it – a double (as opposed to single) system. The French “Perfectone” was the first self-contained, battery-driven, high-fidelity, lightweight recorder, in 1959, but it was the 1960 “Nagra Tape Recorder” that gained traction and “became industry standard not least because its designer, Kudelski, specifically manufactured a model for the 16mm film market – the “Nagra III B” introduced in 1962.13,14 Christian Hißnauer and Bernd Schmidt discuss this false historical attribution in his Wegmarken des Fernsehdokumentarismus: Die Hamburger Schulen (Landmarks of Television Documentary: The Hamburg Schools).15 Despite the fact that the German system might not have been as light as many filmmakers would have liked or found acceptable, the fact that the technology was debuted, proven functional, a full seven years before, yet goes largely unacknowledged, is very telling. If such a clear-cut “first” be incorrectly attributed, it leads one to believe that the cinematic firsts of a German documentary filmmaker such as Böttcher – in east Germany – could also be, for various reasons, missing from the scholarly record. Hißnauer and Schmidt, in German, (there is not currently an English version of the book), point out that German cameraman Carsten Diercks has been trying to draw attention to the fact that the Germans were first since 1992, while “in German television studies, this assessment has meanwhile found uncontested recognition (cf., e.g., Zimmermann 1994; Hickethier 1998).”16 However, with regards to the question of whether, therefore, direct cinema is “a West-German invention?” they point out that having the technology did not necessarily translate to a new way of using it, and a new aesthetic. “This is basically made clear by Diercks himself when he emphasizes that he only used the pilot tone for certain recordings (e.g. for theater recordings, the filming of short statements, and in scenes in which the sound was particularly important.”17,18 They conclude that the technology was first in Germany, but the style-forming use is American, and in some cases, French. Likewise, the essential point of Winston’s chapter is to not give too much credit to the technology: that while there was the emphasis on the technical to

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  39 achieve a scientific ability to observe without the reminder of big lights and equipment, this line of thinking implicitly denies “the subjectivities of selection and arrangement…”19 – the implication that the technology makes what one sees “true” is also flawed. However, the technological advance is very important to filmmakers in their ability to even attempt a sense of verisimilitude for the viewer. From 1957–1960, Drew and Leacock shot numerous small documentary segments for TV that showed on the Today Show or late-night TV. But it wasn’t until the technological advancements were completed and utilized in the documentary Primary that they were able to grow in scope and scale – they were able to move freely, get into cars, and follow someone into a building – with synchronous sound.20,21 After Primary, they had a prolific stretch of filmmaking, producing On the Pole, the twelve-part Close-Up series including Yanki No!, The Children Were Watching (which many would argue forever changed race relations in America) and Kenya, and another ten-part series called Living Camera, which included the films Eddie, Susan Starr, and Jane.22 Drew functioned as an executive producer, and would have as many as 75 employees working for him under the umbrella of “Drew Associates.” 23 D. A. Pennebaker worked as a cameraman on many of these films. The Chair was the second-to-last film made by Richard Leacock and Robert Drew together. After this film, they made Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, in which they filmed a clash between then-President John F. Kennedy’s administration and George Wallace, the then-governor of Alabama, over desegregating the University of Alabama. Access to the President, of course, is indicative of having a strong reputation and track record of previous films, as well as having a prior relationship with Kennedy from the film Primary. It is particularly ironic that, despite sync technology being developed in west Germany in 1953, many would argue that it would be 1965 before westGerman filmmakers such as Klaus Wildenhahn would make a direct cinemastyle documentary.24 Böttcher, in nearby east Germany, would still not have sync sound technology for Ofenbauer, but even without the technology he already had the style of direct cinema. By the following year, for the film Stars, he has found a way to make a makeshift sync sound rig, although it would have many faults.

3.3  The Chair and Ofenbauer Despite being made in the same year, there are many ways in which the two films do not make a perfect comparison. First, the difference in length: Ofenbauer is 14 minutes and 52 seconds long, while The Chair is 1 hour 16 minutes. Obviously, structure is different for a long and a short film, and the level of details and number of individuals that can be included differ.

40  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 Another matter, of course, is the funding and approval process for these films. In the case of Drew Associates, there are network politics and the audience to consider, and the interruption of commercials to edit for. For Böttcher, of course, DEFA and the party had to approve it for content reasons; instead of thinking about profitability, they were thinking of ideology. All of the aforementioned points are valid differences but are outside of the filmmaker’s control and would change.

3.4  The Hero’s Journey in Documentary Film The reason these films are important to compare, however, is because of their drastically different dramaturgical styles. Beginning with the idea and pitch, the preproduction was already different. For television in the US, the film idea was most often pitched verbally, in broad strokes, and was evaluated by the television executive or program editor in terms of what was perceived as being entertaining to broad audience. Pitches to DEFA, however, were in writing, and the ultimate authority was the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and it was ideological value to the Party that was the number one criterion. Thus, one key difference between Böttcher’s preproduction planning and that of Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker, the Maysles’, and other western documentary filmmakers of the time, is the choice of singular or plural protagonists. The singular hero is so deeply embedded in the American story structure, that many scriptwriting authors and scholars do not even address it as a choice. From the first documentary, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, to today’s most-watched documentaries such as Tiger King, we see the Hollywood narrative structure, and the singular protagonist, being applied to documentary, or, more accurately, we see documentary footage being manipulated to conform to Hollywood dramaturgical structure, out of concern that viewers will not accept anything different. In this tradition, the Drew Associates documentary The Chair begins by narrowing down the entire world to one, relatable protagonist. Shot in black-andwhite; the 16 mm film, 75-minutes long, is about an African-American man, Paul Crump, who is to be executed in five days if lawyers are not able to get the governor to grant clemency and stop the execution. The film opens with an aerial shot of Chicago. The narrator, whose voice is male, begins with:” somewhere in the city of Chicago there’s an electric chair…” The film goes on to introduce, through narration, the New York and Chicago lawyers who are on their way to that chair, as we see a taxi going through the city. According to the narration, no governor has ever commuted a death sentence on the grounds of rehabilitation. But rather than focus equally on the two lawyers, we focus on the younger lawyer, Moore, as the main protagonist and hero of the story. After being introduced to Crump as well as the warden, who is in the difficult position of being Crump’s personal friend but being tasked with killing

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  41 him if clemency is not granted, we pivot to Moore; the narrator returns and tells us that the 33-year-old is working the case without fee. We get several shots of Moore’s messy office, with crumpled paper on the floor, and then we see a whistling, fast-moving Moore enter. We see his assistant typing away, as the narrator informs us that this is the weekend before the plea hearing and the document that Moore will present is not ready: it needs testimony and an important statement from the Catholic church that Moore will try to get. The narration stops, and we see his secretary come in and tell him her progress on the brief. The assistant, who looks to be a twenty-something woman, says she heard that he would be leaving. Moore jokes that if the case is not successful, of course he will leave, so that he doesn’t have to “take the rap.” They laugh, but the assistant is pressing to understand her duties for the weekend. She says that she will continue to type things up, and asks when he will be leaving. He says he will be leaving at some point, and offers several different times he might leave, and adds that she will be composing the brief. She laughs, exasperated, and then asks if they will be finishing it before he leaves. He says, “you are nudging me?” And she replies that she is. “I just don’t want you to leave me here and make me stay all night.”25 Moore ignores her and asks to have a cigarette from another assistant, this one male with thick glasses. He asks, “would you like me to go out and get some of your own?” Moore declines, and says that people can run errands for him “when I grow up.”26 These scenes say quite a bit about Moore’s character, work ethic, and view of himself. Moore then answers the phone and we hear him say that he is bringing in a lawyer from New York to argue the case. Moore then adds that it’s his case, but the lawyer, Louis Nizer, has been invited to join. The role of the lead protagonist is thus clearly defined. We are also given a victim: Paul Crump, who is the prisoner set to be executed. But he is not presented as the protagonist or even a protagonist, he is presented simply as the victim, like a damsel in distress. There is a montage of Crump’s discussion with a visitor and the preparation of the equipment that is to be used to kill him. The editing freezes a frame for a beat, and then cuts to a medium close-up of the chair, specifically the face guard, as someone (presumably the warden) explains that this is the part that goes over his face, and only has a hole for his nose to be visible. We cut back to Crump, with a matching medium closeup, where his nose is positioned to the same place the nose-hole is. We cut back to Warden Johnson, who explains, matter-of-factly, that the face guard keeps the person from being propelled out of the chair when the electricity jolts them, and demonstrates how the leg clamps holds the individual’s legs, and explains the chest and stomach straps. These gory details raise the stakes. We then move on to defining the opponent. We are shown a scene at a party, and the narrator tells us that the prosecutor, James Thompson, is “somewhat a celebrity” in Chicago, and we see Thomson mingling at the party. The narrator says that “he seems relaxed and confident about the case he will argue

42  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 against Nizer and Moore.”27 The viewer is led to view his confidence in light of the consequence with contempt. But then rather than turning back to both Nizer and Moore, we focus exclusively on Moore. We go back to Moore’s office, where he is explaining, at his desk, that the prosecutor will go through the details of the case slowly and carefully, so that the board members feel anger and want revenge in order to kill him. Moore notes that “no one really believes that capital punishment deters crime.”28 He goes on to say that if it were a deterrent it would be public and every teenager would be made to watch it, but instead, it is done in a basement at midnight because it is vengeance and retaliation. “It’s sick!” he says, “and there is no question that Paul Crump has pulled himself up by his moral bootstraps, and the only question is if the people of this state are themselves capable of pulling themselves up by their moral bootstraps.” Again, we see the assistant, saying she wants to go home, and asking him when he will be in the next morning. Moore says he will be there at 9:30 with “something she can start on.” She jokingly replies, “yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of.”29 The assistant serves as some comic relief and to humanize Moore. Even in the final hearing, Moore is given top-billing and final say. Nizer reads powerful parts of affidavits as we get reaction shots of the prosecution, looking defeated. Then it is the prosecutor’s turn. He reads passages from the affidavits that indicate that Paul Crump is not so much contrite but acting in his own self-interest and preservation. Then it is Moore, who closes out the trial, giving his rebuttal: of the 250 pages of affidavits, only a few paragraphs seem to cast any doubt on Crump’s rehabilitation. The viewer is left feeling that the defense won the argument. Afterward, we focus on Moore as well: we then cut to Moore at the bowling alley, sweating, on the phone, asking the person on the other end to please not call him unless it’s a true emergency because he spent three hours bowling to get tired enough to be able to sleep. We cut to Moore on the phone with a Mrs. Baker from Steubenville, and it is clear from what Moore says that she has been calling and working to help the case for clemency. At the end of the call, Moore replies to her (we only hear his speaking, of course), that that’s very kind that they would want to help send money to him for his fee, but that he is taken care of just fine and not to worry. When he hangs up, we hear him say, in a breaking, emotional voice, “people want to send me money from Steubenville. People must be out of their minds.”30 As we hear this, we get a pan of his legal books on his office wall. Then we see him, tearing up, and wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. There is a quiet beat while he cries. And of course, the final decision about the commutation is the climax of the film, and we experience this with Moore. We see the female assistant in Moore’s office say that the governor is going to announce his decision at 1:45 today. We get a quiet close-up of Moore’s face, and the prosecutor’s face. We then see the governor, at his desk as the narrator tells us details about where he will decide from, etc. We see Moore on the phone: “recommendation

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  43 commutation!” He is jumping up and down in his seat. “It’s third-hand, fifthhand hearsay but by God it’s our hearsay!” “What time is it?” he then asks, and adds, “let me see how much money I’ve got to bet on the races.”31 Moore asks another assistant or co-worker to take fifty cents and go to the newsstand to buy a racing form because he will not be in that afternoon. The ladies look amused. His phone rings, and he says “no story yet? Well, this could be bogus, they had a bogus report on the Leopold commutation.”32 We go back to the warden, and a ringing, and there is a montage: Moore bowling, the prosecutor golfing, the warden waiting, smoking, Crump waiting, smoking. We cut to a closeup of a news camera, and another ring. “Warden, Governor Kerner’s calling!”33 We see a crash-zoom to a woman in an operator ear set. The warden listens, hangs up, stands, goes in front of the press, and announces that the governor has commuted the sentence from a death sentence to 199 years. Crump is, again, infantized, and Moore is presented as the cool but heroic victor. We see Crump walk into the room after the announcement. The press asked him to look at them. He is told in front of them that he will not be killed. They ask him if he has anything to say and he says, “I thank God,” and the press shout, “look up,” and “a little louder!” and Paul continues, “Governor Turner, and all of the people who worked so hard to bring it to the attention of the governor and the public.” He then thanks his lawyers, and thanks people all over the country, little kids, and then he trails off with emotion and the press says, “that’s fine,” and “can you look over here?” Paul then is escorted out. We see a reporter on the phone, “he was obviously quite overcome with emotion.”34 We then see Moore at his desk, with bright press lights on him, and he tells the press that he got the call. They ask him how he feels, and he says he feels numb, but that he is grateful most of all to Louis Nizer of New York City. We see Moore yelling and cheering with his binoculars at the racetrack, cheering his horse, laughing. We hear from the narrator as we see Crump in chains, walking, that “six days later Paul Crump was transferred to the Illinois State penitentiary system. He has been assigned a job there: helping young criminals rehabilitate. He is there now, and will remain there, according to his sentence, for the rest of his natural life.” Mamber suggests that the film is unsuccessful, despite so many successful scenes, and lays the blame on the dramaturgy: because the film was too centered on one question, too exclusionary, and filled with too many clichés. “The young lawyer (Moore) serving for no pay because his cause is just, the star defense attorney, the specter of death, the warden with a job to do.” He suggests that “actually it is the dependence on fictional conventions and imitation of fictional editing techniques that is The Chair’s crippling error.”35 This observational film, conforming itself to Hollywood, makes for a good, clear plot, but it is the reduction of the superfluous details of life that strips the film of its verisimilitude. The emphasis is on Moore, not the team.

44  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 3.5  Multiple Protagonists in Ofenbauer By contrast, Böttcher’s Ofenbauer begins and ends with the collective, without a clear protagonist or antagonist. As was mentioned in “Chapter 2” the film Ofenbauer (Furnace Makers) was an important turn in Jürgen Böttcher’s early career, having just had both his senior thesis film Drei von vielen (Three from Many) and Jahrgang 45 (Born in ‘45) censored and rejected. Richard Kilborn, in his chapter “Jürgen Böttcher: A Retrospective” in the book DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992 notes that it is “a short film which we in the West would probably call an industrial documentary.”36 Ofenbauer is a short documentary about the effort of a group of workers to move a furnace, a typical industrial topic. However, there are several style choices that do not allow it to be limited in such a category. Kilborn further describes the commonality of narration at this time: “when he began his career in the 1960s, the accepted practice, or even requirement, was that each documentary be supplied with an explanatory commentary. This was primarily to ensure that any account of GDR reality be presented in such a way as to allow no scope for false interpretation.” According to Böttcher, “as soon as explanations were required, the censors and the authorities intervened. You always had to dress things up verbally. You always had to regulate things – and it was absolutely horrible.” 37,38 But Ofenbauer avoids beginning with narration.

Figure 3.1 Crew and documentary subjects during the filming of Ofenbauer ©DEFAStiftung/Lehmann, roßkopf, dumke, münch, gerstmann.

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  45 The film opens with credits over a photograph or static shot of a river or empty field with the factory in the background. We then jump to the roll call of the factory workers in their uniforms and hard-hats, listening intently and smoking. “Today we are going to begin the positioning procedure,” the leader says. “It’s the key phase of our repairs.”39 He begins to tell the men further what will happen in the procedure, until a narrator comes and cuts in, the voice of the leader fading down. The narrator says: Hoffmann gave the final instructions. Everyone knew them. When you work toward one day for eight months, toward just a few hours to be precise, a few hours that will decide everything, then everyone knows what he has to do. And still, we listened closely to every word.40 The use of “we” was very unusual for this time and is not common overall. Later the narration continues: “We worked quickly, but without rushing things.”41 We see the rollers that the furnace will be moved on being placed by the men. There are closeups of many hands working together, more medium shots of tense faces, and wide, upward-tilted shots toward the sky that show the large scale of the scaffolding and the intimidating nature of the space. Then we see the leader speaking over the microphone, handing over the power to speak to the man leading the operation. The anticipation is much like before an orchestra begins, especially with the factory tones resembling tuning. Then a louder noise takes over, and we see the cables tensing and vibrating: a clear beginning. The furnace is moving. Falko Seidel, in his dissertation “Die Lebenswelt der DDR im Spiegel der Filme des DEFA-Dokumentaristen Jürgen Böttcher,” makes note of how beloved films such as Ofenbauer and Stars were supported by the Party because they uplifted the worker. He notes that Böttcher showed not only the importance of the group, but also each single person, and their important role within the group.42 Later films Stars (1963), Wäscherinnen (Washerwomen) (1972), and Die Küche (The Kitchen) (1986) all feature groups of workers, all women, and although Martha (1978) features one of the last post-war rubble collectors, the film really focuses on her relationship with her co-workers as she retires. Even though the Der Sekretär (The Secretary) (1967) initially feels like an exception to this group focus, the Party secretary who is featured is shown to be the organizer, the communicator, and basically the glue who helps keep the group, particularly women in the group, together and reaching their full potential. By contrast, even American documentaries focused on a band in which the members should be equal, always tend to allow, or cause, one to come to the foreground, such as Mick Jagger in the Maysels’ and Zwerin’s Gimme Shelter (1970).

46  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 3.6 Neorealism By not focusing on a single hero, Ofenbauer not only lacks a “hero’s journey,” but the overall structure is different: one of watching something unfold rather than assembling things of note regarding a point or predetermined story. Most critics consider neorealism fiction because the performers, even if not trained actors, play assigned roles; the films possess a clear narrative shape, and the restrained, understated style gives little sense of a documentary voice. These qualities, however, are also present in observational documentaries, as we shall see, but these films are routinely counted as documentaries because the stories they tell seem to be primarily of the social actor’s own making.43 Nichols presents Neo-realism as a developmental step for documentary: Neorealists such as Roberto Rossellini (Rome, Open City, 1945), Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, 1948)… stressed qualities in tune with film’s potential for indexical documentation: a casual, unadorned view of everyday life; a meandering, conscience-laden series of actions and events; natural lighting and location shooting; a reliance on untrained actors; a rejection of close-ups doting on the faces of stars; and a stress on the problems confronting ordinary people in the present moment rather than the historical past or an imagined future. Here was an important strand of narrative filmmaking that contributed directly to the development of documentary.44 Barnouw, in his foundational book Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, also gives substantial consideration to neorealist film, noting that “the widespread ruins of war helped set this trend in motion: they served as an invitation to reconstruct the war experience and at the same time to mythologize it.”45 Barnouw mentions the Italian films, and also notes French neorealist films, as well as German ones: “a number of “rubble films” including The Murderers Are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946) by Wolfgang Staudte…”46 Surprisingly, according to Barnouw, many of these films were marketed as or called “documentaries”: That these were called “documentaries” probably reflected the wartime status won by documentaries. It also reflected the fact that leading documentarists, who were experiencing a shrinkage in documentary sponsorship, were participating in the trend.47 However, this was the generation before Leacock, Drew, Pennebaker, and Böttcher. These filmmakers were influenced by neorealist films and this younger generation have frequently said they value hearing the voices of

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  47 everyday people, but they did not use neorealistic directing or dramaturgy – all except Böttcher. Leacock, and the Maysles/Zwerin films would move away from some of the traditional aspects of the 3-act Hollywood-story dramaturgy, but they would not begin this experimentation until the latter part of the 1960s, nor would they cross many lines that Böttcher did. He is the only one to make a fictional, scripted film or an overtly experimental/art film.48,49,50,51 But even in his documentary films, he was reliably less based on the single-protagonist, “hero-journey” structure, even as early as 1962. Böttcher cites several early Soviet and Italian neorealistic films as being influences (Earth by Dovzhenko and Paisa by Rossellini). “These films left me drained and shattered, because they had so much to do with what I’d gone through.”52 He notes that they showed real people, similar to the people that he was sketching each day, such as those waiting in a room after being evicted from their homes. But he had not only picked up the feeling of neorealism, but the structure. Superficially, neorealism is known for rubble, natural light, and a gritty aesthetic brought about by the destruction following the war in Italy. But as scholars such as Dónal Foreman point out, neorealism is more than mise-enscene, but it is also philosophical: “even with the practical restrictions of postwar filmmaking, Italians could have still have attempted to make commercial entertainment.”53 However, in the words of Roberto Rossellini, “it seemed criminal not to suggest to people the need to sink their hands in, to feel what things are made of.”54 This isn’t only the mise-en-scene, it is the structure, Foreman contends: “the key thing about neorealism was both voluntary and significantly more radical – a rejection not just of conventional production practice, but of the conventional filmmaking forms.”55 Christopher Wagstaff said that many believe neorealist films “eschew the conventional cinema’s obsession with narrative.” But “in fact,” Wagstaff adds, “the neorealists developed a new narrative.”56,57 The dramaturgy is about allowing a search or an uncertainty to be visible. “Rather than knowing how a film will work out before he begins it, a filmmaker like Rossellini interrogates.”58 Ray Carney, in his book about John Cassavetes, describes the neorealistic style as “cultivated narrative digressions, interruptions, pauses, freed from determinism of plot and the tendentiousness of intentionality.”59 Bazin notes that neorealism is about the “process of awareness.”60 Tag Gallagher goes further still: “To look becomes an action: everything is open to question: we have to respond, we have to act.”61 Foreman makes a convincing argument, with help from Gallagher, that The Bicycle Thief, although being known as the quintessential neorealist film, is not actually neorealist at all.62 As Gallagher says, the film is “about what neorealism was supposed to be about (unemployment and the desperate proletariat) and was filmed the way neorealism was supposed to be filmed (on actual city streets, in a working quarter, gray and gritty).”63 But the structure is very traditional: a clear singular protagonist with a clear problem – traditional 3-act structure.

48  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 An interesting parenthetical comment made by Nichols in the caption of a still in his Introduction to Documentary reinforces the intersectional considerations of the individual vs. collective mentality and the Hollywood vs. Neorealist framework: “(The original Italian title correctly translates as Bicycle Thieves, but in keeping with the Hollywood emphasis on the individual, it was initially translated to Bicycle Thief.)64 So, once we understand that neorealism is more about a searching narrative and ensemble cast where it is difficult to name one central protagonist, rather than just “the look,” it is easy to see how Böttcher’s documentaries, which were actually disallowed or discouraged from showing grit and destruction (such as Drei von Vielen), nonetheless were neorealistic. Wagstaff says: The function of cinema became enquiry. Directors and scriptwriters knew instinctively that this prohibited closure in their narratives, though they did not necessarily articulate the logic behind their feelings. Neo-realist films ask, rather than confirm; they wonder, rather than reassure.65 While the overt reason Böttcher gives for his love of neorealist films is that he identifies with the people and the situations, one can suspect that the themes of the average people and a communist leader fighting the fascists together appealed to Böttcher. Obviously there are reasons why I feel drawn to the people doing tough, dirty jobs … It’s partly to do with my own biography, I’m sure, but it’s also something which many members of my generation have experienced. The roots lie there. A film acquires a special truthfulness and depth the more it has to do with the most radical experiences of one’s own life.66,67 Ofenbauer, like neorealist films such as Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1946), lets the viewer begin to assume one person is the protagonist, only to let that person fade away or move back in prominence among the ensemble. In Rossellini’s classic, the female lead Pina is suddenly shot and killed halfway through the film, and her sister, until then a minor character, steps into the forefront of the narrative. In a similar way, Ofenbauer opens with a boss giving instructions, but his role as boss is not examined or referenced again. In fact, it seems that the duty of announcing instructions on the bullhorn is given to another man. There is no central hero; we are following the emotions and physical movements of the workers. And even Rome Open City, according to Wagstaff, is more traditional in its dramaturgy than the Rossellini films that would follow, with “the familiar pleasures of a tight, suspenseful narrative, told in parallel montage… spiced with humor.”68 Wagstaff goes on to explain that during the preproduction of Paisà, Rossellini’s synopsis went from six episodes, each with an American hero as protagonist, to centering on Italian suffering through an ensemble

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  49 cast: “Rossellini’s famous “detachment” transforms the film into a learning experience for the viewer.”69 The Chair, on the other hand, as Leacock noted, seems guided by a central question, rather than a process of simply following. And Moore is forced into the role of hero, although he does not exactly fit the bill. Mamber notes Leacock’s statement in an interview: …many things were omitted because they did not fit the conception required for the film: “Will he or won’t he?” Will Paul Crump be saved from execution? For instance, the young lawyer was incredibly pissed off when Louis Nizer came in on the case. And said so. “Who’s this s.o.b. coming out from New York?” And he was terribly concerned with the racetrack all the way through it. And sometimes you wondered, “How the hell is this guy ever going to get out?” He was never going to get the bloody brief written.70,71 Looking at The Chair and Ofenbauer, we see that The Chair is quite rigid in the “shooting rules,” fearing a performativity for the filmmakers, but unconcerned with whether the characters themselves are performing for others. For example, Drew describes that Moore asks them what they would like him to do in front of the cameras. “We put down our equipment and walk out to a coffee shop. When we return 30 minutes later, Moore is too busy to pay attention to us and we begin to record candidly a highly emotional story. What develops is a courtroom drama of grand and historic consequence in which Moore and Nizer make new law, a life is saved, and an historic film is made.”72 Leacock gives the same account.73 But we see, however, Moore is clearly performing for others. In one scene we see Moore on a phone call. He concludes this call with a compliment, and then says, “I hope you will pray for us; I mean it.” As soon as he hangs up, he says aloud, “Bull- fraud!” indicating that his statements were not sincere. We see him then take a number, and then eagerly rotary dial it. “May I speak with Monsignor Cantwell, please?” he says, clearly nervous. He then receives the news he is looking for, sighing with relief: “Thank God.” He then asks if he can know what the statement would say ahead of time, “confidentially.” While waiting to write, he excitedly pumps his fist in the air. But he concludes that call emotionally, thanking “His Eminence,” saying “this is such a good thing to do,” and “you are in my prayers, Father.”74 He hangs up, begins to cry, and then puts out a cigarette and cries in earnest. The camera pulls back, and the shot ends. We see closeups of that overflowing trash can and another lawyer in a framed picture as we hear Moore crying. We come back to Moore gathering himself, wiping his nose, and putting on his

50  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 glasses again. Moore suddenly speaks to the camera, shaking his head, “see I don’t even believe in God, but his – his eye is on the sparrow… that’s it, that’s it… that’s the ballgame.”75 Through his admission that he does not believe in God, we see that he has been lying, but through the emotional scene, we are being told to trust that his deception is to serve something he does earnestly believe in: his personal quest. So, we see here a concern about performativity for the camera and for the viewer, but not when the protagonist lies to others. Böttcher, inversely, seems to have little issue asking for repeat actions, staging reenactments (as he would in the 1967 film Der Sekretär), but tends to present people who are not performing and are truly themselves, although they are often within a system worthy of distrust. And this aligns perfectly with his 1965/1966 fiction filmmaking debut Jahrgang 45, which is, by the definition we established in this chapter, a neorealist film. Böttcher would instruct his actors in the neorealist tradition, with only broadly outlined actions or themes, without set dialog, allowing them to fill in all of the details. This soft boundary for Böttcher between narrative filmmaking and documentary filmmaking is quite different from that of the American direct cinema tradition, which followed very strict rules about interacting with subjects. Although Böttcher did not have such strict rules, Ofenbauer happens to follow the rules of non-interaction and non-performativity better than The Chair because the subject matter simply lended itself better. Because of the immediacy and danger of the process of moving the furnace, it was practically impossible to ask for anything to be redone or for anyone to be doing anything differently for the camera. And similarly, the editing for Ofenbauer was dictated by the event being filmed; it was a process documentary, following the action. For example, in what looks to be a dangerously tight shot, we see the men seemingly under the furnace, looking like they might be crushed. Someone rushes to check the cables, and the camera pans quickly with him. Two men are discussing it, but the sound completely overtakes their words. We return to the shot of the men who seem to be under the furnace, and they are squirming, shuffling, along the floor, looking even more in danger. We see a very wide shot, of the outside of the furnace, and it is only after a few seconds of this static shot that we realize that we can see the furnace slowly moving. A different shot of a man testing the cables gives some reassurance that all is well. There is a tilt down of the furnace, down to the leader, looking small at the bottom. He says: “Platform 5, to your posts!”76 We then see the metal rollers being moved and transported along the rails, then being rolled off and placed in a new position. We see one man who is pushing the roller hit his head on the cables, showing that not all is going perfectly, but he is not seriously hurt. The way that the men are staining to move the rollers shows what hard work it is, but by doing the work together no one man looks overly strained. One man checks that cables and then another man comes behind to double-check. The

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  51 rumbling and the movement continues, and it is clear that the procedure has turned a corner. The narrator says: “a critical phase was completed.”77 We see the men relaxing, laughing, smiling, and smoking. Caroline Moine describes the production process of Böttcher and his crew. So as to film “from within,” the highly mobile crew integrated itself into the group of workers, despite the reluctance of plant officials to allow them to stand directly under the colossus while it was being moved.78 The crew was thus able to shoot close-ups of the workers’ precise gestures and their tense and concentrated faces. Some fleeting shots even reveal a cinematographer with a handheld camera and a soundman squatting beside the workers.79 Böttcher and his crew were one crew, integrated into another crew of subjects. The Chair was quite different. According to Mamber, between 60,000-70,000 feet of 16mm film, or roughly 30–35 hours of film when projected, were shot for The Chair, and points out that the mix of multi-camera coverage of an intense event of a short period and closely following one person for a long time resulted in this large amount of material. He goes on to note that it is because the two teams, D. A. Pennebaker on camera and Shuker working sound who covered Crump and Nizer, and Leacock and Drew who followed Moore, were together only for the parole board hearing, meant that there was not so much communication about what the other group was filming, and so the big, dramatic events did not always have the backstory that would allow the audience to become as emotionally invested as those in the film.80,81 These shooting circumstances meant that the style was highly dependent on the cameraperson, as Drew was not with both crews. Mamber notes that Leacock is the cameraman for the scenes with Moore82; while there is cohesion between the footage of the two crews, the difference can be spotted in Leacock’s use of metaphorical cutaways, such as the overflowing trash can, which are a signature of his work throughout his career.

3.7  The Chair and Ofenbauer in Regard to Nichols’ Modes Given the history of expository documentary, and it’s pedantic, educational reputation, perhaps it is no surprise that the films of 1962, looking to break away, turn to narrative filmmaking on the path to a new mode. To what extent is the narrativization of a documentary more a part of the expository mode than the observational mode? While it is naïve to say that observational documentaries are not crafted and narrativized from their footage, particularly when there are many, many hours of footage – in this case

52  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 the editor wields incredible power – an expository film, with narration, is much more likely to be edited by script or transcriptions. The Chair is most often listed along with observational films (Nichols puts it in his observational chapter between Chronicle of a Summer and Gimme Shelter), and while the amount of observational scenes outweighs the narration “show and tell” segments of the film, it is nowhere nearly as observational as these two films, especially Gimme Shelter, which has no narration and a psychological editing structure rather than a logic-based one. Even the credits suggest a different structure: one of gathering and presenting rather than simply showing reality. “Filmaker [sic]: Gregory Shuker, Filmakers: Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker. It then lists “correspondents” and editors, which include Joyce Chopra and Richard Leacock. Similar to examining the term “neorealism,” it is important to separate what is essential to the mode from what simply comes to mind. For example, films of the observational mode are often called “fly on the wall,” meaning watching and not engaging. And that “fly” in the analogy does not need to move. We often think of the follow-shot, which became such a staple of cinéma vérité that it later became a cliché, as being observational, but it would only be necessary if the subject was moving. If the subjects are stationary, or active but not moving significant differences, there is no need for a follow shot, and indeed such a shot is impossible. Because of the nature of the work in Ofenbauer, the workers are active, and we are observing them, but we are not tracking them. Pans and tilts provide all of the movement needed. By choosing a subject where there is action, but contained action, Böttcher minimized many of these external differences caused by his 35mm camera, and we do not feel constrained or immobilized. We can look at narration (when not performative, poetic, or reflexive) as being a signifier of the expository mode, and a lack of narration as being indicative of the observational mode. In some ways the comparison between the two films is unfair because a general introduction takes a certain amount of time but counts more heavily in a short film, and Ofenbauer is under fifteen minutes, while The Chair runs 1 hour and 15 minutes. There are eight minutes and twelve seconds of narrated time in The Chair, nearly as long as the entirety of Ofenbauer, so it certainly feels like there is more narration in The Chair, and it doesn’t feel as critical to the story. But Ofenbauer is simply more visual, with far more movement. Much of The Chair’s “observational footage” is of people sitting and talking, making it feel more expository. The Chair is also more “show and tell”: the narration is an exact match with the image; we even see a plaque with the warden’s name as the narrator tells us, for example. What is also important to note is the placement of the narration: Ofenbauer does not have any narration until a minute and twenty-two seconds in, although the credits are in the front, where narration could have gone; instead, there, we get natural sounds, without music, which was unique for this time.

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  53 Böttcher said “I had to hold my ground to the very end to retain the ambient sound of the working conditions just as they were … and those alone: they were determined to add … as an illustration … segments of Beethoven’s [Sonata] Pathetique, as was the convention at the time.”83 This delay in narration was highly unusual for the time. As already mentioned, The Chair is, on balance, less observational than its predecessor, Primary (1962), and thus was a step back along the chronological timeline of modes that Nichols sets out, but Ofenbauer is an advance for both Böttcher and German documentary. And, based on the variables that Böttcher had control of, Ofenbauer seems to be further along this timeline, and more progressive. However, one cannot discount the other factors which were controlled by the technology: the tracking camera and the difference that makes in the audience member’s visual memory of the film cannot be discounted (particularly in 1962). In the next chapter, looking at films debuting only one year later, we already can see quite a progression, and this helps illustrate the relative trajectory that both “western” documentaries and Böttcher’s documentaries were on.

Notes 1 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 167. 2 Betsy A. McLane and Jack C. Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012), 210. 3 Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1974), 23. 4 Mamber, 26. 5 O’Connell, 263. 6 O’Connell, 263. 7 Richard Leacock, “La Camera Passe-Partout, trans. Louis Marcorelles,” Cahiers du Cinema. (April 1959): 37ff. 8 Brian Winston, “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 42). 9 Ann-Ruth Martin, “Magnetic Sound on TV Newsfilms in Germany,” Journal of the SMPTE, 65, (1956): 336. 10 Theorizing Documentary, ed. by Michael Renov, AFI Film Readers (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 205. 11 Renov, Theorizing Documentary, 205. 12 Edmund DiGiulio, “Development in Motion Picture Camera Design and Technology — A Ten-Year Update,” Journal of the SMPTE, no 85 (1976): 485. 13 Renov, Theorizing Documentary, 206. 14 ‘The Nagra III B’, Journal of the SMPTE, no. 71 (1962): 902. 15 Christian Hißnauer and Bernd Schmidt, Wegmarken des Fernsehdokumentarismus: Die Hamburger Schulen, Close up, 25 (Konstanz: UVK Verl.-Ges., 2013). 16 Hißnauer and Schmidt, 131. 17 Hißnauer and Schmidt, 133. 18 Carsten Diercks, “Die Welt kommt in die Stube” Es begann 1952: Die Anfänge des Fernsehdokumentarfilms im NWDR/ARD. (Hamburg, 2000) 48. 19 Winston, 43.

54  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 20 Mamber, 30. 21 Ian Cameron and Mark Shivas, “Cinema-Vérité: A Survey Including Interviews with Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysels, William Klein, Jean Rouch, and Jacques Rozier,” Movie (April 1963): 16. 22 Mamber, 42–97. 23 Robert Christgau, “Leacock Pennebaker: The MGM of the Underground,” Show (January 1970): 92. 24 Hißnauer and Schmidt, 120-209. 25 The Chair, dir. by Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Gregory Shuker, and D.A. Pennebaker (1962; Sharon, CT: Drew Associates, 1962), 00:13:49. 26 The Chair, 00:14:04. 27 The Chair, 00:25:25. 28 The Chair, 00:26:32. 29 The Chair, 00:29:06. 30 The Chair, 01:06:34. 31 The Chair, 01:09:23. 32 The Chair, 01:11:17. 33 The Chair, 01:12:30. 34 The Chair, 01:15:23. 35 Mamber, 99. 36 Kilborn, Richard. The documentary work of Jürgen Böttcher: A retrospective in DEFA: East German Cinema 1946-1992, edited by Seán Allan and John Sandford (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), 272. 37 Kilborn, 276. 38 “Kunst und Kultur in der DDR (Transcript of the Proceedings of the 35th Session of the Bundestag Enquete-Komission: “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland”),” 1993, 195. 39 Jürgen Böttcher, Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders), 1962, 00:00:49. 40 Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders), 00:01:40. 41 Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders), 00:05:00. 42 Falko Seidel, Die Lebenswelt der DDR im Spiegel der Filme des DEFA-Dokumentaristen Jürgen Böttcher, (Thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 2006). https://www. diplom.de/ 43 Nichols, 144–45. 44 Nichols, 133. 45 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 2nd rev. ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 185. 46 Barnouw, 185. 47 Barnouw, 185. 48 Jürgen Böttcher, Jahrgang 45 (Born in ’45), 1965. 49 Jürgen Böttcher, Frau am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord), 1981. 50 Jürgen Böttcher, Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull), 1981. 51 Jürgen Böttcher, Venus nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione), 1981. 52 Hübner, 00:30:00. 53 Dónal Foreman, ‘Italian Neorealism’, 1 www.donalforeman.com [accessed 2 February 2021]. 54 Roberto Rossellini, My Method: Writings and Interviews, ed. Adriano Apra (New York, NY: Marsilio Publ. 1992). 55 Foreman, 2. 56 Foreman, 3. 57 Christopher Wagstaff, ‘Rossellini and Neo-Realism’, in Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, ed. David Forgacs et al. (London: British Film Institute, 2000).

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  55 58 Tag Gallagher, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 277. 59 Raymond Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies, Cambridge Film Classics, Repr (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 301. 60 André Bazin, ‘Defense of Rossellini’, What Is Cinema? Volume II, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, pp. 93-101. Quoted in Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, ed. by David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 159 61 Gallagher, 304. 62 Foreman, 3. 63 Gallagher, 296. 64 Nichols, 135. 65 Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, ed. by David Forgacs et al. (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 40. 66 Seán Allan and John Sandford, eds. DEFA: East German Cinema 1946–1992. New York: 1999, 271. 67 Jürgen Böttcher, & Filme von Jürgen Böttcher “in Internationales Forum des jungen Films Berlin 1987, ed. Alf Bold (Berlin: Internationales Forum des Jungen Films, 1987), 1. 68 Wagstaff, 46. 69 Wagstaff, 42. 70 Mamber, 104. 71 James Blue, “One Man’s Truth: An Interview with Richard Leacock,” Film Comment, (Spring 1965):19. 72 Drew Associates. 73 Andrew McIntosh, “Being There with Richard Leacock: Profiling Documentary’s Lion in Winter,” Point of View Magazine, (Spring 2008). 74 The Chair, 00:20:53. 75 The Chair, 00:22:24. 76 Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders), 00:07:51. 77 Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders), 00:09:58. 78 Jürgen Böttcher and Erika Richter, “Filmsplitter. Fragmentarisches über die Anfänge,” in Apropos: Film 2000. Ed. Ralf Schenk, Erika Richter, and Claus Löser. (Neue Berlin), 10–16. 79 Caroline Moine, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955–1990, ed. by John Barrett and Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs, Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 85. 80 Mamber, 103. 81 Cameron and Shivas, 17–18. 82 Mamber, 104. 83 Böttcher and Richter, 12.

References Seán, Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke, eds. Reimagining DEFA: East German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Contexts. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016. Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Bazin, André, “Defense of Rossellini,” What Is Cinema? Volume II, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, pp. 93–101.

56  Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962 Blue, James. “One Man´s Truth: An Interview With Richard Leacock.” Film Comment Spring 1965: 15–23. Böttcher, Jürgen. “Filme Von Jürgen Böttcher “in Internationales Forum des jungen Films Berlin 1987, Alf Bold (ed). Berlin: Internationales Forum des Jungen Films, 1987. ———, Frau Am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1981. ———, Jahrgang 45 (Born in ‘45). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1965. ———, Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1962. ———, Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1981. ———, Venus Nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1981. Böttcher, Jürgen and Erika Richter, “Filmsplitter. Fragmentarisches über Die Anfänge. “In Apropos: Film 2000, Ralf Schenk, Erika Richter and Claus Löser (eds). Berlin: Verlag das Neue Berlin, 2000. Cameron, Ian and Mark Shivas. “Cinema-Vérité: A Survey Including Interviews with Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysels, William Klein, Jean Rouch, and Jacques Rozier,” Movie, (April 1963): 12–27. Carney, Raymond. The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. Cambridge Film Classics, Reprint Cambridge: Cambridge University Classics, 1999. Christgau, Robert. “Leacock Pennebaker: The MGM of the Underground,” Show, (January 1970): 92. Diercks, Carsten. Die Welt Kommt in Die Stube. Es Begann 1952: Die Anfänge Des Fernseh-Dokumentarfilms Im NWDR/ARD. Hamburg, 2000. DiGiulio, Edmund. ‘Development in Motion Picture Camera Design and Technology — A Ten-Year Update’, Journal of the SMPTE, no. 85, (1976): 485. Drew, Robert and Richard Leacock. The Chair. New York: Life, 1962, 1962. Film. Foreman, Donal, “Italian Neorealism, “Donalforeman.Com Forgacs, David and Sarah Lutton eds., Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and British Film Institute, Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Gallagher, Tag. The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Hißnauer, Christian. Fernsehdokumentarismus: Theoretische Näherungen, Pragmatische Abgrenzungen, Begriffliche Klärungen, Close up, 23. Konstanz: UVK Verl.-Ges, 2011. Hißnauer, Christian and Bernd Schmidt. Wegmarken Des Fernsehdokumentarismus: Die Hamburger Schulen. Close up, 25 Konstanz: UVK Verl.-Ges, 2013. Hübner, Christoph. Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1 - Wildenhahn/Böttcher/Nestler/Koepp. Goethe-Institut Filmmuseum München, 2008. Kilborn, Richard. The Documentary Work of Jürgen Böttcher: A Retrospective in DEFA: East German Cinema 1946-1992, Seán Allan and John Sandford (eds), 267–282. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999. “Kunst und Kultur in der DDR “Transcript of the Proceedings of the 35th Session of the Bundestag Enquete-Komission: “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,” 1993. Leacock, Richard, “La Camera Passe-Partout, trans. Louis Marcorelles,” Cashiers du Cinema, April 1959.

Dramaturgy and Structure in Observational Documentary in 1962  57 Mamber, Stephen. Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974. Martin, Ann-Ruth. “Magnetic Sound on TV Newsfilms in Germany,” Journal of the SMPTE, no. 65, (1956): 336. McIntosh, Andrew. “Being There With Richard Leacock: Profiling Documentary’s Lion in Winter,” Point of View Magazine, Spring 2008. https://povmagazine.com/ being-there-with-richard-leacock/ McLane, Betsy A. and Jack C. Ellis. A New History of Documentary Film. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2012. Moine, Caroline, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival 1955–1990 (Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1). Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs (ed) and translated by John Barrett. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. O’Connell, P. J. Robert Drew and the Development of Cinema Verite in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Renov, Michael, ed., Theorizing Documentary, AFI Film Readers. New York: Routledge, 1993. Rossellini, Roberto: Magician of the Real, David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.), London: British Film Institute, 2000. Rossellini, Roberto. My Method: Writings and Interviews. Adriano Apra (ed). New York, NY: Marsilio Publ. 1992. Seidel, Falko. “Die Lebenswelt der DDR im Spiegel der Filme des DEFA-Dokumentaristen Jürgen Böttcher. “Thesis. Freie Universität Berlin, 2006. “The Nagra III B,” Journal of the SMPTE, 71, 1962, 902. Wagstaff, Christopher. “Rossellini and Neo-Realism.” In Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, David Forgacs, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds), 36–49. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Winston, Brian. “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription.” In Theorizing Documentary, Michael Renov (ed), 37–57. New York: Routledge, 1993.

4

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema Richard Leacock and Joyce Chopra’s Happy Mother’s Day (Director’s Cut) and Jürgen Böttcher’s Stars, 1963

In an effort to compare and contrast documentary filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher in relation to his global contemporaries, in addition to examining his dramaturgical choices, structure, and progression along Nichols’ modes, one can and should, of course, also consider content: what the texts attempt to show us and say about our society and lives. It is established that documentary, despite being often misrepresented or misunderstood as simply documenting the reality around us, is, in fact, crafted by the maker, and is controlled by the very nature of deciding where to point the camera. Therefore, documentary content is subjective and reflects the societal and historical realities of the time as well as the director’s vision and perspective. Documentary making was, like nearly all professional endeavors, initially populated by almost entirely white men, and has been generally democratizing and diversifying progressively. In tandem, the content of documentary in terms of representation has changed. In this way, we can look at Böttcher’s work as compared to his contemporaries, in terms of how women are represented, in what numbers, and how. In Chapters 5 and 6, other aspects of Böttcher’s filmic content are compared and contrasted.

4.1  Women in DEFA In the representation of women, we find a basis for distinction between the GDR’s DEFA films, including those of Jürgen Böttcher, and those of observational filmmakers of the west; the societal overhaul in the GDR naturally also effected gender relations, gender norms, and gender portrayal in film. According to Andrea Rinke, in her chapter in DEFA: East German Cinema 1946-1992, “there was no explicitly feminist approach to film-making in the GDR, the official view being that women’s emancipation had been successfully accomplished by achieving women’s economic independence.”1 She states, “an initial overview of DEFA films reveals an altogether different variety of female protagonists from Western images of women on the DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264-4

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  59 screen.”2 She notes that DEFA films present women as working mothers; of around 90 contemporary screen dramas produced between 1972 and 1988 there are more than half with a female character at the center of the story or a female-male relationship as their main theme. This is indeed quite a difference between “the west” both then and now. Can a documentary made by a man, about women, be a feminist text? A serious ethical question for all documentary filmmakers is whether it is appropriate to make a film about a group of people of which we do not belong. Anthropologist Trinh Minh-ha says it best: “A conversation of ‘us’ with ‘us’ about ‘them’ is a conversation in which ‘them’ is silenced… Anthropology is finally better defined as ‘gossip’ (we speak together about others) than as a ‘conversation’ (we discuss a question)…” (qtd. In Nichols 228). There is some study regarding the idea that a male filmmaker, regardless of intentions, may still have “the male gaze” or some other gendered considerations.3 Laura Mulvey writes, in her seminal work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” from 1975, about her view that Hollywood visually responds to and satisfies unconscious patriarchal desires and “formative obsessions” that center on women – that the film spectator identifies with the male hero and assumes his gaze.4 “Woman […] stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other […] tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning.”5 Even as Böttcher, by naming his film Stars and explicitly stating via the narration, intends to mock and counter Hollywood, Mulvey’s premise requires consideration of how possible this can be: Hollywood “cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it.”6 In Böttcher’s case, in addition to his conscious or unconscious biases or tendencies, his representation of women was expected to comply to Party norms, which were often in direct contradiction to the American representation of women at that time. Rinke mentions that, following the Eleventh Plenum of the SED’s Central Committee in 1965, DEFA films with women in the late 1960s and early 1970s were expected to present women in prestigious, traditionally-male jobs, such as a lecturer of mathematics. It was in the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s, Rinke says, that the more typical female worker was shown. Although this is in regards to narrative films, we see that Böttcher was ahead of the curve in regards to his own DEFA filmmaking colleagues, and all of DEFA was ahead of the west in terms of any representation of women at all, and particularly of women in the workplace, and certainly working mothers. The three narrative films that Rinke examines all have plotlines that address the conflicts of working and having children, or being a worker and a wife, as Böttcher’s film Stars addresses. In documentary observational filmmaking, typically it is the producer, director and/or funding organization who is deciding the topic of a documentary, but one must acknowledge another essential player: the editor. The editor of

60  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema an observational documentary wields incredible power – the power to shape a film overall in post-production. There has been the suggestion by critics that much of the editing in observational film is done by the cameraperson, who selects what is captured, and this is certainly true. But with the sheer volume of what is captured, main structural decisions are still made by editor. And it should be noted that observational documentary editors in the 1960s and 1970s were typically female.

4.2  Women Editors of Documentary Ofenbauer was edited by Charlotte Beck, Stars by Bärbel Lehmann, Martha by Angelika Arnold – all women. Rangierer, Die Küche, and In Georgien were edited by Gudrun Plenert, a woman. In fact, all of Böttcher’s films except his experimental films, which he edited himself, were edited by women. A typical Hollywood narrative film shooting ratio is between 6:1 and 10:1. Expository films, because they are scripted, have a lower shooting ratio, more similar to a narrative film. Observational films have incredibly high shooting ratios, of up to 100 hours of filmed footage per hour of finished film. As an example of process, for the observational/reflexive documentary Grey Gardens (1975) Ellen Hovde, Susan Froemke (who was also Associate Producer of the film), and Muffie Meyer worked together as co-editors, and they describe their editing process in much the same way in several accounts.7,8 It begins with screening the footage and taking notes, which took nearly an entire year, and then talking about what is strong, and figuring out the storyline, and editing, which took about another year and a half. The films are based on a three-act structure, so clips are sorted as being act one, two, or three information. Values are assigned to a scene and then the scenes are played against each other to see how they work together and what is accomplished by their juxtaposition. Meyer describes the difficulty in determining how to credit a film’s structure: “In documentary, in vérité, it’s like you’re given a lot of great notes and it’s left to you to write the book. So who’s the author?”9 Susan Froemke describes the role of her coworkers as well as the role of the editor to vérité: “…I was working with one of the most phenomenal vérité editors, Ellen Hovde – she and Charlotte Zwerin had both worked on Salesman. Charlotte Zwerin’s one of the directors of Salesman and Gimme Shelter. These women were, in my opinion, geniuses. They are the foundation; they are the backbone of Maysles in terms of who made those films because so much is structured in the editing room.”10 Zwerin, feeling she was tantamount to a director for her role in making the film, demanded that she be listed as a director of the films she edited.

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  61 “Charlotte in the end was very smart,” Froemke said. “After Gimme Shelter she got an iron-clad contract that said her name was to be in the credits, in the right order. I think she was onto something.” Some, like Richard Meran Barsam, go as far as to include Zwerin in his general list of the pioneers of cinema vérité filmmaking, acknowledging that all filmmaking, and especially vérité filmmaking, is a collaborative process.11 The support and skill of these three directors, Hovde, Meyer and Froemke, cannot be underestimated… David supervised the process and he and Albert had final say on the content, but… they made the majority of the difficult decisions as to what footage to include and in what order. The brothers’ trust in their editors has been mentioned before, but in the case of this film, it was indeed an outrageous act of faith.12 Meyer adds, “The Maysles made none of the editing decisions [in Grey Gardens] – except one at the very end: David [Maysles, co-director] asked to have one scene removed because he felt it would date the film (a brief but very funny scene in which little Edie does a tirade about Richard Nixon).”13 So truly, this was a film with creators of both genders. By the 1970s, these were overt, conscious, collaborations that were seen as progressive and changing the industry. That is what makes the two films examined here from 1963 truly outstanding, as they were so ahead of the curve. Both Leacock/Chopra and Böttcher make films featuring women, in a time when almost no one was.

4.3  Mode in 1963 In less than a year from their 1962 films of Ofenbauer and The Chair, we see a distinct shift in both Leacock and Böttcher’s documentary style and advancement within the observational mode. In the words of Nichols, “Poetic and expository modes of documentary often sacrificed direct engagement with specific individuals to construct formal patterns or compelling perspectives.”14 Here, in these two observational works, we see the preconceived notions of the documentaries’ plots are reduced and readjusted in light of what is actually happening – in short: directors who are listening to their female protagonists. We see great similarity between two filmmakers from very different backgrounds – two filmmakers who would probably not be called feminists, but who nonetheless are critical of the commercial and Hollywood cultures that often marginalize women. Leacock is mentioned in every documentary English-language textbook, and most recount how he met Robert Flaherty, the Nanook of the North director, who is considered to have made the first documentary film: Leacock went

62  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema to boarding school with two of Flaherty’s daughters and a film that he had made had gotten their attention and therefore their fathers’. Leacock describes an idyllic childhood in the Canary Islands, permissive co-ed boarding schools, swimming pools, hobbies, and travel to see intellectual friends of his parents – quite a contrast to Böttcher’s early years. After The Chair, Leacock worked with Drew on what would be their last film together: Crisis. Leacock and Drew separated professionally, and Leacock was hired by The Saturday Evening Post to make a documentary about quintuplets born in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Leacock was one of the first to work with a woman who was clearly named and given credit as a co-creator (Joyce Chopra). Chopra did the audio recording and Leacock operated the camera, but it is interesting to note that Leacock does not specify himself as the director, and by default, splits that credit. Leacock and Chopra came two weeks after the birth of the quintuplets and they shot for three weeks.15 According to Mamber, when the sponsors viewed the completed, edited film, they did not approve, and because of contractual issues from his collaboration with Drew that he could not work with a television network for a year, ABC acquired the footage and made their own film, and Leacock made his. Shooting ratio for Leacock’s version was from 25 to 1.16 Chopra, born in New York City, began her filmmaking career in 1963 with this collaboration with Leacock. In 1972, Chopra released an autobiographical documentary about her challenges trying to work again after having a baby. In the film, titled Joyce at 34, she attempts to balance the child-rearing scale with her husband, screenwriter Tom Cole, who laments the issues he has with continuing his career as he takes on more of the parenting. Richard Brody, reviewing Joyce at 34, says “Chopra’s vigorous dialectic, in style and in substance, is a crucial forebear of generations of first-person filmmakers.”17 Chopra, in 1986, co-directed a narrative film about an adolescent girl coming to terms with sexuality, named Smooth Talk.18 While Chopra’s career has centered around female experiences, she doesn’t like the label “woman director,” according to a 1986 interview in the Washington Post. She goes on to add, “Maybe the day will come when you interview me and we don’t bring up the fact that I’m a woman.”19

4.4  Stars Motivation Stars is, from beginning to end, focused on a group of women who work in a lightbulb filament factory in Berlin. The opening shot is of the women, together, waving from the factory window. While there is a male narrator, there are no men at all that appear within the film, and there is very little talk of men at all, other than to make fun of the hypocrisy of a few foolish ones in casual conversation. The women discuss their work and life issues together, share

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  63 both silly and serious conversation, and work and play together with seemingly no self-consciousness. Böttcher was in some ways critical: “the short film is, however, an attempt that fails in many respects.” This type of conversation could not be recorded with bulky sound cameras and complicated technical procedures, because in that case genuine results would never have been achieved. Highly sophisticated apparatus which is easy to handle and technically perfect does not yet exist for us. Our equipment consisted of a poor recorder and a whirring Arriflex camera wrapped in blankets (this mobile hand camera was absolutely essential for us). An improvised interim motor achieved synchronous operation (a LE JOLI MAI [F 1963, R: Chris Marker], and we filmed with light 16 mm special high-sensitivity miniature cameras. We nevertheless undertook this experiment, which was extremely tricky to realize, since only live original sound could achieve the necessary depth of structure for our documentary. Our film (and the associated trials in the studio) was also intended to rapidly achieve the essential improvements in this enormously important field in modern sound techniques.20,21,22 But all of the concern over the technical was to be able to record the women and let them speak for themselves, and out of a desire to place us, the viewers, in a place we would otherwise not be able to go, for a perspective we might not otherwise get. However, one gets the impression that he is pleased with the content: I wanted to create a short film telling the story of a group of women sitting together, day by day and year by year, in one room and doing a tough job. I put a great deal of effort into portraying their very innermost lives. On a primary level I intended to record their daily work, the superficial forms of their contact interested me most – their conversations and jokes. Then a more dramatic moment was intended to supplement and intensify the whole. The woman brigadier gives her workers a short sharp lecture about their working morale. The workers defend themselves with arguments, laying bare a deeper source of problem (this part of the response is not included in the film). After this there is a break similar to a long slow episode: resting, dreaming, a meal, sprucing up, helping each other.23,24,25 The cinematography is impeccable; the camera is close; the space is not so large, and one can see from the positioning of the people that the cameraman had to physically get in close, although there is no feeling of strangeness of an outsider standing among the subjects. In fact, he truly feels invisible, a

64  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema

Figure 4.1 From Stars. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Christian Lehmann, Gerhard Rothe.

tribute to the relationship Böttcher had with the women and the time spent amongst them. I wanted people to get to know and respect the women (they are the same as us!), and maybe to compare this example with all the other women workers and working women. I and the public are urged to consider, and possibly feel and enjoy a routine solidarity!

4.5  Happy Mother’s Day The goal and the setup of Leacock and Chopra’s Happy Mother’s Day is less clear at the outset than Stars, perhaps by intention. Black and white, 16 mm, and 25 minutes long, Leacock said that he “wanted to reveal the unexpected.”26 The film begins with the sound of piano and singing, and we see a still image of five young children holding five newborn babies, and the title “A Happy Mother’s Day” is shown. With the scratchy narration of a deep baritone we hear, “On September 23, 1963, Mrs. Andrew Fischer, already a mother of five, left St. Luke’s Hospital in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Mrs. Fischer had just become the mother of quintuplets.”27 We see and hear Mrs. Fischer, answering a question of a reporter (“how are you feeling?”), and she is laughing, somewhat breathlessly saying, “I don’t have many feelings.”

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  65 She is then asked how it will feel to go back home to her children and she says, enthusiastically, “wonderful.” They then ask her husband a question, “Andy, what do you say?” Mrs. Fischer’s jaw tightens. He says, “I’m glad to have her back home.” She swallows and looks away and down to her right. The reporter asks, “what do the kids call you, Mrs. Fischer?” She doesn’t reply, looking sad and angry, her demeanor completely changed. Mr. Fischer says, “we better head on home” and guides her into the car.28 The narrator begins speaking, noting the town’s population as we zoom in from an aerial shot in to a street with a parade. We then go to the street level, and see the parade, with the camera placed in the middle of the street and the marchers going by. Sometimes the camera is moving with a cheerleader, then pausing to let saxophone players walk by. When we pan left to the crowd, we see a familiar face: Mrs. Fischer and her older children, sitting and watching the parade. The narrator continues, as we are now at the Fischer farm, and we see Mr. Fischer and learn via the narrator that they purposely live out on the farm, although Mr. Fischer works in the city, because Mr. Fischer likes farm life. We hear that a local dairy company has donated a year’s supply of milk to the Fischers, so the cows are being sent away to Grandpa’s place. We then see the Fischer children calling their mother into the barn. There are baby kittens, and Mrs. Fischer is heard saying, “oh aren’t they sweet?”29 A boy starts counting the kittens – there are five – and Mrs. Fischer laughs at the coincidence. A little girl wants to keep holding a kitten, but Mrs. Fischer explains that the mommy will come back and if the kitten isn’t there she would cry, because she put them in there. The double-meaning here is clear, although Mrs. Fischer does not seem sad in this scene. Now, at nine and a half minutes, we cut to inside a department store. The husband and wife that own the store seem to be having a polite disagreement about what Mrs. Fischer should try on. The narrator tells us, “Mrs. Fischer has not had a store-bought outfit since her marriage.”30 Mrs. Fischer laughs in a wool dress, as a mink coat is brought out. The male owner says, “Don’t get any ideas, but this is how it should look” as he drapes the coat on. She looks amused and says, “here, take it quick,”31 and it is unclear if she is playing along with the joke that she might want it, or whether she is simply uncomfortable. We cut to inside the Fischer home, and Mr. Fischer explains his view that the quintuplets will certainly generate tourism for the town. He then says that if people are coming to see them then they have to let people in to see them. Immediately Mrs. Fischer says, “no, no, no. They aren’t going to be on display to anybody as far as I’m concerned…” and there is a long, silent pause in the room. “As far as I’m concerned that’s the way it better be.”32 Her expression implies that while she may be in some trouble for saying this, she views this as her chance to make her wishes clear. We cut to men in a sitting room, smoking, debating how to let people see the babies. “What should we do, pretend that they don’t exist?”33 The other

66  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema man says that there would be no way for them to live a normal life that way. The first man poses the question, “do the president’s children expect to live a normal life?”34 Eventually they ask if they are going to put the babies on an exhibition, and a man explains that he thinks that there has been too much focus on the commercial interest “as if there’s something awful” about it and that increased revenue in the town is not a bad thing.35 We then cut to a woman and Mrs. Fischer sitting together in a different room. The woman explains on behalf of other women, it is assumed, that as mothers, “they” can imagine that after getting out of the hospital, one wouldn’t want anything too “rugged,” but maybe a luncheon that would be a fun time and not an ordeal. Mrs. Fischer is asked about if she has a favorite color she would like for the luncheon, and she sheepishly replies that she doesn’t care. We see a close up of her hands, fiddling with her purse. As the woman continues about the bouquet of mums that Mrs. Fischer can hold in the parade, Mrs. Fischer looks on, despondently. But when we cut to the luncheon, the city administrator, in his speech, underscores the town’s commitment to letting the Fischers raise their family in privacy, and the attendees applaud. The singer and piano, of the opening title, begin a song. As she begins, we get a medium shot of Mrs. Fischer, who appears to make eye contact with the camera and we see a one-sided smile creep up, before the camera pans to the other attendees. We are not sure exactly why she smiles, but one might think that it is because the singing is not very skillful, or on key. We then see the parade beginning, despite the rain. Eventually, it seems that the sun comes out. A man is selling hats that say “quint city.” We are informed that the doctor watched from the sidelines with his family, and we see them watching the parade. The rain returns, and umbrellas are being passed to the Fischers in a special viewing box. Mrs. Fischer passes the umbrella given to her to Grandma. We go to a very wide shot of people scrambling to cover from the rain, as the narrator ironically says, “it was a typical day of celebration in Aberdeen, South Dakota, USA.” We see text “Produced by FILMAKERS, Leacock & Pennebaker Inc.” then “Made by RICHARD LEACOCK and JOYCE CHOPRA” Mamber takes note that Leacock seems to film things that he finds funny in almost a cruel or callous way, with Mamber giving as an example that the singer whose performance is painfully bad is allowed to continue to sing instead of being cut out, etc.36 But Mamber seems not to see the film from another perspective which many have noted: a sadness in Ms. Fischer, an impression that although she is in the spotlight, no one is really seeing her as herself, but only as what is beneficial to them, with the possible exception of Leacock/Chopra, who receive her small smile while the woman is singing. The opening scene makes it clear that Mrs. Fischer is not happy with her husband or with something in her marriage. Ben Levin, a professor at the University of North Texas, points out what happened to Mrs. Fischer in the years

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  67 following the film: that in 1980 she and Mr. Fischer divorced and that she had had struggles with depression.37,38 With this knowledge one can argue that this is the core of the film: that Mrs. Fischer loves her children and is getting on despite all of the silly, self-interested people around her.

4.6  Women in Stars Stars is a 20-minute-long black and white 35mm film. It opens with crisp jazz music, and a shot of the exterior of a brick building with a large arched window. Women are coming to the window and waving, filling the window, and beaconing the camera to come inside. We then move inside, with women interacting casually, giving each other shoulder rubs. We hear the narrator say, “Famous women. You’re not called Cleopatra, Soraya or Bardot. You are our stars. And we want to eulogize you.”39 “These are famous women: The Brigade of Socialist Labour. But we don’t want to talk about their title, nor do we want to think about the filaments. Let’s instead tell you about the women who operate these microscopes. Let’s gaze into their faces and listen to their conversations at work and during their breaks.”40 Throughout this time we have had lots of closeups of the women at work. The natural sound, which had been playing lowly in the background, raises in volume. We are 2:46 minutes into the film. We see one woman showing another a technique to separate the filaments. We see two women who are hunched over and laughing while separating and counting. We hear whispered counting. One woman says loudly, to the room, “Who has 15 left over today?” Then she asks who has 25. Someone says they do. Another woman says they have 17, not 15. We are introduced by the narrator to one worker named Heidi. We see her in a medium shot. “She has checked her 30,000 filaments every day for months. But now she finds the work hard.” She looks bored of the work. We go to two other ladies working, talking of bathrobes they might want to buy. We hear a snippet of another conversation: “he says we shouldn’t laugh so loudly but laugh on the inside.” Another woman replies, “Well, he should show me how!” We see them talking about and sharing candies. We are introduced to Saffitti, the brigade leader – the narrator says, “Saffitti? That’s what her husband calls her.”41 Saffitti speaks to the group, telling them that she has some bad news from Saturday: that the boss was mad because the 100 filaments were not correctly counted. It meant that three women had to do all the work over, and the boss was angry and said that if things didn’t change some people would have to be let go. She ended her talk with asking the ladies if they could be a bit quieter for the second part of the workday. But then we transition to the breaktime, with the women reading magazines or talking by the large, sunny windows, tending to the plants, and eating fruits. We hear only the general sound of

68  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema chatting and the jazz music again. We see them drinking coffee, painting nails, eating sandwiches, and even taking a nap. We see someone doing hair, and the narrator tells us that one of the ladies studied hairdressing in the past. Then, at 11:04, we see the baby, introducing us to a main topic of the film. One of the ladies has brought her baby to work today. The narrator explains that when the baby found a place in the nursery, the mother came back to work, and adds, “all these experts here giving their opinion!”42 The women group around the baby and talk excitedly. We find out that Heidi (the one we saw who isn’t enjoying the work) is expecting a child. Saffitti asks her if she will come back to work after the baby. She says she thinks so. Saffitti asks if she feels at home in the workshop. She says yes. The narrator asks, rhetorically, if she will really come back. We see the women of the factory talking about the topic. One woman says that if you’ve always worked, it is hard to stay home. Another says that if you have two children and you need to clean and do it alone, it’s very hard. Saffitti says that the days when the woman had to have the slippers ready for the husband when he got home from work are over, and that women have just as many rights, and if one sits at home all day they will rot. Another says it is no good to have the husband come home and you wait for him to say something because nothing has happened to you all day. When you work you can say what happened in your day. An older lady talks about how she hasn’t retired because she doesn’t want to stay home alone all day, and that she would really miss the other ladies when she stops working. We jump forward in time, to see many of the ladies bringing flowers and gifts to Heidi, who has just had her baby, a girl, just as she had wished. We see all the ladies, in different clothes, looking at Heidi’s newborn, named Sabine. The narrator says, “Farewell Sabine. Farewell to all of you! You were truly wonderful” as we see the ladies again waving from the window.43 The jazz music comes up and closes the film as it fades out. Because of the prior questioning of whether people are saying what they mean, you sense that the women are indeed free to state their opinions on the matter. And you come to the conclusion that the comradery that they feel, and thus the connection to society, is very valuable to them. And mostly, you feel the respect that the filmmaker has for the women and the desire he has to honestly portray their lives.

4.7  Mode in Stars and Happy Mother’s Day Regarding Böttcher’s position and relative position within the modes at this point in time in regards to a progressive style of cinema; overall, Stars and Happy Mother’s Day are fairly equally “observational.” They consist primarily of watching real events unfold without intervention.

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  69 In Stars and Happy Mother’s Day, we get a different perspective, not only in who is making the content, but in the presumption of audience. With the exception of maybe Drew/Leacock’s Jane, most films of the time are made for and about the white, male, mid-to-upper class male. But these two films are not specifically catering to this audience. In fact, in the opening scene of Happy Mother’s Day, the reporter talking to the father effectively ends the scene – the father is of no interest to Leacock – only Mrs. Fischer. And in the small, shared smile at the luncheon, the viewer gets the impression that she knows she is seen. In the ABC version of the film, this sense of perspective is completely gone – there is no sense of experiencing Mrs. Fischer’s life, feelings, or point-of-view – it is primarily an expository film. This opportunity, to look at two films from the same footage that are essentially different modes is a good opportunity to look beyond the shooting to see all of the variables that come together to define a film’s mode and deciding if a film is characterdriven or topic-driven, like the ABC version. And, clearly, a character-driven film about a normal woman or group of normal women was remarkably progressive for this time. Rather than being about a “crisis moment,” this pair of 1963 films are instead the story of a filmmaker placing himself into an existing situation. In Böttcher’s case, there is even a slight reflexive note, as the women in the factory are clearly waving to the filmmaker himself. For Leacock/Chopra, they include a small smile intended for them, who might appreciate the humor that everyone else in the town seems to ignore. And, of course, rather than explaining or chronicling, the experience is much more one of watching and experiencing. It’s important to note the still-relative-newness of the observational mode in 1963. That year, the Best Documentary Feature went to Black Fox: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler by Louis Clyde Stoumen, an expository mode film. Nominated was a west-German film, Alvorada – Brazil’s Changing Face, which was very experimental, with music and electronic sounds. The Best Documentary Short Oscar went to the film Dylan Thomas by Jack Howells, which is a poetic documentary: poetry readings and scenic landscape shots. Nominated was The John Glenn Story, about the American astronaut, which is introduced by President John F. Kennedy, and proceeds in a traditional, expository way. Also nominated was The Road to the Wall, about the Berlin Wall. One could also note some interesting political patterns to the film subject matter, but looking at the modes, as Nichols mentions, as a progression, as one looks at the distance covered – the movement between the two films – there appears to be more growth between Leacock/Drew’s film and Leacock’s Happy Mother’s Day, but one must take into account that although Leacock worked on The Chair he was not the director. Therefore, it is important to look at each film individually in regards to where it stands on the mode spectrum, rather than simply comparing the two directors between films.

70  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema Both have music and narration, typically something the observational mode is moving away from, but the music is used sparingly, and the narration is atypical: sometimes funny, sarcastic, or probing in a new way – less factual and more personal. We see aerial footage of the town of Aberdeen as the narrator says, somewhat sarcastically, because it is clear from the visual, “Aberdeen, South Dakota is a prairie town, and the land around it is flat. The roads are straight…”44 Surprisingly, both 1963 films had a greater percentage of narrated time than The Chair or Ofenbauer, films that Leacock and Böttcher participated in in 1962. Happy Mother’s Day was 23.1% narrated, although it should be noted that the narrator spoke very slowly. Stars was 21.9% narrated, but came in at a total of 19 minutes, whereas Leacock’s film was 25 minutes, and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the longer the film the easier it is to lower the percentage because a certain amount of explanation for setup is typical of a narrated film. Still, perhaps because the style of the narration was different, it doesn’t feel as present as the 1962 films. Both had issues of audience and censorship, although from diametrically opposed sources: Leacock and Chopra were subject to the commercial pressure of the network, who viewed his work as not commercial in multiple ways. When it was clear that Leacock/Chopra and ABC had irreconcilable differences in opinion, the network took the footage and made a completely different film, cutting Leacock/Chopra out of the process. Viewing the ABC version, which is very expository, cheery, and celebratory of the town and their commercial motivation, and assuming that they were happy with the version that aired, the perceived failures of Leacock and Chopra’s version become clear. His version does not revel in the material outpouring for Mrs. Fischer, but in fact seems to somewhat mock it. Leacock and Chopra’s version has a slower pace, requiring effort from the audience to watch and deduce, and thus is the opposite of what the network wanted; to this day, networks are known for wanting audio that draws in distracted viewers and plots that play to the lowest common denominator. Mamber says of the ABC version: “the film was sponsored by BeechNut, and the movie looks like a half-hour baby food commercial.”45 Mamber notes, also, that the ABC version, when they used Leacock/Chopra’s footage (ABC later shot additional footage), the original footage was always trimmed shorter than it is in their version. Böttcher, as always, had to consider the strict overview of the Party, but instead of the concern about being not commercial enough, the concern was, of course, ideological in the other direction: it should, in every way, promote socialism and the DDR in the minds of the current authority. This confrontation, between Böttcher and the Party, was expected; there were numerous accounts of negotiation back and forth, and several of his films were completely banned. There is no record of a battle between Böttcher and censors for this film, however, even though the film is quite different than those coming before it.

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  71 The reception of these two very similar films was also quite different, and was, like the censorship, determined by their location and global politics. While most of the international attention was still focused on the cinematic “firsts” of Chronicle of a Summer (1961) and Primary (1960), in 1962 Leacock’s reputation as a cutting-edge filmmaker was growing internationally, while Böttcher’s films were not being seen outside of the DDR/GDR.

4.8 Female Content throughout the Filmmaker’s Career Looking at the total career, Böttcher made more films with female protagonists than his contemporaries and certainly more with multiple women featured. Stars was Böttcher’s first female-protagonist film in 1963. In 1972 he made Wäscherinnen (Laundresses) and 1978 he made Martha, with Martha as the protagonist, one of the last working “Trümmerfrauen,” women who cleared rubble after WWII. In the film, the tough-as-nails Martha now works with all men, and is celebrating her retirement. Die Küche (The Kitchen) (1986) features almost exclusively women working in a kitchen, from the preparation of the meat to serving it to a hungry line, and In Georgien (In Georgia) (1987), where he filmed more women than men in the medieval capital Mzcheta and in several locations throughout Georgia.

Figure 4.2 From Wäscherinnen (Laundresses). ©DEFA-Stiftung/Werner Kohlert.

72  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema Pennebaker, Drew, and Leacock’s percentage of films with women leading is smaller that Böttcher – only Maysles Inc. had a greater percentage (21%). Of the 67 listed Drew Associates films, there were four starring women (5% total): Jane and Susan Starr, Kathy’s Dance, and Anne: A Life Making Films, a film about Anne Drew, the primary editor of the Drew Associate films and Robert Drew’s wife. Maysles productions, if one counts re-releases and male/female equal billing protagonists, have nine films of their 43 listed films featuring women, and two, Grey Gardens and Abortion: Desperate Choices feature two or more women. Pennebaker Hegedus Films list 52 films in their filmography, and six (11%) are centered around women: Janis Joplin, Carol Bernett, Elaine Stritch, a debutant queen in Queen of Apollo, Susanne Vega, and Victoria Williams. Therefore, based on the analysis done here, Böttcher should be noted for being a leader in the field regarding the representation of women in 1963, and throughout his lifetime.

Notes 1 Andrea Rinke, “From Models to Misfits: Women in DEFA Films of the 1970s and 1980s,” in DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992, ed. by Seán Allan and John Sandford (New York and Oxford: Berghahn), 183. 2 Rinke, 183. 3 Knobloch, Susan, “(Pass through) The Mirror Moment and Don´t Look Back: Music and Gender in a Rockumentary,” in Feminism and Documentary (Visible Evidence, vol. 5) ed. by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 133. 4 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 16. 5 Mulvey, 15. 6 Mulvey, 18. 7 Muffie Meyer, interview by the author, New York, 2005. 8 Muffie Meyer, interview by the author, New York, 2005. 9 Meyer, interview by the author, New York, 2005. 10 Liz Stubbs, Documentary Filmmakers Speak (New York: Allworth Press, 2002), 24. 11 Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, Rev. and expanded (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 252. 12 Jonathan B. Vogels, The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 126. 13 Muffie Meyer, interview by the author “Additional information about Grey Gardens,” New York, 2021. 14 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 172. 15 Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1974), 192. 16 Mamber, 196. 17 Richard Brody, “Sixty-Two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking” The New Yorker, October 14, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ the-front-row/sixty-two-films-that-shaped-the-art-of-documentary-filmmaking

The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema  73 18 Roger Ebert, “Review: Smooth Talk,” Chicago Sun Times, May 9, 1986. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/smooth-talk-1986 19 Rita Kempley, “Director Joyce Chopra &,” The Washington Post, March 29, 1986 https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/03/29/director-joyce-chopra38/e6d963c2-6b00-421d-8ce0-540c9a4267b9/ 20 Böttcher, “Edition Filmmuseum 103,” 6. 21 “Film 67.” 22 Dokumentaristen der DEFA und ihre Filme. 23 Böttcher, “Edition Filmmuseum 103,” 6. 24 “Film 67.” 25 Dokumentaristen der DEFA und ihre Filme. 26 James Blue, ‘One Man’s Truth: An Interview with Richard Leacock’, Film Comment (Spring 1965):18). 27 Richard Leacock, Happy Mother’s Day (Director’s Cut), 1963, 00:00:27. 28 Leacock, 00:00:52. 29 Leacock, 00:05:45. 30 Leacock, 00:10:35. 31 Leacock, 00:11:23. 32 Leacock, 00:13:21. 33 Leacock, 00:13:44. 34 Leacock, 00:14:06. 35 Leacock, 00:15:18. 36 Mamber, 200. 37 Patrick Kiger, “Mary Ann Fischer: Mother of Quints Avoided Fame,” AARP (blog), December 13, 2012. https://blog.aarp.org/legacy/mary-ann-fischer-motherof-quintuplets-avoided-fame 38 Ben Levin, “Cinema Verite Course, Radio, Television, and Film Department” (Denton, TX, USA, 2006). 39 Jürgen Böttcher, Stars (1963 Berlin: DEFA Film Library), film, 00:00:59. 40 Böttcher, Stars, 00:02:40. 41 Böttcher, Stars, 00:07:23. 42 Böttcher, Stars, 00:11:16. 43 Böttcher, Stars, 00:19:02. 44 Leacock, 00:03:06. 45 Leacock, 195.

References Barsam, Richard Meran. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, Rev. and Expanded. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Beale, E. B., Beale, E., Portrait Films, Maysles Films & Copyright Collection. Grey Gardens. Maysles, D., Maysles, A., Hovde, E. & Meyer, M., dirs, Maysles, D., Maysles, A. & Froemke, S., prods United States: Maysles Films, Inc., 1975. Blue, James. “One Man´s Truth: An Interview with Richard Leacock.” Film Comment. New York: Spring 1965: 15–23. Böttcher, Jürgen. Dir. “Edition Filmmuseum 103. München: Filmmuseum München, 2016. ———, Stars (DEFA Film Library), 1963. Brody, Richard, “Sixty-Two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking,” The New Yorker, October 14, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ the-front-row/sixty-two-films-that-shaped-the-art-of-documentary-filmmaking

74  The Representation of Women in Observational Cinema Dokumentaristen der DEFA und ihre Filme. Berlin: Progress Film-Verleih, 1979. Ebert, Roger. “Review: Smooth Talk,” Chicago Sun Times, May 9, 1986. https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/smooth-talk-1986 Kempley, Rita. “Director Joyce Chopra &,” The Washington Post, March 29, 1986. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/03/29/director-joyce-chopra-38/ e6d963c2-6b00-421d-8ce0-540c9a4267b9/ Kiger, Patrick, “Mary Ann Fischer: Mother of Quints Avoided Fame,” AARP (blog), December 13, 2012. https://blog.aarp.org/legacy/mary-ann-fischer-mother-of-quintupletsavoided-fame Knobloch, Susan. “(Pass Through) The Mirror Moment and Don´t Look Back: Music and Gender in a Rockumentary,” in Feminism and Documentary (Visible Evidence), volume 5.Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (eds), 121–136. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Leacock, Richard. Happy Mother’s Day (Director’s Cut). Film, 1963. Levin, Ben.Cinema Verite Course, Radio, Television, and Film Department. (lecture from course, Denton, TX: University of North Texas, 2006. Mamber, Stephen. Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974. Meyer, Muffie, interview by the author, additional information about Grey Gardens. New York. 2021. ———, interview by the author, New York. 2005. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Rinke, Andrea. “From Models to Misfits: Women in DEFA Films of the 1970s and 1980s.” In DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992, Seán Allan and John Sandford (eds), 183–203. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999. Stubbs, Liz. Documentary Filmmakers Speak. New York: Allworth Press, 2002. Vogels, Jonathan B. The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

5

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman Institutions and Workplace in Observational Documentary Films in 1984

In 1984, both Frederick Wiseman and Jürgen Böttcher made black and white, purely-observational documentary films: no narration, no music, and no filmmaker intervention or questions. Their films are about a workplace and the people of that workplace, giving us a glimpse into their perspectives regarding workers and institutions. Both had made films about institutions before and would go on to make more, but the similarities and differences between these two films in 1984 reveal a good deal about the observational mode, using the observational mode in a time of primarily participatory-mode and/or reflexive-mode documentaries, the documentary director as auteur, and their views concerning power dynamics in society. The comparison also allows for an examination of the unstated assumptions about cinéma vérité in terms of style and content.

5.1 Modes By 1984, completely observational documentary films were still occurring, but documentary filmmaking had largely moved to what Nichols identifies as the “participatory” and “reflexive” modes. Participatory documentaries, according to Nichols, actually include the early 1960s cinema verité films, such as the interactions between the filmmaker and the subject in Chronicle of a Summer. “What happens in front of the camera becomes an index of the nature of the interaction between filmmaker and subject.”1 Nichols continues: “This mode inflects the “I speak about them to you” formulation into something that is often closer to “I speak with them for us (me and you)” as the filmmaker’s interactions give us a distinctive window onto a particular portion of our world.”2 Nichols notes that observational films do not try to persuade, but rather just to show us what a situation is like, “but without a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be there too,” while the perspective of the filmmaker is a critical element to the participatory mode.3 Essays, confessions, and diaries are often utilized structurally and stylistically. Sometimes the mode contains so-called “ambush interviews,” made famous and infamous by

DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264-5

76  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman Michael Moore. Nichols puts all compilation films and interview films in this mode – Harlan County, U.S.A. by Barbara Kopple, Eyes on the Prize (1987) and Ken Burns’ Jazz (2000) – as well as films heavily reliant on reenactment, such as Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line although, stylistically, these films are all very, very different. Where the participatory mode is about the filmmaker and the subject, the reflexive mode, according to Nichols, is about the filmmaker and the audience, and what sets it apart is its reflection on the process of filmmaking itself and the problems and issues surrounding representation. “Instead of seeing through [author’s emphasis] documentaries to the world beyond them, reflexive documentaries ask us to see documentary for what it is: a construct or representation.”4 Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov is an early example; most reflexive documentaries were made in the 1970 and 1980s. In 1985, Ross McElwee released the well-known participatory/reflexive documentary Sherman’s March in which McElwee begins the film with a false beginning: pretending to be an expository documentary (he has his professor Richard Leacock to provide the voice for the opening narration) about the Union General Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea” military campaign, but after the initial introduction, the filmmaker informs the viewer that he cannot focus on making that film because his girlfriend broke up with him, and the film becomes about the filmmaker’s quest for love, where he interviews people about love and commitment as well as reflecting on it himself and his representation of it.

5.2  Böttcher’s Films 1963–1984 One might say that Böttcher’s Rangierer (Shunters), because it is fully observational in a career of over forty films of which only three are purely observational, is not an ideal representative work from 1963 to 1984, but by looking at his work as a whole during this time, one might argue that an anomaly is the perfect representation because Böttcher had so much variation in his genre, mode, and style in these years, and work that is different from what anyone else at DEFA was doing. For example, within filmmaking in general, and especially within DEFA there is little precedence for documentary and narrative director cross-over, but in 1965 Böttcher makes his only attempt at a narrative film, Jahrgang 45 (Born in ‘45), which was then banned by the Party. During this period he would make an observational documentary with a reflexive-mode opening; Der Sekretär (The Secretary), 1967, opens with a staged scene that pretends to be a documentary scene but we, the audience, are told that it is an acted scene after its completion, the only time that Böttcher ever does this. This is not really seen in documentary film until the mid-to-late 1970s, with bait-and-switch mixed genres of documentary and narrative in

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  77 No Lies (1973) and the aforementioned expository to participatory/reflexive mode in Sherman’s March. Böttcher’s 1968 film, Tierparkfilm (A Film About a Zoo), has no human voices, talking, or commentary/narration, where all of his other films had, and in 1981 he gives us DEFA’s first and only experimental film tryptic that features painting over works of art. So, in actuality, these years of Böttcher’s career featured one “anomaly” after another as he experimented in genre, mode, and style. In his words: “Every film has its own structure, its own truth, and that’s how it should be.”5 One author notes: “It is always invidious to pick out the most representative works of any artist, but the documentaries for which he [Böttcher] will probably be best remembered are Der Sekretär (The Secretary), 1967, Wäscherinnen (Washerwomen), 1972, Martha, 1978, and Rangierer (Shunters), 1984.”6 While the variety of style between his works has already been established, Kilborn goes on to note that all of these films are marked by certain common features: namely, featuring unheard voices. “The nub of Böttcher’s documentary approach… has always been to hone in on individuals, usually in their workplace environment, and give them space and opportunity to speak for themselves.”7 In 1967 Böttcher makes We Were in Karl Marx City, a report about a congress of “free German youth.” Löser names 1976 as a pivotal year: Böttcher’s friend Wolf Biermann was refused re-entry into the GDR/DDR following a concert. Böttcher, along with others, signed a petition to SED leader Erich Honecker in protest. A reversal was denied. Many artists and intellectuals left for the West, but Böttcher did not go, and his standing in DEFA was diminished. His 1968 film Ein Vertauensmann (The Representative) focuses not on a well-dressed and paternal “Sekretär” or party secretary, but a young, familyman union representative and the collective workers – all dressed alike in dusty work-clothes and hard hats – building a new city by the sea that will accommodate 20,000 people. The narrator says: “representative is a good word. It means: we trust you, so you can represent our interests… that’s what Union representation means today.”8 It is narrated by Böttcher himself, and has narration running through almost the entire film. There is upbeat jazz and scenes of relaxation at the beach between the hard construction work, giving a lighter feeling to an otherwise didactic film. In 1968 Böttcher directs Tierparkfilm (A Film About a Zoo), which is devoid of people, and by some accounts was assigned to Böttcher as a punishment – however he makes the film a visually-striking study in form and composition. In 1969 he makes Arbeiterfamilie (A Working-Class Family), about employees at the state-run transformer and X-ray factory in Dresden. In 1970 he makes Dialog mit Lenin (Dialog with Lenin), where Lenin texts are read by the actor Eberhard Esche with a montage of modern everyday life. In 1970 was Der Oktober kam… (October Came…) and Böttcher’s episode, featuring Benno Besson and Heiner Müller, was forbidden and personally struck through on a filmography list by Böttcher.

78  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman Wäscherinnen (Laundresses), which also deals with an institution – most literally the Berlin laundering company REWATEX, but also, in a way, the entire apprenticeship program, as there is not only discussion of this workplace, but of how the women were placed there. The music, a loud, surf-punk-rock song, sets the tone of rebellion. In the opening scene we see a trainee mockingly saying that they have the best job in the world, as they lift and move heavy wet sheets. But then she says, “don’t insult our profession or we will insult yours.”9 The narration then says, “No job is especially important. No. All are important.”10 Wäscherinnen is concerned with management, youth, work, rebellion, and human rights. Chris Löser notes: Socialist Realism, which enjoyed official endorsement, had precious little to do with actual reality, and that was obvious. And it was Jürgen Böttcher who first put an end to this symbolic representation in his “production films” and turned the representation of working class life on its head. In his films, the workers were suddenly shown with their true faces and their own biographies. The work they did was hard, stressful, at times stupid, and only rarely heroic.11 After his 1979 film Martha, Böttcher took a break, and returned to make his painting-animated tryptic Frau am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord), 1981, Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull), 1981, Venus nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione), 1981, which were a huge departure, completely different style – experimental – and free of traditional talking or discussion.12,13,14 When he returned to traditional documentary filmmaking, he returned with Rangierer, completely devoid of talking at all. Böttcher said, regarding Rangierer: At this time I no longer wanted to make films with people talking politely. I didn’t want to engage people in a dialogue which could only be a coverup for what they weren’t allowed to say. They were almost all furious about the Stasi and felt insulted and humiliated. Or they couldn’t bear the Wall anymore.15

5.3  Rangierer (Shunters) Rangierer (Shunters) is black and white film, 22 minutes in length. The film shows something that most people have not paid attention to – a job that requires skill and precision – the disconnecting, stopping, and connecting of train cars. We see quite a bit of the camera following and finding focus as the subject moves from the foreground to the background to the foreground again. The out-of-focus portions are not cut. To the credit of the cameraman, Thomas

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  79

Figure 5.1 Jürgen böttcher (right) directs during the shooting of the film Rangierer ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert.

Plenert, there is a very shallow depth of field, and the focus is always found quickly, but more of interest is that it was left as one whole shot instead of cutting out the momentary imperfections. Rangierer is Böttcher’s first film with the then 25-year-old Thomas Plenert.16 Böttcher would work with only a few cameramen throughout his career, and he would have an excellent working relationship with them in accounts from Böttcher, the cameramen, and the critics alike – a relationship where words were frequently not needed to explain what to do in a shooting situation. The film revels in the artistic possibilities of the tonal ranges of the black and white as well as the exploration in composition. Some shots offer a very deep y-axis, as the trains move into the distance at night, and then, adjacent, we cut to a snowy day scene with a compressed depth of field: a worker between the x-axis tracks in the foreground and perfectly composed under the intersection of pieces of metal on the building behind him. In this shot, it is the falling snow that offers depth. The snow also obscures the pure blacks, and the breath and cigarette smoke of the worker produce brilliant, bright white tufts. The shunter carries a note with him containing info regarding exactly what cars he should separate. This is scary to watch, as they are manually stopping such inertia, and we hear the cars collide, and the shunters placing and removing what makes the cars stop. Most of the shots are of a singular man, a centered composition. When he springs into action, moving quickly, we see

80  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman the cars not disconnect easily and we fear that they are frozen together. But upon another try it unhooks. We follow the workers into their indoor space, where they are writing notes, and where a machine, looking like a typewriter, is constantly dispensing a typed banner. The walls are covered with pictures of nude ladies. Returning outside, we hear the first talking of the film: men talking to each other, stopping platform cars which are loose, singular, and gliding, carrying heavy loads. We see a familiar face return, and he gets ready for another shift of this high-stakes job that seems like a type of dance, a performance, without seeming to be at all performative. The sound is all natural: the grating of the brakes and the moaning of the rocking cars creating a refreshingly different aural experience. The film ends noting the hugeness of the train depot: over twenty-one visible tracks, and train cars with over thirty automobiles on them, rolling along. It was unusual at this time for there to be written commentary at the end of a film. In one title card, Böttcher shares the following information: “In recent years, railway freight transport has increased by almost 18%. The film was shot in February of 1984. Böttcher notes that during a single shift, 1600 wagons are coupled and uncoupled by the workers.”17 One might recall the Canadian Film Board’s 1953 film Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway Switchman by Roman Kroitor, for similarities in content as well as composition of shots, although in Kroitor’s nine-minute film we learn a lot about the switchman, an immigrant from Poland – everything from the massacre that occurred in his home village to the fact that he eats six eggs for breakfast in the morning. The silence of Böttcher’s film, concerned more with how the men work together rather than the individual, is telling. Just as he does in Martha, even as we can become engrossed in the work of one person, it is their relationship to their colleagues and how these people form the true institution, rather than the upper management, that Böttcher puts as the center of his work.

5.4  Wiseman Films, 1967–1984 Despite also being a prolific filmmaker – also making over forty films in his career – Wiseman’s genre, mode, style, and working method has not changed significantly through the entire body of work. His 1967 film Titicut Follies, was filmed in the Bridgewood State Hospital for the criminally insane, and had an immediate critical success, despite the State of Massachusetts successfully barring it’s release except as an education resource. His films High School, Hospital, Near Death, Welfare, Zoo, Central Park, and many more all focus on institutions and the people associated with them, and all are fullyobservational, with no narration or music. His 1984 film Racetrack is 114 minutes long, shot on 16 mm black and white film, and is very similar in content and craft as his other films.

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  81

5.5  Racetrack Racetrack by Frederick Wiseman shows the various roles that spring from one institution: the Belmont Race Track in Elmont, New York, USA. The film begins with the birth of a horse calf. We see how different people spend their free time: riding a bicycle and cutting hair, or attending a garden party with a big brass band. We see a church sermon in its entirety, held on the Racetrack grounds. It touches upon class and race: showing the difference between people watching the same race, hoping for their horse to win: completely different reactions, and different ways of showing loss or excitement. Belmont feels like an an-inclusive lifestyle, both for the rich attendees and management and the workers associated with the institution. The DVD cover gives a review quote from Pulitzer-Prize-winning critic Tom Shales, of The Washington Post: “Wiseman wanders around Belmont finding ripe, illustrative material, most of which fits into the abiding themes of his films, the melancholy peculiar to industrial societies, the emotional wages of materialism. Horse racing is a small industry comparatively, but it serves as a rich microcosm…”18 The following sentence of Shales’ review, perhaps wisely omitted from the DVD jacket, is: “Various strata are contrasted, but almost everyone looks a little silly.”19 In a sequence of the surgery of a horse, one finds oneself wishing to skip over some of the operation – the drilling of bone and the blood and stitching. The viewer might become angry with the people who force this horse to race. But then we see the compassion of the veterinarian, who calms the horse as he wakes, who encourages him not to stand too early, who tries to help him stand, along with many men. The horse then gets tired and sleeps, snoring loudly. We see and feel the passage of time as they patiently wait to help the horse stand again when he wakes. The viewer’s feelings toward the veterinarian softens. Then one understands why this sequence, if further condensed, would lose a lot of the meaning. Nichols notes: Observational films exhibit particular strength in giving a sense of the duration of actual events. They break with the dramatic pace of the mainstream fiction films and the sometimes hurried, montage assembly of images that support expository or poetic documentaries. When Fred Wiseman, for example, observes the making of a 30-second television commercial for some 25 minutes of screen time in Model (1980), he conveys the sense of having observed everything worth noting about the shooting. His 25 minutes of screen time, however, condenses what was hours and hours of actual shooting time for the commercial.20 Wiseman himself confirms this: “a sequence that occurred in what can be called “real time” may last an hour. Of that, fifty-eight minutes is shot. I then edit the

82  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman fifty-eight minutes to eight minutes.”21 He goes on to explain that it is likely to be different parts of the fifty-eight minutes are used so that “a sequence is created that resembles but is not the original, yet is a fair representation.” While adding that he never changes the order of events in a sequence, they are still “fiction” because it is creating the illusion of being uncut.22 Even this condensed version can feel long, even to a patient to a viewer. Errol Morris recounts that once, when having dinner with Wiseman and his family, “one of his sons asked whether he was going to show me the “twohour, three-hour, or four-hour boring film.””23 Shales defends the challenge in Wiseman’s material: “Racetrack” is difficult viewing at times, but then the trouble with most television, public and private, is that it’s much too easy. In focusing on a specific, quixotic, rather pixilated environment, Wiseman emerges with a new assortment of insights and observations, and that “Racetrack” could never be adequately summarized in print is part of its brilliance. It’s a super film, from a super filmmaker.24

5.6 1984 When looking at the most popular documentaries of 1983, there are many participatory documentaries, such as When the Mountains Tremble, which was narrated by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, who gives a firsthand account of war. Voyage in Time is a primarily reflexive documentary about a director and a screenwriter who travel to Italy to scout locations. In 1984, 28 Up is by necessity participatory and reflexive, because not only do we hear the filmmaker’s voice throughout, but the participants are very aware of their portrayal in the 7 Up, 14 Up, and 21 Up films, have become wellknown due to the series’ popularity, and reference their own representation. Streetwise, a color film about kids trying to live in Seattle without parental or governmental help, purely observational, was one of the only observational films that year, and was nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1985. But it was The Times of Harvey Milk, a participatory film, that took home the Oscar. All of the nominated films were in color, including Marlene, about Malene Dietrich, made by Maximillian Schell and Bayerischer Rundfunk and OKO-Film. By comparison, the black and white observational films of Wiseman and Böttcher present more like late 1960s films in style and mode. While the first DEFA color film was in 1950 (Das kalte Herz (Heart of Stone), the first Böttcher film in color was Martha in 1978. His 1981 overpainting experimental films were in color, but he returns to black and white for Rangierer. His 1985 Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner (A Short Visit with Herrmann Glöckner) was in both black and white and color, which is unusual.

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  83 His 1986 Die Küche (The Kitchen) was back to black and white. In Georgien (In Georgia), in 1987, was in color. For Wiseman, his choice between utilizing black and white or color is based on both artistic preference and practical reasons. According to Wiseman: My first color film was The Store [1983], and I felt that had to be in color because the objects for sale were so colorful and that was part of the story. Other films were shot in color because the black-and-white film stock simply wasn’t fast enough. For instance, I wanted to shoot Ballet [1995] in black-and-white, and we tried using [Eastman Double-X] 7222 on our first day, but it was not usable. We went back the next day with [Kodak] Vision 500T [7279] and it looked terrific – same room, same light. I would love to have had the abstraction of black-and-white to capture the compositions and choreography, but it wasn’t possible. We shot color for Blind [1987] in part because of the fact that color was absent from the subjects’ lives. I wanted the audience to experience what the blind could not.25

5.7 Philosophy The many similarities between Rangierer and Racetrack makes their differences stand out in stark relief, as it hones in on stylistic or even philosophical differences between the two filmmakers. One is in tone: Wiseman uses irony, while Böttcher is earnest. “Irony abounds in Wiseman’s films,” according to Morris. “Often it’s a way of showing a disconnection between what people think they are doing and what they are doing.”26 Giving examples of times in Wiseman films when the documentary subjects reference Satre or Godot, Morris says he imagines Wiseman smiling. “These are his roots – not Grierson and Flaherty but Beckett, Anouilh, Ionesco, and Satre, the theatre of hopeless irony and the absurd.”27 Shales says of Wiseman: “[he] can make anything look enigmatically sad – a sign that says “snacks” at the race track, or a quick glimpse of the girl behind the hot-dog counter chanting to the customers the discouraging words “No beer. No beer.”28 John Grierson and Robert Flaherty, while one might fault their choices or execution – their films project a certain hopefulness. When Grierson shows you people in squalor, he wants to shame us for the squalor but also to praise the toughness of people who are living through it. Flaherty, with the wonder of a child, wants to show the viewer human differences to celebrate them. One feels that they want to bring connection and positive change. Böttcher’s motivation, it seems, is more concerned with showing the viewer the beauty and wonder of the everyday. He said, “Van Gogh rediscovered the world by painting old shoes and potatoes. The sun shone on it! With his great sensitivity he made humble articles suitable for art. And that’s got a lot to do with the documentary too.”29 …”I love all art that doesn’t ignore this dialectic.”30

84  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman 5.8  Belonging to Cinéma Vérité or Direct Cinema Löser notes: “The director [Böttcher] felt himself to be a spiritual ally of his contemporaries from Western Europe and North America, who, like him, emancipated documentary film from the burden of popular science, working under programmatic group names such as “Cinéma Verité” or “Direct Cinema.’”31 But would Böttcher be considered direct cinema with his use of a tripod and his neorealistic rather than three-act structure (as discussed in Chapter 4)? Further, it seems that part of this three-act structure is an expectation of singular protagonist, who is trying to succeed or win in a special endeavor, not day-to-day life. But Böttcher feels akin to his contemporary direct cinema filmmakers, because of his hope, his optimism, and his wonder. These films all have in common that the viewer feels that the ordinary individual is appreciated, seen, and maybe even elevated. And this comparison serves to further clarify and sharpen the definition of the genre itself: an unwritten “rule” of direct cinema is that the subjects, or in the case of Böttcher the “subjects” are respected or elevated. Wiseman himself eschews the categories of cinema verité and direct cinema, saying he “detests” it, and even, the term documentary film.32 Wiseman says that he makes “films,” and consciously calls them films and not documentaries. “I think they are structured stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end and with some elements in common with feature films and other forms of fiction.”33 He has the technical profile of direct cinema – handheld camera, no narration, no questions – but yet does not identify as being of this genre. Errol Morris notes this incongruity: “his movies are stylistically ur-vérité. No narration. Available light. Fly-on-the-wall. But Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. He might be a direct-cinema guy in form, but the content is not valetudinarian but visionary and dystopian.”34 Neugeboren notes that while Wiseman does not focus on the once-in-alifetime crisis that others do, he does focus on the crisis of the every day …”giving us stories of people in crisis who are dependent upon others for their well-being and survival.”35 David Denby, in his chapter entitled “Comfort for the Tough-Minded” says of Wiseman: He has a mischievous, sometimes black sense of humor that plays through all the films. And anger is certainly one of the emotions at play. But the anger, when it emerges, is directed not only at the failing institutions or at injustice, but often the sheer difficulties of life, the sometimes intractable nature of our common social existence, the sometimes intolerable nature of our common physical existence.36 “He prefers ‘reality fiction,’” according to Delbanco, “– a term that registers how much is shaped by the choices of what to shoot and how to put together what remains after the radical cutting.”37 Neugeboren’s quote

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  85 from Wiseman himself about the term cinema verité contains a good deal of distain: “Wiseman disparages the notion that his films are cinema verité, which to him “connotes just hanging around with one thing being as valuable as another.”38 Wiseman says of his filmmaking: “there are millions of choices to be made.”39

5.9 Institutions “My films are about institutions, the place is the star,” according to Wiseman. “I have no precise definition of “institution” other than a place that has existed for a while and that has fairly circumscribed geographical boundaries and where the staff is thought to be trying to do a good job.”40 Wiseman says that for most films he only visits one or two days before he begins shooting. “All I try to do in advance is to get a sense of the physical space where the film will be shot and make preliminary inquiries to discover the various people who control the decision-making.”41 Like Wiseman, for Rangierer Böttcher made a conscious decision to have little contact with those he would film before the shooting began. He was careful not to do introductions, whereas with most other films there was a good deal of time spent getting familiar with the subjects. “I knew that if I befriended them, the film would be crap.”42 Wiseman considers the filming itself to be the research. “It is only during the editing that I discover the themes and structure of the film.”43 Wiseman edits his own films, saying “this results in a four-way conversation between myself, the sequence being worked on, my memory, and some consciousness of my values and alertness to my experience.”44 As before mentioned, Wiseman does not alter the chronology of events within a sequence, however, he does move the sequences around as he pleases. Something shot on the last day could be shown as the opening scene, for example. Wiseman jokingly notes that the time that he spends shooting for a particular film varies according to the “subject matter, the nature of the activities, my interest, and the quality of the hotel accommodations,” but that most films are shot in four weeks, one was nine weeks, and the longest was 12 weeks.45 But he films all day, nearly every day, from when he starts a film to when he finishes; for example, for National Gallery he filmed 8am-10pm and watched rushes at night, and said he only took two days off in the 12 weeks.46 During this time, he shot 170 hours, and he noted that even in digital, he only shoots about 10% more than he did with film stock, reaffirming that his practice has not changed over time.47 When it comes to choosing the institution, Wiseman says sometimes it is from reading a People magazine while at the dentist office, or from a chance encounter while skiing. “For more than four decades,” Errol Morris notes Wiseman’s organizing principle for what to film: “I have no fixed conviction

86  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman about where to go,” said Wiseman, “other to hang out with the powerful and the powerless.”48 Wiseman approaches his breathtaking range of subjects – doctors, ballerinas, soldiers, students, welfare recipients, actors, factory workers, politicians, zookeepers, victims of domestic violence, corporate managers, fashion models, Benedictine monks, police officers, the terminally ill – with a minimum of intrusion or influence. He relies instead on a sensitive but trustworthy eye, a lawyer’s penetrating skepticism, and the dramatic impulses of a storyteller…49 Wiseman says he thinks his films are more novelistic rather than journalistic.50 He says he “leads with the mic,” meaning that in his documentary production team of two, the cameraperson and himself, the director and soundperson, he decides what interests him by the audio – both musical sound, such as the beat of punches or skipping feet in Boxing Gym, or content, such as the description of a painting in National Gallery.51 “The cameraman has one eye on the lens and one eye on me. I have one eye on him and one on what’s going on.”52 According to Nichols, Wiseman requests consent verbally from those he films when he shoots but assumes that when he shoots in tax-supported, public institutions he has a right to record what happens.”53 At first glance, one could believe that Wiseman’s stance toward institutions has softened throughout his career. In the earliest films, Wiseman seems to view people as cogs in a machine – important pieces, but in a system or machine made by the powerful or unseen. Films such as High School are clearly showcasing a generational change in views toward authority, pointing out hypocrisy and abuse of power. But, as Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane note in A New History of Documentary Film, after Titicut Follies and High School, one might have expected Wiseman to continue making films critical of the establishment or institutions, but his Law and Order (1969) does not do this.54 But it is important to note that his choice of institution most dictates the opinion one forms of that institution; it is a case-by-case evaluation. And in recent films, he does seem to be selecting institutions that are healthier, such as an egalitarian boxing studio in 2010 (Boxing Gym), a beloved museum in 2014 (National Gallery), or even a sometimes-troubled but well intentioned University of California, Berkeley (At Berkeley), 2013. Böttcher, however, makes his statement on the imbalance of power by showing only the workers in his films after Der Sekretär (The Party Secretary) 1967. Der Sekretär strikes a hopeful tone, projecting a desire for better leadership, collaboration, and the dream of a fully-functional and self-correcting socialist state is alluded to. But in his following films, this idealism seems to wane or is refocused toward the younger generation. He does not feature

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  87 anyone who is not a worker, and he focuses more on children and young people. His reaction to the ill-informed reasons for the censorship of his work ranged from confusion to sadness, then disgust. Böttcher notes that after Jahrgang 45 was banned he was told that it was because it “did not represent the DDR” although the actors were, in the neorealistic style, found from people already at the location. The Party leadership took particular issue, according to Böttcher, with the men wearing studded jeans into the ocean, as if Böttcher had dressed them and directed them, while this was what they were doing naturally already that day. Unbeknownst to Böttcher, the Party sent his film to France; only later did he discover a festival program that showed that his film had been submitted and screened in France. On top of this, Böttcher notes that he felt “penalized.” “They were so harsh, that I asked myself how I could carry on.”55 “And then for a few years I wasn’t able to do anything except propaganda for the foreign ministry.”56 He said that he purposely had no voice-over to Tierpark or Pergamon Museum but said that he saw the former five years later and they had added voice-over. Löser notes: “Just how his filmography might have developed were it not for the constant fluctuations between the more tolerant and restrictive phases of GDR domestic policy will remain a matter of speculation.”57

5.10 Funding The complicated relationship between Böttcher and the leadership of the DDR, as mentioned, included periods of punishment and pains as well as times when they offered Böttcher unquestioned financial support and the ability to work and not have to fundraise or pitch. Wolfgang Kohlhaase, who worked for DEFA, addressed the Conference on East German Cinema held March 1996. He describes how he was 14 years old when the Russians came, similar in age to Böttcher. Speaking about censorship and the relationship to the government, Kohlhaase said: Now, at a time when people tend to see things in black and white, I would like to emphasize that even with a wall around your country you could still think for yourself. Of course today you sometimes find that there are other walls than the one you had experienced before. You can also have walls around your head. He goes on to describe that public or private, when you ask for money, a certain amount of self-censorship occurs, in order to get the funds. He points out that the banning of films in 1965 did not just affect the people who made those films, implying that there was a chilling effect for future directors as well. “It wasn’t just an Eastern European invention, it is the way of the world,

88  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman the pressure to conform. I have not yet found that wonderful country where, if you want to make a film, someone says: here’s the money – don’t tell me what you are going to do with it. If I could find it I’d go there.” Wiseman did not ever have quite this good of a situation, but he did gain an unprecedented amount of financial freedom to make his films because of relationships he developed in both the private and public sectors. DuArt laboratory in New York agreed not to be paid for the film processing lab work for six years (and he notes, “in gratitude I have used them for all of my other films [but one, inside the US]).”58 After some small grants, from 1971 to 1981 Wiseman was partially funded by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and WNET Channel 13, the public television station in New York via the Ford Foundation, to do “one film a year.”59 Wiseman said, “Fred Friendly, the former head of CBS News, was in charge of the film program at the Ford Foundation, and he liked what I was doing and arranged the grant so I could continue to work.”60 Such a long-term funding opportunity that does not require pitching of each film is extremely rare, if not a complete anomaly in filmmaking. After 1981 Wiseman said that he receives funds from all of the aforementioned funding institutions plus MacArthur and Diamond foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and occasionally British or French television stations.61 Wiseman said he “had been cheated” by professional distributors with his first two films, and so in 1971 he made Zipporah Films Inc., which is the sole release point of his films via DVD, even to today. In 2018 he reached an agreement with Kanopy Films, which does streaming to some universities and public libraries, to be able to stream all of his content.62 Most of Böttcher’s films, including the banned ones, are available via DVD in chronologically-grouped sets from Filmmuseum München, DEFA, and Goethe-Institut. These films are as Böttcher released them (i.e. no narration over films that were later covered with narration when shown in the DDR), and have options for English and French subtitles. Several of the DVDs also include interviews with Böttcher at different dates after 1989.

5.11 Contemporaries and Perception as a Progressive Filmmaker Wiseman has never expressed caring about his contemporaries except for trying to distance himself from the categorization of being a “cinéma vérité,” “direct cinema,” “observational cinema,” or even “documentary” filmmaker. By staying true to his own rules of filmmaking, his films remain distinctive, predictable, and within the same mode, and thus Wiseman has created a unique brand and niche audience for himself. One may not see him as progressive in the field, as he does not change modes, nor do his films move any faster throughout his career. The average shot length of English language

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  89 films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today.63 Not Wiseman’s films. But one might also interpret his ability to not change and stay productive, making roughly a film a year for a living, as pioneering. Either way, Wiseman is known as a successful and prolific documentary filmmaker in both popular and scholarly circles. He is in the index of every documentary textbook. Böttcher, however, is not. Böttcher was interested in his contemporaries, in terms of knowing they had better equipment and wanting that equipment. He wanted to watch other cinéma vérité films, but was not able to see much more than what was brought to the Leipzig Film Festival. He sought their advice and guidance. Böttcher said that when he, on a rare trip to the west, was able to sneak out and meet the experimental filmmaker Stanley Brakhage, he brought some small cards that he had made painted over with him, and Brakhage told him that he should make these into an experimental film. He took this advice, and this was the inspiration for his experimental tryptic films. This work was a bit delayed by international standard, but was the first and wholly unique to the DDR. As already mentioned, Böttcher, in the early 1960s, was so advanced in terms of mode that it was not always well-received, but similar work done by other filmmakers in the 1970s was very popular. This gap is even greater with his German contemporaries, and greater still with DDR documentary filmmakers. In West Germany, filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn is well-known and upon his death in 2018, the then-NDR-director Lutz Marmor paid tribute to him with the words: “Hardly anyone has shaped the German documentary film as much as Klaus Wildenhahn.” According to a Norddeutscher Rundfunk article, in 1964 Wildenhahn interviewed D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock, – “an encounter that was to influence his work forever.”64 In 1965 he accompanied the jazz organist Jimmy Smith on his European tour with the camera. From 1968 to 1972 Wildenhahn also worked as a directing lecturer at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, became a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts in 1993. In the mid-1970s, Wildenhahn produced a four-part documentary about the planned closure of a Volkswagen plant in Emden, as a result of which there was a risk of mass layoffs in the East Frisian region around Endem called Emden goes to USA. In some ways, Wildenhahn’s career represents everything that Böttcher could not do: access the west, travel, and be critical of management. Volker Koepp, a director at the DEFA Studio for Documentary Films from 1970 to 1991, is best-known for his work in the town of Wittstock. In 1974, Koepp and cameraman Christian Lehmann began an ambitious ten-year project in Wittstock, focusing on the women workers at a textile factory. Lehmann worked on over 200 films, and almost all of Böttcher’s early films. Lehmann was the cameraman for Stars (1963). In 1984 Koepp’s ten-year Leben in Wittstock was released, and it’s similarities to both Stars and Wäscherinnen

90  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman are remarkable, in both style and content. But Stars was made in 1963; Leben in Wittstock was shot from 1974 to 1984. Leben in Wittstock stuck to the three main characters, returning over and over throughout time. Thus Leben in Wittstock, nearly twenty years later, had a different path: after winning the Silver Dove in Leipzig, Erika and Ulrich Gregor sent Wittstock to Berlinale’s forum in 1985 and then the broadcast rights were sold to the Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Broadcasting; Nowak 1995).65 In the vain of the British 7-Up series, Koepp and Lehmann continued filming until 1996. After the fall of the wall, the three women that the film focuses on are unemployed and struggling when the factory is downsized. Both Wildenhahn and Koepp made projects that were far longer within one topic and for a longer duration, and Wiseman’s style has remained constant throughout his career. But Böttcher continued to evolve, wanting new experiences, both in location and style. In 1987 he applied to travel for a film and, perhaps sensing his frustration and claustrophobia, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany approved him to make his first film outside of Berlin, with a full budget and near-complete creative freedom: the 103 minute In Georgien. When the wall comes down in 1989, he makes Die Mauer, with the full title Die Mauer: Demontage eines Altraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare), perhaps the clearest statement on his final views of what the DDR had become, and the culmination of his filmic experience.

Notes 1 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 179. 2 Nichols, 179–80. 3 Nichols, 181. 4 Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary,” 195. 5 Katrin Teubner and Ferdinand Teubner, Zeitzeugengespräch: Jürgen Böttcher (Filmmuseum München, Goethe-Institut München, DEFA Stiftung Berlin, 2015), 00:19:32. 6 Richard Kilborn, “The documentary work of Jürgen Böttcher: A retrospective,” in DEFA: East German Cinema 1946-1992, ed. by Seán Allan and John Sandford (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999): 274. 7 Kilborn. 8 Jürgen Böttcher, Ein Vertrauensmann (The Representative), (1968 Berlin: DEFA Film Library), film, 00:18:19. 9 Jürgen Böttcher, Wäscherinnen (The Laundresses), (1972 Berlin: DEFA Film Library), film, 00:01:50. 10 Böttcher, Wäscherinnen (The Laundresses), 00:02:19. 11 Claus Löser, “Jürgen Böttcher: Der Sekretär& Ein Weimarfilm,” Edition Filmmuseum 103, (Filmmuseum München, 2016) DVD insert. 12 Jürgen Böttcher, Frau am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord), (1981 Berlin: DEFA Film Library), film. 13 Jürgen Böttcher, Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull), (1981 Berlin: DEFA Film Library), film.

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  91 14 Jürgen Böttcher, Venus nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione), (1981 Berlin: DEFA Film Library), film. 15 Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker – Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 00:10:02. Translation by Goethe-Institute. 16 Claus Löser, “Late DEFA Works (1978–1988) Edition Filmmuseum 104 DVD Insert” (Filmmuseum Filmmuseum München, 2016). DVD Set). 17 Jürgen Böttcher, Rangierer (Shunters), 1984. 18 Tom Shales, “TV Preview,” The Washington Post, June 4 1986. https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/06/10/tv-preview/8ce9898b3885-446b-a292-bad91c9b4607/ 19 Shales, “TV Preview.” 20 Nichols, 176. 21 Frederick Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. by Joshua Siegel et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 37. 22 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 37. 23 Errol Morris, “The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. by Joshua Siegel et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 63. 24 Shales, “TV Preview.” 25 David E. Williams, “The Doyen of Direct Cinema,“ American Cinematographer 87, no.2 (2006): 70–75. 26 Morris, 66. 27 Morris, 66. 28 Shales, “TV Preview.” 29 Christoph Hübner, Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1 – Wildenhahn/ Böttcher / Nestler / Koepp (Goethe-Institut Filmmuseum München, 2008), DVD. 00:49:47. 30 Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1 Wildenhahn Böttcher/Nestler/Koepp, 00:51:43. 31 Löser, “Late DEFA Works (1978-1988) Edition Filmmuseum 104 Dvd Insert.” 32 Frederick Wiseman, Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman, Events at the Apple Store, 2014, 00:13:46. 33 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 20. 34 Morris, 64. 35 Jay Neugeboren, “Near Death/Near Life,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. by Joshua Siegel et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 125. 36 David Denby, “Comfort for the Tough-Minded,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. by Joshua Siegel et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 98. 37 Andrew Delbanco, “Learning from Wiseman,” in Frederick Wiseman, ed. by Joshua Siegel et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 91. 38 Neugeboren, 127. 39 Frederick Wiseman, “Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman.” Produced by Apple. Events at the Apple Store, November 13, 2014. Podcast, 32:00. https:// podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/frederick-wiseman-meet-the-filmmaker/ id941378231 40 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 28. 41 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 30. 42 Katrin Teubner and Ferdinand Teubner, Zeitzeugengespräch: Jürgen Böttcher (Filmmuseum München, Goethe-Institut München, DEFA Stiftung Berlin, 2015), DVD. 00:16:08. 43 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 30. 44 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 36–37. 45 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 36. 46 Wiseman, “Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman, Events at the Apple Store.” 47 Wiseman, “Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman, Events at the Apple Store.” 48 Wiseman, “A Sketch of Life,” 34.

92  Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman 49 Joshua Siegel, et al., eds., Frederick Wiseman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 12. 50 Wiseman, “Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman, Events at the Apple Store,” 00:21:15. 51 Wiseman, “Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman, Events at the Apple Store.” 52 Wiseman, “Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman, Events at the Apple Store,” 00:12:37. 53 Nichols, 175. 54 Betsy A. McLane and Jack C. Ellis, A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012), 233. 55 Teubner and Teubner, Zeitzeugengespräch: Jürgen Böttcher, 00:08:24. 56 Teubner and Teubner, Zeitzeugengespräch: Jürgen Böttcher, 00:08:32. 57 Löser, ‘Jürgen Böttcher: Der Sekretär & Ein Weimarfilm, Edition Filmmuseum 103’. 58 Siegel et al., “Frederick Wiseman,” 28. 59 Siegel et al., “Frederick Wiseman,” 28. 60 Siegel et al., “Frederick Wiseman,” 28. 61 Siegel et al., “Frederick Wiseman,” 29. 62 Sam Adams, ‘Frederick Wiseman Explains Why He’s Finally Making His Documentaries Available for Streaming’, Slate, January 10, 2018. https://slate.com/ arts/2018/01/frederick-wiseman-explains-why-hes-finally-putting-his-documentaries-on-streaming-services.html 63 James E. Cutting, Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). 64 “Documentary Filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn: Master of the Close Look,“ June 19, 2020, Norddeutscher Rundfunk. https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/koepfe/Dokumentarfilmer-Klaus-Wildenhahn-Meister-des-nahen-Blicks,wildenhahn104.html 65 Caroline Moine, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955-1990, ed. by John Barrett and Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs, Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), p. 214.

References Adams, Sam. “Frederick Wiseman Explains Why He’s Finally Making His Documentaries Available for Streaming.” Slate, January 10, 2018, Böttcher, Jürgen. Ein Vertauensmann (The Representative). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1968. ———, Frau Am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1981. ———, Jahrgang 45 (Born in ‘45), 1965 ———, Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1981. ———, Rangierer (Shunters). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1984. ———, Venus Nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1981. ———, Wäscherinnen (The Laundresses). Berlin: DEFA Film Library. Film, 1972. Cutting, James E. Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Delbanco, Andrew. “Learning from Wiseman.” In Frederick Wiseman, Joshua Siegel, Andrew Delbanco, William T. Vollman, and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (eds), 86–95. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010.

Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman  93 Denby, David. “Comfort for the Tough-Minded.” In Frederick Wiseman, Joshua Siegel, Andrew Delbanco, William T. Vollman, and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (eds), 96–105. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. “Documentary Filmmaker Klaus Wildenhahn: Master of the Close Look. “June 19, 2020. Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker - Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 2005. Hübner, Christoph. Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1 - Wildenhahn/Böttcher/Nestler/Koepp. Goethe-Institut Filmmuseum München, 2008. Kilborn, Richard. The Documentary Work of Jürgen Böttcher: A Retrospective in DEFA: East German Cinema 1946-1992, Seán Allan and John Sandford (eds), 267–282. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999. Löser, Claus. Jürgen Böttcher: Der Sekretär & Ein Weimarfilm. Edition Filmmuseum 103 ed., “DVD insert. Filmmuseum München, 2016a. ———, Jürgen Böttcher: Frau am Klavichord & In Georgien. Edition Filmmuseum 104 ed. Filmmuseum München, Goethe-Institut und DEFA-Stiftung, 2016b. ———, “Late DEFA Works (1978-1988). Edition Filmmuseum 104 ed. DVD Insert” Filmmuseum München, Goethe-Institut und DEFA-Stiftung, 2016. McLane, Betsy A. and Jack C. Ellis. A New History of Documentary Film. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2012. Moine, Caroline, Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival 1955– 1990 (Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1). Edited by Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs and translated by John Barrett. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Morris, Errol. “The Tawdry Gruesomeness of Reality.” In Frederick Wiseman, Joshua Siegel, Andrew Delbanco, William T. Vollman, and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (eds), 62–67. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Neugeboren, Jay. “Near Death/Near Life.” In Frederick Wiseman, Joshua Siegel, Andrew Delbanco, William T. Vollman, and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (eds), 122–131. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Shales, Tom. “TV Preview.” The Washington Post, June 4 1986. https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/06/10/tv-preview/8ce9898b-3885446b-a292-bad91c9b4607/ Siegel, Joshua, Andrew Delbanco, William T. Vollman and Marie-Christine de Navacelle. Frederick Wiseman. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Teubner, Katrin and Ferdinand Teubner. Zeitzeugengespräch: Jürgen Böttcher. DEFA Stiftung Berlin: Filmmuseum München, Goethe-Institut München, 2015. Williams, David E. “The Doyen of Direct Cinema.” American Cinematographer 87, no. 2 (2006): 70–75. Wiseman, Frederick. “A Sketch of Life.” In Frederick Wiseman, Joshua Siegel, Andrew Delbanco, William T. Vollman, and Marie-Christine de Navacelle (eds), 19–47. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. ———” Meet the Filmmaker: Frederick Wiseman.” Produced by Apple. Events at the Apple Store, November 13, 2014. Podcast, 32:00. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/ podcast/frederick-wiseman-meet-the-filmmaker/id941378231

6

Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple and Reform in Participatory/Reflexive Documentary in 1990

The world of documentary cinema and the work of Böttcher experiences great change between 1984 and 1990, when Jürgen Böttcher releases his bestknown documentary film Die Mauer: Demontage eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare) Böttcher 19911. There is movement from the observational mode, to participatory, and then to reflexive modes, as well as a shift from black and white to color. In 1989, Michael Moore’s Roger & Me was released in theatres (although not to immediate popular acclaim). In this film, considered one of the first of the reflexive/participatory mode, Moore questions the factory workers much in the same way that Böttcher does in 1972 in Wäscherinnen, again showing Böttcher’s relative progressiveness. And by 1990, the world for Jürgen Böttcher as a person is something entirely changed as well. On November 9, 1989, people moved freely from Berlin to West Germany for the first time in 28 years, breaking the barrier between Böttcher and the “west.” This juncture in time is a good opportunity to look at the evolution of modes, and Böttcher’s relatively progressive style at that time, as well as to examine how Böttcher decides to reposition himself professionally within a global, open context. By contrasting Böttcher’s Die Mauer: Demontage eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare), about the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Barbara Kopple’s American Dream, about a failed factory strike, we can compare and contrast how the two filmmakers experience and present life-altering, revolutionary change caused by an external force. With this massive change that altered life as Böttcher had known it, Böttcher was also thinking about what this meant for documentary, and for art, and considering equally large professional reform to match the political ones around him. Böttcher notes that in the time right after the wall came down documentary interviews were being done with people in the street and aired that night on the news and that this was good and right, but then mentions that the documentary filmmaker, then, must think of their role. “…It tells us, filmmakers, that the films we make must work in a totally different way.”2 Comparatively, Kopple seems to be bringing her set process to a situation. This contrast offers insight into differing philosophies and differing filmic results. DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264-6

Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple  95

6.1 Participatory Mode to Reflexive Mode in the 1970s and 1980s in Böttcher and His Contemporaries The inclusion of conversation between the subject and the filmmaker was becoming even more prevalent in the 1970s, as well as having the filmmaker as narrator with relevant personal experience. Nichols notes this in 1983: “And so in the last decade we have seen a third style which incorporates direct address (characters or narrator speaking directly to the viewer), usually in the form of an interview. In a host of political and feminist films, witnessparticipants step before the camera to tell their story.”3 A good example of this evolution of mode can be seen in the work of the Maysles Inc. team, including Charlotte Zwerin. The Maysles began their careers with fairly inflexible rules regarding how or when they would interact with subjects, preferring to try to remain invisible. Subjects were instructed to ignore the filmmakers, and Al Maysles discussed how it was only with new people who were entering the filming space that they would give “a look”: the look of understanding and wordlessly asking for permission and for them to carry on without mentioning the filming process. One sees this in Salesman, as new people enter a house where a salesman is in process of trying to sell a Bible. They enter, looking befuddled, and then look up to the cameraman, they look back to the situation, ignoring the camera.4 And this would have worked in the 1960s, as film equipment was more foreign and special, and live broadcasts less commonplace. But by the 1970s, people were much more aware of the power of documentary, and filmmakers would sometimes find themselves in situations where their presence had to be acknowledged. To some extent it was Zwerin who heralded in this change with Gimme Shelter. In the famous 1970 documentary about the Rolling Stones putting on a concert at the Altamont Speedway, the band and their management decide to use the motorcycle club “Hell’s Angels” to provide security, and during the concert, concertgoers and the Hell’s Angels have a substance-fueled clash that ends with a gunshot and a man who is killed. It was Zwerin’s idea to bring the Rolling Stones in to view the footage of what happened, as they were on stage at the time and had a lot of questions about what had happened that the footage of the concert could answer. But she also recognized it as a powerful structuring and plot device, to have the band members view the footage and film their reactions. The film opens with her and David and Al Maysles explaining how the Steinbeck editing machine works and showing them the footage, slowing on the actual frames where the gunshot occurs. Zwerin, as editor, freeze frames on each of their faces to capture their reactions, and this is when she inserts their names on-screen, providing an introduction to the band and setting up the drama that is later to come in the film. The filmmaking and the filmmakers had become a part of the story and so when their invisibility was impossible, Zwerin took advantage of this to step into a completely new mode. The film, to some extent, mirrors

96  Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple the loss of innocence of the 1960s; after Robert Kennedy and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., are killed; the viewer wants to see where peace diverged into violence. Stylistically, Gimme Shelter opened the door to the Maysles/Froemke/ Hovde/Meyer film Grey Gardens in 1975, in which the subjects equally address each other and the filmmakers, even by name – a film that is observational, participatory, and sometimes reflexive.5 As already mentioned, Böttcher was already making participatory documentaries in, for example, Wäscherinnen (Washerwomen) in 1972, as they address the camera directly rather than just being observed. Barbara Kopple, one of the most written-about documentary filmmakers of all time, also followed the same trajectory of change in regards to genre. Like Zwerin before her, and Susan Froemke after her, Kopple’s career was shaped by her work with the Maysles’. A psychology student, Kopple dropped out when she got an opportunity to apprentice with David and Albert Maysles. “She helped light and shoot their exploration of door-to-door Bible sellers’ bleak lives (Salesman) and riveting account – including an on-camera killing– of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour, Gimme Shelter.”6 Echoes of Gimme Shelter are easily recognized in Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976), as this film also witnesses a shooting.7 A little over one hour into the film, we see Kopple film a truck approaching and a man pointing a gun out of the truck and shooting. We hear a woman screaming. We have enough time to realize the camera has the evidence of a crime, and then we see another man rushing to the camera. The soundperson (Kopple) rushes ahead and is tackled. The cameraperson is knocked to the ground while holding the camera, but the footage continues. In both of these observational films, the filmmakers’ presence was brought to the foreground because of capturing violence. Reflexivity increased in documentaries throughout the 1970s and by the 1980s, the audiences’ relationship to the filmmaker has evolved. Viewers developed a desire to know who is framing the film they are watching, no longer accepting that a film that has no literal voice, of a narrator speaking, has no “voice,” but instead understanding that every film is shaped by the maker. Thus, Nichols discusses how interviews can avoid the problems of a single voice of authority, although he notes that “a gap remains between the voice of a social actor and the voice of the film.”8 “Voice is perhaps akin to that intangible, moiré-like pattern formed by the unique interaction of all a film’s codes, and it applies to all modes of documentary.”9 Nichols goes on to lament that filmmakers seem unwilling to acknowledge and interrogate these issues. “Very few seem prepared to admit through the very tissue and texture of their work that all film-making is a form of discourse fabricating its effect, impressions, and point of view.”10 He notes in 1983 that many filmmakers in history have taken the stance that “knowledge and the position of the self in relation to the mediator of

Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple  97 knowledge, a given text, are socially and formally constructed and should be shown to be so… the process of constructed meaning overshadows constructed meanings.”11 By the 1980s, the personal history and personality of the documentary director, even a director who was making largely observational films, was a large factor in a film’s box-office success, and therefore overall viewership. According to an economic study on the subject, critical success is not a statistically significant factor in box office success, but having previous awards is a very strong indicator.12 And so to some extent, Kopple’s known history as a social-issue filmmaker, as someone with a commitment to unions, and a prior Academy Award win for Harlan County U.S.A. (1972) gave her credibility when it came to her 1990 film American Dream. While a documentary film may seem very observational within the film, the audience probably came to the film knowing some of the filmmaker’s personal story, background, and political stance. Böttcher is also in step with these changes. After Rangierer (Shunters) in 1984, Böttcher completed Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner (A Short Visit with Hermann Glöckner) in 1984, Die Küche (The Kitchen) in 1986, and the 103-minute In Georgien (In Georgia) in 1987, the only film Böttcher made outside of Germany. In Georgien opens with Böttcher’s narration, explaining that the film is a subjective portrait of what they, the German filmmakers, experienced when they arrived, and what follows is a colorful feast for the eyes, showing the beauty and simplicity of the life of the Georgian people. In Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner (A Short Visit with Hermann Glöckner) Böttcher is addressing the subject directly, even when his questions could have easily been cut out by inserting a closeup, but he chooses to leave it in, and in fact, the conversation with Glöckner feels as if it is one between two artists, as Glöckner shows his artwork and explains his process.

6.2  American Dream In order to contrast Böttcher’s filmic response to revolutionary external change, a good counterpoint is Barbara Kopple’s American Dream, 1990. Kopple began filming about a plant closing in Worthington, Minnesota, but when she learned of the Hormel factory struggle 100 miles away, she began to film there and made this battle the center of the film.13 Unlike Harlan County, U.S.A., there is no historical, expository section of the film that deals with the history of labor strikes or even the history at the Hormel plant, but Kopple said that is because it’s a more modern film that deals with the realities of today, and she didn’t feel that it was a good fit.14 This indicates that Kopple is letting the content drive the mode. While individuals are interviewed, which is participatory, the film is largely observational. The film, which begins by showing the gruesome and difficult work that is done in the factory by the meatpackers, opens as the workers at the Austin,

98  Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple Minnesota Hormel meat packing plant are told they will have a pay cut from $10 to $8.25 and that the factory will cut benefits by 30 percent at a time when they posted a net profit of $30 million. The workers and their local union decide to strike, but the international union disagrees with their strategy, saying that instead of fighting to keep their wages and those of future employees, they should compromise to a pay rate that applies to all factories of the same industry. The local decides to go on strike anyway, and we see, slowly, Hormel winning: they offer the high-paying jobs to those who cross the picket line. The viewers are presented two brothers who refuse to speak to one another, as one crosses the picket line to continue to work, and the other does not. The union provides forty dollars a week to each striking family, but we see the hardships of the strikers, and hardest of which is the realization, finally, that Hormel will fill the plant and not allow them to come to back to work at all. At the end of the film, we find that Hormel did in fact lock out the strikers from future employment, and for current and future employees, Hormel divided its factory, created a new company in name only, and leased out the factory space to itself, now hiring and re-hiring their workers at $6.50 per hour. Leon Fink, who reviews the film, makes an astute observation: “the director’s eye is really fixed on two sets of antagonisms: first, the people and their power – represented by rallies, traveling caravans, and outside supporters such as Jesse Jackson – arrayed against the seemingly immovable object, the corporation…”15 The film showcases the depressing reality of deregulation of corporations, which are then supported by police and military, for the sole purpose of higher profits, and for a modern viewer, it provides a clear example of how the financial policies of the Regan era and beyond crushed labor, worker protections, and the middle class. Perhaps because Harlan County, U.S.A. had a positive ending for the Union, critics and audience members found the outcome of American Dream to be a surprise. The interview from Cineaste asks, in essence, if in light of the dark ending, the film’s closing rendition of “Solidarity Forever” is “ironic.” Kopple replied that “what it meant to me was a sort of regrouping of things that people believed in, that a sense of hope and a willingness to stand up and fight for your beliefs was still alive in these people.”16 When asked about the film’s somewhat open ending, where it is not clear who is right or wrong, Kopple says that it was not her intention to point out a right or wrong, but real people who were caught in having to make real-life choices “when everything, including long-held beliefs, starts to unravel.”17 American Dream cost nearly $1 million dollars and was five years in the making.18 Kopple says, regarding distribution, “documentaries are movies and need to be shown in theatres. There should be alternatives to Terminator II. People should be able to see films that reflect their own lives, their own sense of history. Documentaries have drama and passion and narrative stories.”19 IMDB gives the total global box office of American Dream as $269,823.

Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple  99 Bill Nichols, in his forward for the book The Films of Barbara Kopple, says “if documentary is truly good, it alters how we see and understand the world around us by giving this world a form we have never seen before.”20 “Barbara Kopple is clearly a filmmaker with a vivid voice. It is not her spoken voice (her films lack voiceover commentary and for this reason, plus her penchant for filming events as they unfold, her work is characterized in this volume as a form of cinema verité).”21 Nichols points out that her work does “not sound a singular note as the work of filmmakers like Michael Moore or Errol Morris does.”22 Kopple crafts her stories but resists this characterization. E. Ann Kaplan relates the example of an interview with Kopple and Roland Legiardi-Laura, where he says, “they are dramatic film pieces. They’re stories that are deftly woven together the way you would structure any good fiction film. You find a story and you create tension,” to which, Kaplan relates, she sharply replies, “I don’t create tension.”23,24 But when Kopple gives us an empathetic view of the people who cross the picket line, is she not complicating the protagonist and antagonist roles in order to create tension, whether or not this was the full intension? In 1998 Kopple told Washington Times reporter Gary Arnold, “…you try to take people on a journey and help them forget that any artifice could be a stumbling block. You live a short lifetime with the people you are filming and want to make it count. I think the audience feels the same way when they look through the window you’ve tried to open.”25 Jeff Jaeckle, in his chapter about Kopple, says: “Kopple’s commitment to crafting a compelling storyline means that no subject or character should stand out as too particular or too idiosyncratic because such qualities might, to use metaphors, create stumbling blocks… this means that knotty or contradictory aspects of a subject’s or character’s lived experience – such as their race – will ultimately be flattened out to maximize the momentum of the dominant storyline.”26 He points out that Paula Rabinowitz notes in a now-foundational 1996 article, that Kopple relies heavily on oversimplified good and bad that are effective, but also stifle character’s intersectional identities. It is almost as if Kopple feels compelled to keep a clear, strong, classic storyline in order to succeed in telling the story, whereas one might argue that narrativizing real life makes something that is both far from fiction and far from reality. This is a strong contrast to Böttcher, in Die Mauer (The Wall), 1990, who serves more as a guide, showing the viewers that life is made up of the personalities that stand out, and stresses the importance of the connections that we can draw from these textured, separate events and people. Also documenting a reform, but as an artist, Böttcher is looking for the visual and thematic threads that we can follow, in an imperfect journey, rather than creating a window.

100  Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple 6.3  Die Mauer: Demontage Eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare) Die Mauer: Demontage eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare), mentioned often in the shortened Die Mauer (The Wall), is equal parts observational and participatory, with some reflexive moments. There is a very telling opening scene, which orients the viewer not only to the wall, but to the sensibilities of the filmmaker taking them on this journey. After the title card, we see birds flying freely in the air and over the wall and we hear the sound of lots of small hammers hammering. The camera notices a woman with her face against the wall, listening. We see the cameraman (Thomas Plenart) “pick up sticks,” meaning, grab the entire tripod and move it by walking while the film is still rolling. Plenart then re-focuses, adjusts the aperture, and reframes the woman in a close up shot, and these technical corrections are left in the film although it would have been possible to cut between the wide shot and the close up without technical issue. We hear Böttcher ask the woman what she hears. She says she heard some noises, and Böttcher then asks the others to stop hammering for a bit. Although what she is saying seems impossible, even the teenagers dressed in punk-rock clothing stop to let her listen and listen as well. This scene indicates a few important things: first, it is an invitation to look for the unexpected and the deeper meanings in the film, even when they might at first seem crazy. It is also a signal that the rules are gone, and that the filmmaker is presenting his story of his home being changed forever, and his interpretation of what this means, imperfections and all. The viewer is taken inside of a “ghost station,” where guards are stationed, and the metro does not stop. According to Jordan, “it’s a nod in the direction of film history; forty-four years earlier, in January 1946, cameraman Reimar Kuntze shot the first DEFA footage in this flooded Berlin subway tunnel.27 We see Böttcher gingerly enter the frame, open a safe, and dart back out, allowing us to discover the age, rust, and mold inside, and then lingering a moment on the serendipitous work of art that time has made of an ordinary object.28 He lets us see him and see the process. Poetic in its pacing and framing, with long sections without talking, and only natural sounds, objects and people alike become elements in the frame as he and Plenart are reveling in making fresh compositions out of bygone artifacts. We see film footage of the Wall being built in 1961 being projected on the Wall being destroyed in 1989. The irony fades as the footage progresses to show escapes, attempted escapes, and tombstones. We cut to the street running parallel to the Wall, with it’s warm lights, and the cold, blue lights in the distance. We approach the Bundestag in a slowly-moving car as fireworks begin. We see the masses of people behind a chainlink fence, people on top of the Bundestag, saying “Happy New Year!” We are given time – lots of time, in what is a 6-minute-shot – to see the beautiful color and tonal richness in the

Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple  101

Figure 6.1 Böttcher (right) with two GDR guards after the fall of the Berlin wall. ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert, Michael Loewenberg.

film. We meet a woman from Kansas City in the crowd, and a man speaking in Italian. One man chants, “Gorbi!” and others join in. Later, in the daylight, we see a surreal scene of a hole in the Wall where we see former GDR guards on one side and people on the other. A girl is talking to one of the guards, and we seem to witness them hit it off: she asks if he is happy about the Wall coming down and he says yes, because he can visit friends in the west. She agrees to give her address to he can visit her in Hannover, but she does not want to give it “in front of the cameras.” At the end of the scene, the young guard, obviously elated to have met the girl, remembers he is being filmed and turns away quickly. We hear laughter from behind the camera, likely Böttcher himself. The guard replies, saying, “I’m shy! It’s just how I am!” and rejoins the other guards and attempts to regain a serious composure. This is another instance, like that of the woman at the beginning of the film, where we break the “fourth wall” and the mode switches to reflexive. But it is not to draw attention to the filmmaker or the film, but rather to present a real, sweet, future-looking moment. The exchange is an example of a quote by Böttcher given several years later: “… in documentary as I see it, there’s only the moment. There’s a real opposition. I like to compare it… to love. The documentary as I see it has got this point of crystallization, this particular moment when people suddenly get together, their reserve overcome by the surprise of people facing each other, in which both give but also hold back something of their character, no one forcing the other.”29

102  Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple Repeatedly, the holes in the Wall are used as frames, and we are shown a collection of a wide variety of people looking through: a snapshot of time and place. They appear so curious about the eastern side, looking not unlike people visiting the zoo. Often the steel rebar that remains after the Wall is chipped away looks like bars. Historical film footage of the Brandenburg gate is projected on the Wall: we see a happy populace in summer, running to celebrate, and then an excited, organized crowd with the Brandenburg Gate draped in Nazi flags. The juxtaposition of hope and joy with the knowledge of what was to happen gives the viewer a punch in the gut. The film captures the hope turning ominous, with the cracks in the Wall and the rough texture showing through. The next shots are of the destruction of the area: rubble and fire. Then the Russians coming through, bearing their flags, and the people looking scared and unsure of what will come next. The viewer is left to ponder all of the history that has occurred in one place. Some of what we see is disorienting. People experience the thrill of crossing easily, laughing giddily at a border that once held so much power having disappeared. Then we see the area, some time later, when the Wall has been completely removed – the ground where the Wall once was looking like a scar. We see a machine, with no crowds around, slowly and mechanically removing

Figure 6.2 From Die Mauer (The Wall). ©DEFA-Stiftung/Thomas Plenert, Michael Loewenberg.

Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple  103 pieces of the Wall with a robotic arm. We see the film projector, and hear it humming, and see the dust and fog playing in the light that the projector is putting out, as a transition to showing more footage on the Wall, this time military boots marching in unison and soldiers marching with identical movements, expressions, and dress – exact copies of each other. Finally, we see projected footage of people in 1989 crossing freely – some excited, jumping and cheering, some looking scared, a sea of people, and an astonished Eastern guard who looks as if his entire life has been turned upside-down. Here, one sees the many pieces of Böttcher’s career come together: the experimental touches from his tryptic, the comical observation of Tierpark and the easy trust he builds with his subjects in Stars and In Georgien. We take the time to watch the wind blow the leaves of a flowering bush, something that would not have been permitted in a film that wasn’t expressly experimental; here Böttcher is exercising his freedom and also showing his style as auteur. Then a direct cut from the tiny leaves to a square packed with people uses the editing to convey an idea about the smallness of each person in regards to the whole. It is reunification day, and we hear the words: “We are one people!” But instead of staying with the crowd, with the main event, we see a chimneysweep. He says that he asked his boss for time off because it is a special day, a special event, but he then trails off, as it is clear he did not get his request. He and his colleague move to clean another chimney, with the sea of people as far as the eye can see below them. Böttcher, after emphasizing the smallness of each person, then elevates the average, working person, as he has done throughout his career. And the film ends with seeing the storage place for sections of the wall – still covered in graffiti but sitting alone like tombstones. We take plenty of time to view the designs on different sections. The sound is of a peaceful field, and the camera tilts up to the sky. The natural sound plays under the credits, which are a simple white text on black. The full title of the film is Die Mauer: Demontage eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare) but it feels more like the funeral of a nightmare. We view the body, we review its life, and we place it in a field to hopefully give us, the living, peace. The film opened the Leipzig Film Festival in 1990. Moine writes: “With it Böttcher – then fifty-nine and having worked at DEFA for nearly thirty years – offered a visual reflection in the form of an overview that ultimately belonged to an entire generation. Throughout the ninety-minute documentary, the public’s boisterous joy alternates with prolonged periods of silence.”30 Die Mauer won the International Film Critics Award at the 1991 Berlinale. When receiving the award, Böttcher stood and announced that he would retire from filmmaking to concentrate on painting, quite a surprising statement

104  Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple given that he had just reached such a professional pinnacle. In the thirty years to follow, Böttcher has not done another large film project. The world around him had altered remarkably with the fall of the Wall, and after documenting this reform, he undertook a profound career change, becoming the painter he has always wanted to be but was not allowed to be in the GDR. He even changed his name to STRAWALDE, an homage to his childhood hometown. In many ways Böttcher had come full circle, but in many ways he would begin to branch into the unknown: the west, and the art world.

Notes 1 Jürgen Böttcher, Die Mauer: Demontage eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare), 1991 Berlin: DEFA Film Library), film. 2 Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1 – Wildenhahn/Böttcher/Nestler / Koepp, 00:58:04. 3 Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 17. 4 Jessica Schoenbaechler, “Legendary and Budding Filmmakers Share Screentime at Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival,” International Documentary Association, March 31, 2005. https://www.documentary.org/feature/legendary-and-buddingfilmmakers-share-screentime-hot-springs-documentary-film-festival 5 Al Maysels, David Maysels, Muffie Meyer, Susan Froemke, and Ellen Hovde, Grey Gardens 1975; New York City: Maysels Films. Film. 6 Gregory Brown, ed., Barbara Kopple: Interviews, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), 77. 7 Barbara Kopple, Harlan County, U.S.A. 1976; New York City: Cabin Creek Films. Film. 8 Nichols, 23–24. 9 Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 18. 10 Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 18. 11 Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 27. 12 Neil Terry, Leigh Browning, and Lisa Mitchell, “The Determinants of Box Office Revenue for Documentary Movies,” Journal of the Southwestern Society of Economists 42 (2015): 24. 13 Barbara Kopple, American Dream 1990; Prestige Films, 1990); Film. 14 Brown, “Barbara Kopple: Interviews,” 45. 15 Leon Fink, “Movie Reviews – American Dream Produced by Barabara Kopple,” The Journal of American History, 78, no. 3 (1991): 1088. 16 Brown, “Barbara Kopple: Interviews,” 45. 17 Brown, “Barbara Kopple: Interviews,” 44. 18 Brown, “Barbara Kopple: Interviews,” 49. 19 Brown, “Barbara Kopple: Interviews,” 48. 20 Bill Nichols, “Foreword,” in ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple, ed. by Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), xiii–xviii. 21 Nichols, “Foreward,” xiii. 22 Nichols, “Foreward,” xiv. 23 Roland Legiardi-Laura, “Barbara Kopple by Roland Legiardi-Laura,” Bomb 38, January 1, 1992. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/barbara-kopple/ 24 E. Ann Kaplan, “Harlan County, USA and the Documentary Form,” in The Films of Barbara Kopple, ed. by Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 23.

Jürgen Böttcher and Barbara Kopple  105 25 Jeff Jaeckle, “The Peekskill Projects,” in The Films of Barbara Kopple, ed. by Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 93. 26 Jaeckle, 93. 27 Moine, Screened Encounters 301. 28 Die Mauer (The Wall), 1991, 00:15:05. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128334/ 29 Dokumentarisch Arbeiten 1 – Wildenhahn/Böttcher/Nestler/Koepp, 00:07:31. 30 Moine, 302.

References Böttcher, Jürgen. Die Mauer (The Wall), 1991. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0128334/ Brown, Gregory, ed. Barbara Kopple: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. Fink, Leon. “Movie Reviews – American Dream Produced by Barbara Kopple.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (1991): 1188. Jaeckle, Jeff, “The Peekskill Projects,” in The Films of Barbara Kopple, Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan (eds), (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019) pp. 90–103. Kaplan, E. Ann, ‘Harlan County, USA and the Documentary Form’, in The Films of Barbara Kopple, Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan (eds), 2020, pp. 17–30. Kopple, Barbara. American Dream. New York City: Prestige Films Film, 1990. ———, Harlan County, U.S.A. New York: Cabin Creek Films, 1976. Legiardi-Laura, Roland, ‘Barbara Kopple by Roland Legiardi-Laura - BOMB Magazine’, 1992. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/barbara-kopple/ [accessed 21 March 2022] Maysles, Albert, et al. Grey Gardens. 1975; New York: Maysles Films, 1975. Film. Moine, Caroline. Screened Encounters: The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival 1955– 1990 (Film and the Global Cold War, volume 1). Edited by Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs and translated by John Barrett. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.Moore, Michael. Roger & Me. 1989; New York: Warner Brothers, 1989. Film. Nichols, Bill, “Foreward,” in The Films of Barbara Kopple, Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan (eds). Scotland: Edinburgh University Press Scotland, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019): xiii–xvii. ———, “The Voice of Documentary.” Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1983): 17–30. Schoenbaechler, Jessica. “Legendary and Budding Filmmakers Share Screentime at Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival,” International Documentary Association. March 31, 2005. https://www.documentary.org/feature/legendary-and-budding-filmmakers-share-screentime-hot-springs-documentary-film-festival Terry, Neil, Leigh Browning and Lisa Mitchell. “The Determinants of Box Office Revenue for Documentary Movies.” Journal of the Southwestern Society of Economists 42 (2015): 15–27.

7

Conclusion Documentary Contrasts in Structure, Subject, Place, and Change in Group Identity, and an Expanded Definition of Documentary Modes

Throughout this work, there is categorizing by documentary mode which serves to illuminate the progressiveness of Böttcher relative to his contemporaries. While valid, the foundational work on modes is, and has always been, seen as capable of expanding and changing, and in fact, Bill Nichols encourages this development and further study. In the introduction to the 2016 book Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary Film, Bill Nichols traces his trajectory in film studies and elaborates on how he was driven to particular topics or books. He was at times prompted by an influx of political documentaries to write further about them, but at other times, after years of preparing for his courses or for visiting lectures, found himself with many essays to be collected together.1 This personal history is quite important to consider, as his work on the documentary modes, often taught and read as doctrine, or assumed to be foundational, complete work, should actually be considered as a starting place. Nichols said in his 1983 article, “…The dominant modes of expository discourse change; the arena of ideological contestation shifts. The comfortably accepted realism of one generation seems like artifice to the next. New strategies must constantly be fabricated to re-present “things as they are” and still others to contest this very representation.”2 Therefore, this look at the works of Jürgen Böttcher and documentary contemporaries and the documentary modes has produced some useful quantitative study and frameworks for comparing texts, but the real value is in the questions raised that can advance the dialogue about the personal auteurship of filmmakers, their relationship to their audience, and society’s relationship to film. Below, the various limitations of the study are explored, followed by the areas of potentially fruitful further examination.

7.1 Limitations 7.1.1 The Amount of Narration is an Inaccurate Way of Determining Mode The presence of narration and/or the length of the narration can be seen as an indicator of mode, but this doesn’t take into account the intention. The DOI: 10.4324/9781032701264-7

Conclusion  107 filmmaker’s style of the narration, whether it is sarcastic, subversive, or, for example, using “we…” (such in Böttcher’s Furnace Builders) are all counter to the assumption of narration coming from a “voice of God” or authority point of view. In Marlon Riggs’ Tounges Untied, for example, although he is giving commentary, the nature of the narration is so different, and the content is so personal, that we have no trouble understanding that it is participatory and/or reflexive. But in the transition time between a prevalence of expository films and observational films, narration did not disappear overnight, as station heads and DEFA/DDR did not allow this not wanting a too-quick change for the audience. Gradually the narration did begin to change in style and content, and therefore there should be extra caution not to just consider the quantity, such as measuring the percentage of narrated to non-narrated in several of the film comparisons, but also the quality. Ricky Leacock’s slightly sarcastic narration in Happy Mother’s Day or Böttcher’s adoration of the women workers in the film Stars is actually subversive. 7.1.2  Misidentification by the Technology The mode is often misidentified by the technology. For example, if the sound is synced and the camera is roving, we all recognize this as direct cinema or observational cinema – to the point that it is almost a parody of itself – we have mockumentaries like This is Spinal Tap making fun of the endless follow-shot. Although sometimes the mode is not possible without the technology, the technology does not make the mode. The primary example of this is that the Americans claim that they are the first to make sync sound, but they were not. West Germany was actually the first, however, they did not use the technology in the way that the Americans and French used the technology. Jürgen Böttcher, right on the other side of the wall, wanted the technology for these “new methods,” did not have access to it, knew it, and found a way to get the same approximate results without the equipment through sheer will. You cannot make a film like Primary without the technology, but if you have the technology you do not automatically make Primary. The aesthetic, structure, content, and the relationship between the director and audience and subjects and audience are all variables in the mode, but as the aesthetic is the most quickly identifiable variable, there is a larger risk that films could be misidentified or misclassified. 7.1.3  “Hollywood Default” Documentary structure as a whole, consciously or unconsciously, is built on narrative structure, and it is very difficult to separate it from this tradition. Because students frequently only study deeply and exclusively in documentary or narrative filmmaking, it can be hard for documentary filmmakers to be aware of the structural assumptions that come from narrative, Hollywood

108 Conclusion film, particularly when coming from a North American background. The foundational notion of the Hero’s Journey and the 3-Act structure is often ingrained and imperceptible. The observational mode as defined by Nichols is a protagonist struggling in real-time and overcoming. This is a very western and Hollywood assumption. Jürgen Böttcher very rarely centers on a single protagonist, preferring instead groups, typically working groups, and made what might be the very first documentary with two or more women who speak to each other about something other than a man. His aforementioned narration in Ofenbauer using “we” is something that was not done until participatory documentary in the 1970s. Despite many observational filmmakers saying that Italian Neorealism was very impactful to them, very few utilize the “discovering” structure of neorealism, but instead have a clear challenge and climax at predetermined times within the film. And so I believe that the definition should be widened. We can acknowledge that Hero’s journey and 3-act structure are common for western documentaries, but just as we acknowledge a greater variety of narrative structures as valid, we can increase our inclusivity when it comes to documentary. 7.1.4  Positivity Default This is similar to the differences in narration, but it is even more subjective and buried within the reception of the film. Nichols points out similarities between Kopple and Robert Flaherty, who made what is considered to be the first documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922). “Like Flaherty, Kopple’s voice is one of admiration and respect… both films celebrate the vitality of the human spirit and its great resourcefulness in the face of adversity,” adding that “her films, across a wide range of subjects, exhibit a consistent respect for others.”3 The many similarities between Böttcher’s Rangierer and Wiseman’s Racetrack makes their differences stand out in stark relief, as it hones in on stylistic or even philosophical differences between the two filmmakers. One is in tone: Wiseman uses irony, while Böttcher is earnest. This can further clarify and sharpen the definition of the genre itself: an unwritten “rule” of direct cinema is that the subjects, or in the case of Böttcher the “subjects” are respected or elevated. But this assumption can make films that have a dark actor as a protagonist difficult to classify or easily misidentified. 7.1.5  M  odes, Typically Chronological, Do Not Work as Well for Someone Who Has a Varied and Vibrant Career, Such as Böttcher In Chapter 6: Jürgen Böttcher and Frederick Wiseman – Institutions and Workplace in Observational Documentary Films in 1984, I contrast two films by Jürgen Böttcher: Rangierer and Racetrack. Both, made in 1984, both black

Conclusion  109 and white when color was available, both purely observational films. But the difference is, Wiseman has only made purely observational films. In a career of over 40 films, Böttcher has only three that are fully observational – no narration, no music, no interaction. Most reflexive films were made in the 1970s and 1980s, but Böttcher has a reflexive scene in Der Sekretär in 1967. In 1981 he gives us DEFA’s first and only experimental film tryptic that features painting over works of art (in this case it is late for the world but completely unique for the GDR). The mode and style vary widely, but the content has common themes that run throughout his career.

7.2  Discussions for the Future 7.2.1  G  reater Consideration for the Editors of Documentary Film as Co-Directors Generally, documentary filmmaking must make a special effort to explain why history should be re-written to properly attribute all directors, including editors. Although this is important for increasing inclusivity and gender equity in filmmaking, the question is a more basic one of ethics, ownership, and auteurship, and certainly scholars in all fields have a responsibility to correct fallacies and omissions when they are encountered. 7.2.2  Relationship between Director and Audience As Nichols notes in Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary, any discussion of the modes also brings up the notion of trust between the filmmaker and the audience. “In a nutshell, a guiding statement might propose, “Do nothing that would violate the humanity of your subject and nothing that would compromise the trust of your audience.””4 Nichols goes on to admit the fuzziness of this concept, but despite the difficulties in quantitatively studying documentary, the academic conversations that arise from the difficulties push the quality of the qualitative study. It is heartening to see the similarities between documentary filmmaking and other artistic fields, as once general rules about structure were made, and the technology settled, these boundaries were pushed. The topics of documentary, as we see in Böttcher’s work, went from novel to more nuanced stories, about broadening representations, and then about societal constructs like institutions, and then complex dynamic change in groups of people, such as the construction and destruction of country or place, and looking at the communal bonds between people that remain. Maker and audience alike, globally, have grown together in these sixty years, and one can be optimistic for further complexity in documentary as we move into the future, perhaps as we watch in new virtual space and participating in new ways.

110 Conclusion 7.3 Böttcher Beyond Region and Country, and into the Future The removing of “silos” in academic study, the movement to interdisciplinarity, will undoubtably benefit Böttcher, as it is unfair to study him only as an East German filmmaker, or a German filmmaker, or as a documentary filmmaker, or as an experimental filmmaker, or an observational filmmaker. Notable in all of these silos, he is much more impactful when looked at generally and globally. The article in Cahier Louis-Lumiére notes that recent research about DEFA is turning away from the narrow, political way it has been focused to a more nuanced look at the films in a more international way, citing three recent books that have expanded the scholarship in this area.5,6,7,8 It is the author’s hope that this examination of Böttcher’s life and work help fill this gap. This kind of examination not only corrects the current understanding, it helps elaborate on documentary filmmaking generally, and what was and is “progressive.” It is also an opportunity to look at why history is recorded in a certain way, and how we might work to recognize issues of misrepresentation and how to course-correct. For example, what if there is a similar talent to Böttcher in every region that was on the losing side of war, or economically disadvantaged? How could we do a better job of letting local institutions inform scholars of their distinguished filmmakers? As for Böttcher, 80 years old in 2022, struggling for recognition in the art world, one wonders if he is satisfied with his place in history as a filmmaker. A couple of people think my pictures are extraordinary and that makes me feel good… It’s what you also see in experimental video films, a sort of still life, light breaking through, the force of nature, rain, ordinary rain on a balcony, what is in essence a hurricane. And then children at play and then a young woman posing in front of me. This disputation, the tension between approaches and glances. That is film. The crystallization of this craziness in the world – this enchantment. That is a challenging statement. When I am 80 or 90 I shall make a completely crazy film, a crazy love film. It’s fun for me to say that and there is an element of truth in it. But…I don’t have to make it.9 Prolific, like Alexander Calder, cross-discipline, like William Kentridge, and observer, like Van Gogh, how fortunate is humanity that Böttcher created the films and art that he created? And while no, he would not have to make a “crazy” film at 80 or 90 years old, we would be lucky beyond measure if he did.

Notes 1 Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). 2 Bill Nichols, ‘The Voice of Documentary’, Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1983): 17.

Conclusion  111 3 Bill Nichols, “Foreword,” in ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple, ed. by Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), xv. 4 Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film, 158. 5 Barbara Eichinger and Frank Stern, eds., Film im Sozialismus - Die DEFA (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2009). 6 Michael Wedel et al., eds., DEFA international: Grenzüberschreitende Filmbeziehungen vor und nach dem Mauerbau (Wiesbaden: Springer–Verlag, 2013). 7 Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage, eds., DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion, Companions to Contemporary German Culture Vol. 4, (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2014). 8 Brombach et al, “Walls Have Never Held Us Back”: 85. 9 Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker - Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 2005, 00:22:12-00:22:13.

References Brombach, Ilka, Tobias Ebbrecht, Chris Wahl and Brad Prager. ‘“Walls Have Never Held Us Back”: 60 Years of Student Films at the University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf,’” Cahier Louis-Lumière, no. 9. (2015), 78–85. Eichinger, Barbara and Frank Stern, eds., Film Im Sozialismus - Die DEFA, Buchreihe Der ÖH Uni Wien, Bd. 4, 1. Aufl Wien: Mandelbaum 2009. Goethe Institut, KuBus 64, The painter and film-maker - Jürgen Böttcher/Strawalde, 2005. Nichols, Bill, “Foreward,” in The Films of Barbara Kopple, Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan (eds), 2020: xiii–xvii. ———, Speaking Truths With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. Oakland: University of Carlifornia Press, 2016. ———, “The Voice of Documentary.” Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1983): 17–30. Silberman, Marc and Henning Wrage, eds. DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion. Companions to Contemporary German Culture Vol. 4. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. Wedel, Michael, Barton Byg, Andy Räder, Skyler Arndt-Briggs and Evan Torner. DEFA International: Grenzüberschreitende Filmbeziehungen Vor Und Nach Dem Mauerbau. Wiesbaden: Springer–Verlag, 2013.

Index

Note: Page numbers in bold denote tables. American Dream 6, 94, 97–98 Barfuß Und Ohne Hut (Barefoot and Without a Hat) 20 Berlin Wall ix, 1, 27, 26, 69, 94, 101 Chopra, Joyce 4, 52, 58, 61–62, 64, 66, 69–70 Chronicle of a Summer 7, 52, 71, 75 cinéma vérité i, 2, 6–9, 18–19, 27, 36–37, 52, 61, 75, 84–85, 88–89, 99 cinema verité and cinéma verité see cinéma vérité DDR see GDR DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) ix, x, 1–3, 9, 16, 19, 21, 24–25, 27, 40, 44–45, 58–59, 76–77, 82, 87–89, 100, 103, 107, 109–110 Der Sekretär (The Party Secretary) 21, 45, 50, 76–77, 86, 109 Die Küche (The Kitchen) 45, 60, 71, 83, 97 Die Mauer: Demontage eines Alptraums (The Wall: Demolition of a Nightmare) 2, 6, 9, 27–28, 90, 94, 99–100, 103 direct cinema i, 4, 6–9, 19, 38–39, 50, 84, 88, 107–108 Drei Von Vielen (Three Of Many) 16, 44, 48 Drew, Robert 4–5, 6, 7–9, 46, 49, 51, 62, 64, 69, 72

Flaherty, Robert 5, 17, 40, 61–62, 83, 108 Frau Am Klavichord (Woman at the Clavichord) see Verwandlungen (Transformations) GDR 1–3, 14–17, 20–22, 24–25, 27–29, 44, 58, 71, 77, 87, 101, 104, 109 Gimme Shelter 45, 52, 60–61, 95–96 Grierson, John 17, 37, 83 Grey Gardens 8, 60–61, 72, 96 Happy Mother’s Day 4, 6, 18, 58, 64, 68–70, 107 Harlan County, U.S.A. 76, 96–98 hero’s journey 108 In Georgien (In Georgia) 27, 60, 71, 83, 90, 97, 103 Jahrgang 45 (Born in 1945) 4, 20–21, 44, 50, 76, 87 Koepp, Volker 89–90 Kohlert, Werner 19 Kopple, Barbara 6, 27, 76, 94, 96–99, 108 Leacock, Richard 4–5, 6, 7–9, 17–19, 27, 35–40, 46–47, 49, 51–52 Lehmann, Christian 18, 38, 89 Leipzig Documentary Film Festival 6, 9, 16–22, 24–28, 103 Marker, Chris 7, 19, 22, 63 Martha 23–24, 45, 60, 71, 77–78, 80, 82

Index  113 modes 3–7, 10, 36, 51–53, 58, 61, 68–69, 75–77, 80, 82, 88–89, 94–97, 106–109; expository 5–6, 35, 51, 61, 69; observational 5–6, 35, 51, 69–70, 75, 94, 108; participatory 5–6, 9, 75–77, 94–95; performative 5–6; reflexive 5–6, 75–77, 94–95, 101

Racetrack 6, 80–82, 108 Rangierer (Shunters) 6, 9, 26, 60, 76–79, 82–83, 85, 97, 108 Rossellini, Roberto 15, 46–49 Stars 4, 6, 18–19, 39, 45, 58–60, 62, 64, 67–71, 90, 103, 107 STRAWALDE 1, 13, 28–29, 104 sync sound i, 5, 37, 39, 107

neorealism 46–48, 52, 108 Nichols, Bill 3–6, 35, 46, 48, 51, 52–53, 58–59, 61, 69, 75–76, 81, 86, 95–96, 99, 106, 108–109

The Chair 6, 35–36, 39–40, 43, 49–53 Tierparkfilm (A Film About a Zoo) 22, 77 Toby and the Tall Corn 36

Ofenbauer (Furnace Builders) 6, 16–17, 35–36, 39, 44–46, 48–53, 60–61, 70, 108

Venus Nach Giorgione (Venus According to Giorgione) see Verwandlungen (Transformations) Verwandlungen (Transformations) 24, 78

Penck, A. R. 15–16, 23, 28 Pennebaker, D. A. 5, 7, 9, 37–40, 46, 51–52, 66, 72, 89 Plenart, Thomas 100 Potter’s Stier (Potter’s Bull) see Verwandlungen (Transformations) Primary 7, 39, 53, 71, 107

Wall see Berlin Wall Wäscherinnen (Washerwomen) 45, 71, 77–78, 89, 94, 96 Wildenhahn, Klaus 39, 89–90 Winkler, Wolf see Penck, A. R. Wiseman, Frederick 6, 75, 80–86, 88–90, 109 Wolf Biermmann petition 22, 77