- Copyright Page
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Communist Vision Today
- Socialist Domestic Infrastructures and the Politics of the Body: Bucharest and Havana
- Architecture in Series: Housing and Communist Idealism
- Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s
- Esfir Shub’s <i>K.Sh.E.</i> (1932) and the Movement of Energy
- Soviet Wall Newspapers: Social(ist) Media of an Analog Age
- Red Stars, Biorhythms, and Circuit Boards: Do-It-Yourself Aesthetics of Computing and Computer Games in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
- Machines, Nations, and Faciality: Cultivating Mental Eyes in Soviet Books for Children
- Who Doesn’t Like Aleksander Kobzdej?: A State Artist’s Career in the People’s Republic of Poland
- “How-To” Make Art in Communist China: Professionalizing Amateur Artists
- Visions and Visualization of Sustainability: Leningrad Designers in Search of Soviet Recycling System, 1981–1984
- Shaping the Avant-Garde: The Reception of Soviet Constructivism by the American Art Journal <i>October</i>
- The Time Lag of <i>Defa-Futurum</i>: A Socialist Cine-Futurism from East Germany
- The Visitation of the Idea: Badiou on Film and Communism
- In the Name of Internationalism: The Cinematic Memorialization of Norman Bethune in Socialist China
- Listening between the Images: African Filmmakers’ Take on the Soviet Union, Soviet Filmmakers’ Take on Africa
- Brothers at War: The Images of Prison S-21 (Tuol Sleng) in the Framework of Intracommunist Conflicts
- The Constructivist Sartorial Utopia and Its Revolutionary Potential: Then and Now
- “Socialist Realist” Critiques of Neoliberal “Shock Therapy”: East German Artists Respond to the 1973 Putsch in Chile
- Beauty and Quality for All: A Vision of Fashion under Cuban Socialism
- Disappearing from the Picture?: Female Figures in Pattern Books of the Mao Years
- The Subject Who Knows: Photographers and the Photographed in the Late East Germany
- Two Worlds: Boris Efimov, Soviet Political Caricature, and the Construction of the Long Cold War
- The Lyrical Subversions of Socialist Realism in Đặng Nhật Minh’s New Wave Cinema
- The Montage Connection between John Heartfield and László Lakner: Artistic Resistance and a New Leftism in Sixties Europe
- Visual Regimes of <i>Juche</i> Ideology in North Korea’s <i>The Country I Saw</i>
- Television and the Good Times of Socialism
- Futures Remembered: Kosmonauts, the GDR, and the Retrospective Impulse
- Contesting the Cuban-Soviet Visual Rhetoric for the Present
- Komunistki: Visual Memory of Female Communist Agency
- Specters of Europe and Anticommunist Visual Rhetoric in Romanian Film of the Early 1990s
- Lenin in Los Angeles: Counter-Memories, Recycling Socialism
- Coda: Flashes of Arab Communism
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
On April 23, 1975, at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, the East German filmmaker Joachim Hellwig (1932–2014) and scriptwriter Claus Ritter (1929–1995), both initiators and authors of the artistic working group defa-futurum, defended their collectively written practice-based PhD on the “artistic forms for imagining a socialist future by the means of film under specific consideration of the experiences of the working group defa-futurum.” Strongly influenced by Hellwig’s antifascist projects and nonfictional documentary practice, defa-futurum demonstrates a specific concern for a Marxist cybernetics with regard to creative thinking, labor, love, and political work. The latter is elaborated in greater detail by engaging with the forgotten writings of the philosopher Franz Loeser. Defa-futurum allowed the idea of film-as-theory to endorse the GDR as a sovereign state—promoting also an East German socialist internationalism—under the conditions of the global Cold War by the means of cinema. By using methods from visual culture and cultural studies to facilitate a decolonizing analysis of defa-futurum’s films, Stasi files, archival material, and original writings, the article aims to argue that decolonizing socialism is necessary in order to break through the Cold War’s binary limits for understanding technopolitics, art, and social realities in the post-1989 world.
Keywords: defa-futurum, cinema, cybernetics, socialism, GDR, internationalism, Cold War, futurity, decolonizing analysis
Doreen Mende, Associate Professor in Visual Arts, HEAD Geneva University of Art and Design
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- Copyright Page
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Communist Vision Today
- Socialist Domestic Infrastructures and the Politics of the Body: Bucharest and Havana
- Architecture in Series: Housing and Communist Idealism
- Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s
- Esfir Shub’s <i>K.Sh.E.</i> (1932) and the Movement of Energy
- Soviet Wall Newspapers: Social(ist) Media of an Analog Age
- Red Stars, Biorhythms, and Circuit Boards: Do-It-Yourself Aesthetics of Computing and Computer Games in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
- Machines, Nations, and Faciality: Cultivating Mental Eyes in Soviet Books for Children
- Who Doesn’t Like Aleksander Kobzdej?: A State Artist’s Career in the People’s Republic of Poland
- “How-To” Make Art in Communist China: Professionalizing Amateur Artists
- Visions and Visualization of Sustainability: Leningrad Designers in Search of Soviet Recycling System, 1981–1984
- Shaping the Avant-Garde: The Reception of Soviet Constructivism by the American Art Journal <i>October</i>
- The Time Lag of <i>Defa-Futurum</i>: A Socialist Cine-Futurism from East Germany
- The Visitation of the Idea: Badiou on Film and Communism
- In the Name of Internationalism: The Cinematic Memorialization of Norman Bethune in Socialist China
- Listening between the Images: African Filmmakers’ Take on the Soviet Union, Soviet Filmmakers’ Take on Africa
- Brothers at War: The Images of Prison S-21 (Tuol Sleng) in the Framework of Intracommunist Conflicts
- The Constructivist Sartorial Utopia and Its Revolutionary Potential: Then and Now
- “Socialist Realist” Critiques of Neoliberal “Shock Therapy”: East German Artists Respond to the 1973 Putsch in Chile
- Beauty and Quality for All: A Vision of Fashion under Cuban Socialism
- Disappearing from the Picture?: Female Figures in Pattern Books of the Mao Years
- The Subject Who Knows: Photographers and the Photographed in the Late East Germany
- Two Worlds: Boris Efimov, Soviet Political Caricature, and the Construction of the Long Cold War
- The Lyrical Subversions of Socialist Realism in Đặng Nhật Minh’s New Wave Cinema
- The Montage Connection between John Heartfield and László Lakner: Artistic Resistance and a New Leftism in Sixties Europe
- Visual Regimes of <i>Juche</i> Ideology in North Korea’s <i>The Country I Saw</i>
- Television and the Good Times of Socialism
- Futures Remembered: Kosmonauts, the GDR, and the Retrospective Impulse
- Contesting the Cuban-Soviet Visual Rhetoric for the Present
- Komunistki: Visual Memory of Female Communist Agency
- Specters of Europe and Anticommunist Visual Rhetoric in Romanian Film of the Early 1990s
- Lenin in Los Angeles: Counter-Memories, Recycling Socialism
- Coda: Flashes of Arab Communism
- Index
