Introduction: New Films

On December 2, 1987, the Galerie Oben in central Karl-Marx-Stadt—now Chemnitz—hosted a screening of what it advertised as New Films by Wolfgang Hartzsch, Volker Lewandowsky, Mario A., and Claus Loser. Independently produced, non-narrative films like these were hardly atypical fare for Galerie Oben, an artist-run “producers’ gallery” founded in 1973, which exhibited paintings, sculptures, and boundary-blurring pieces that expanded and rethought traditional distinctions between genres. Yet none of these New Films could have been viewed in standard East German cinemas, whether as part of a full program of independent or experimental shorts, or as accompaniments to a conventional feature. For one thing, the German Democratic Republic's (GDR) state-owned film studio system, the Deutsche Film AG (DEFA), had never prioritized the production of experimental films, by that name or any other. And for another, even as late as 1987, such films’ legality (and lack thereof) was governed by an order on so-called approval and licensure, last updated in 1976, which expressly prohibited the production or exhibition of films that had not been submitted to, and approved by, governance bodies existing solely for this purpose.

Tasked with determining whether these unlicensed films merited criminal investigation, agents of the Ministry for State Security (MfS, or Stasi) attended the Galerie Oben event.