The East German Disco Film: An Intermedial Approach to the GDR’s Imagined (Musical) Futures

Abstract

abstract:Between 1975 and 1981, the documentary film group defa-futurum within the state-owned East German film studio DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) made forty-one Discofilme (disco films). Twenty-seven of these were music videos of socialist “Beat” bands and were initially theorized as documentary films of the future. Ewa Mazierska’s analytical framework considers global pop rock as articulated through local culture and provides the basis of the present exploration into the complexities of transnational musical meaning making at the local level in the disco films. This intermedial analysis reveals the films’ full array of metaphor and allusion in portraying imagined (socialist) futures.