Fantasy and latency: Rainer Simon’s late DEFA films

Abstract

Abstract Article proposes to look at the last decade (1980–1989) of DEFA film production, still not been much discussed in scholarship, through the lens of the work of Rainer Simon (b. 1941), arguably one of DEFA’s last auteurists (although the auteurist label does not fit DEFA comfortably). Simon’s later movies, after the censoring of his Gegenwartsfilm (film of the present) Jadup und Boel (1980/1988), reworked the genre of historical film in new ways, via a politics of fantasy. The difficulty of defining these films’ genres is tied to its lack of defined address or alternative public sphere within the GDR.