What´s left?
Films from former East Germany

As part of the 2018-2019 initiative Year of German-American Friendship, encompassed by the motto “Wunderbar Together”, Goethe Pop Up Kansas City invites everyone to its Pop Up Film Haus to discover German cinema through a curated selection of films. Each film will be shown in German with English subtitles.
 
Together with Stray Cat Film Center, we invite you to What’s left? Films from former East Germany, a series of film screenings curated by Dr. Larson Powell, Professor of Film Studies at UMKC. Dr. Powell will lead a discussion after each screening about the film’s content and contexts, its relation to film history, and its artistic form and style.
 
What´s left? Films from former East Germany
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, eastern Germany is still marked by a particular mentality, the product of a different experience of the postwar period and its two distinct political ideologies. Several themes from the divided German past and the ongoing cultural unification of the country are still very much present in German film and literature today. Even filmmakers born in West Germany like Christian Petzold are drawn to the topic of East Germany and its legacy. Both films from East Germany and also recent films about its history often show heroes and heroines of everyday life with gritty realism, ironic understatement and comical stories. Goethe Pop Up’s What’s left? Films from former East Germany series will show a range of these stories and social contexts covering four decades of filmmaking.
 
Dr. Larson Powell is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC). He has published books on modern German literature of nature (The Technological Unconscious, 2008) and post-1945 electronic media art (The Differentiation of Modernism, 2013). His new book on East German film maker Konrad Wolf is forthcoming in 2019. Other teaching and research interests include psychoanalysis and comparative literature (French, Russian, Polish, Swedish), and Eastern European and Scandinavian film.  He was a visiting DAAD-Professor for Film Studies at the Johann-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in 2016.