Magical History Tour - German Postwar Cinema and British Free Cinema

Exhausted genre stuff, unimaginative escapism, formulaic production methods, a national cinema lacking international presence – damning indictments of this kind can still be read and heard when the issue is West German films produced from the end of the war to the beginning of the 1960s. But apart from sentimental films with regional backgrounds, remakes of German classics from the Weimar period, film adaptations of literature, or desperate attempts to copy Hollywood blockbusters, what did exist were films that broke with the cinematic tradition of National Socialism in both content-related and aesthetic terms. Especially in East Germany, novel and daring films were produced in the first DEFA years until 1950, films that critically dealt with the then-recent past.