Abstract
In the two decades since the fall of the Wall, the work of some of the documentary filmmakers of the German Democratic Republic has entered to some extent into the pages of English language documentary film histories. There is a full entry on the German Democratic Republic in the Encylopedia of the Documentary Film published in 2006 where they have been recognized for their development of a distinct aesthetic during the 1970s and 1980s to represent the work and workers of a twentieth century communist state. The more overtly propagandistic compilation films of Andrew and Annelie Thorndike during the 1940s and 1950s had already been described in Erik Barnouw’s history of documentary, together with the anti-Vietnam war films of Heynowski and Scheumann. The new generation of filmmakers working in the 1970s and 1980s, however, are not mentioned in later editions of Barnouw’s overview. This paper seeks to highlight the energy and commitment of DEFA documentary filmmakers in the seventies and eighties who sought to apply some of the principles of observation and cinema truth practised in Western Europe and the USA and shown and debated at the Leipzig documentary film festival.