Home cinema behind the iron curtain - an interview

[Joachim Schmidt]

Dr. habil. Robert Forster in conversation about DEFA home cinema in the GDR. Dr. habil. Forster is a film scholar, exhibition director at the Filmmuseum Potsdam, author and active in many other fields. On his website Schmalfilmkino.de he gives insight into his collection and informs about his activities.

In this interview (in three parts) with off2, which was recorded in his film archive, he talks about the beginning and the end of DEFA home cinema, publications and the technical conditions in East Germany during Socialism, prints for West Germany, digests, sales successes and failures as well as extraordinary home cinema titles - among other things...

The whole interview, with its nearly 50 minutes total running time, has English subtitles (doing the transcript, translation and adaptation was hell of work )

If this sounds interesting for you, you can watch it here:


1:

2:

3:

Besides that it is always a good idea to subscribe to my off2 YouTube channel - every second week a new, exciting, Super 8 related video is published! Where else do you get that
https://youtube.com/@off2-Super8

[Steve Klare]

These are great, Joachim!

I've always wondered about small gauge film in the Eastern Bloc countries: we do see film equipment from them including the pretty widely respected Zenit Quarz camera, so it was a phenomena there too, just in their own way of doing things, of course.

I appreciate the opportunity to practice my German comprehension, yet probably appreciate the subtitles even more!

[Joachim Schmidt]

Thank you Steve! Yes, this interview provides a lot of background information to the topic. In two weeks a classic DEFA East Germany homemovie will be published. This will be a cartoon without any dialogue, so no language barrier at all