DEFA Indian film
At the beginning of the 1960s, the GDR began producing DEFA Indian films . The protagonists were mostly Indians fighting against colonialism . Most of the stories take place in the later annexed territory of the USA . The term Western was frowned upon for a long time. While the Karl May films produced in the Federal Republic placed more emphasis on light entertainment, the DEFA Indian film focused more on a historically more precise implementation of the stories.
The films reversed the cliché conveyed from American and West German productions: while American westerns continued to portray the Indians for a long time as primitive savages who apparently attacked innocent white immigrants and had to reckon with just acts of revenge by the settlers or the army, and even in the West German Karl May films the fate of the indigenous people was only touched on in a simplified manner, the GDR productions told the stories from the perspective of the afflicted Indians. In the USA, it wasn't until the New Hollywood West, such as Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970) , that films came to the cinema that also showed a more realistic Indian image. However, in contrast to the DEFA Indian film, the Indians in the New Hollywood films were not the main characters.
In order to help the films to be successful, the DEFA Indian films relied on well-known and returning stars. While Pierre Brice played the leading role of the Indian Winnetou in the Karl May films , Gojko Mitić played the role of an Indian chief in almost all DEFA Indian films . The 16 DEFA films do not provide a direct coherent story. In almost every film, Gojko Mitić plays a chief from heterogeneous Indian tribes with different cultures and over a wide period of time.
Exceptions are the films Spur des Falken (1968) and White Wolves (1969), in which Mitić plays the Dakota chief Far-Spying Falcon , and Apaches (1973) and Ulzana (1974), in which he embodies the Apache chief Ulzana . Its interpretation differs significantly from the film adaptation of Robert Aldrich's No Mercy for Ulzana (1972). Mitić had his first experience with the representation of Indians in 1963/64 in the West German Karl May films Old Shatterhand , Winnetou Part 2 and Unter Vultures .
The content was not limited to the stories of individual Indian figures, but also dealt with topics such as the attempt to live together peacefully with the whites ( Osceola ) or life in the reservation ( fatal error ).
DEFA Indian films
DEFA group "Red Circle":
- 1966: The Sons of the Great Bear , based on the novel The Sons of the Great Bear
- 1967: Chingachgook, the big snake
- 1968: Trail of the Falcon
- 1969: White Wolves
- 1970: fatal error
- 1971: Osceola
- 1972: Tecumseh
- 1973: Apaches
- 1974: Ulzana
- 1974: Kit & Co - a western comedy produced by the same team without any noteworthy appearances by Indians
- 1975: blood brothers
- 1977: Severino
DEFA group "Johannisthal":
- 1979: Blue Bird
- 1981: Sing, Cowboy, sing - Western comedy without Indians
- 1983: The Scout
- 1985: Atkins - not an Indian as a central figure, but as an important person
literature
- Frank-Burkhard Habel : Gojko Mitic, Mustangs, torture stakes. The DEFA Indian films. The big book for fans , Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-89602-120-6 .
- Friedrich von Borries , Jens-Uwe Fischer: Socialist Cowboys. The Wild West of East Germany , Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-12528-1 .
- Thomas Kramer : Heiner Müller on the torture stake. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2006. ISBN 3-89528-548-X .
- Henning Engelke / Simon Kopp: The Western in the East. Genre, temporality and authenticity in DEFA and Hollywood westerns , in: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 1 (2004), pp. 195–213.
- Stefan Wogawa: The Sons of the Great Bear & Co. Lexicon of GDR Indian Films , THK, Arnstadt 2018, ISBN 978-3-945068-13-7 .
Web links
- Native Americana in German Cinema and Culture by Andrei Znamenski
- Online exhibition on the DEFA Indian film by the DEFA Foundation (text and design: Philip Zengel)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Fritsch, Peter: Body images and staging in the DEFA Indian films The Sons of the Great Bear (1966), Spur des Falken (1968) and Ulzana (1974) . In: Society for Folklore (Ed.): "Cowboy & Indianer - Made in Germany" . Journal of Folklore in Rhineland-Palatinate, No. 31 , p. 164-169 .