Film mirror

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Film mirror

Area of ​​Expertise Movie magazine
language German
publishing company Henschel Publishing House (Berlin)
First edition 1954
attitude 1991
Frequency of publication every 14 days
ISSN 0015-1734
ZDB 516511-8

The film mirror was a film magazine of the GDR . It was published every 14 days from January 1954 to March 1991 by Henschel-Verlag (East) Berlin . The magazine contained reports on new national and international films , film reviews , actors and directors , reports on filming and audience letters.

history

In the post-war period after the Second World War, special magazines on the subject of film appeared in the Soviet zone of occupation . These were published with licenses from SMAD , but were otherwise relatively independent. From 1947 there was the New Film World , which initially focused primarily on international film, but later increasingly turned to DEFA films and films from the so-called popular democracies of the Eastern Bloc. Under the pretext of "retreating from the argument and lack of position" , the magazine was transferred to the SED in 1948 . From 1953 onwards, Deutsche Filmkunst , which was published until 1962, was devoted to more artistically demanding films , which saw itself as a journalistic response to the cultural-political reorganization of film.

As a result of the events in the GDR on June 17, 1953 and the politically decreed "New Course", the Central Committee of the SED decided on November 25, 1953 to publish a new German film illustrated to replace the previous Neue Filmwelt . With the film mirror , a film-cultural mass newspaper was created in 1954, which was devoted to various aspects of the subject of film. The magazine was published by Henschelverlag in East Berlin. It appeared twice a month and initially cost 0.40 marks, later the price rose to 0.70 marks. The circulation was around 300,000 copies. Due to the lack of suitable paper and printing capacity, there were initially only four fully-fledged magazines in the GDR. Even the film mirror could only appear in black and white until the end of the 1960s. It was not until the 1970s that it developed into an illustrated magazine with a high proportion of images in four-color printing .

In 1989, the Filmspiegel was one of the 24 GDR newspapers and magazines whose acceptance was cut massively by the Soviet Union's foreign trade operations . The regulation, which came into force on April 1, 1989, was a reaction to the previous ban on the Soviet magazine Sputnik in the GDR.

concept

In terms of content, the film mirror was designed as a mass cultural paper. In addition to reviews of current national and international films, there were also reports on filming, portraits of well-known actors and interviews as well as reports on film and cultural-political topics. The magazine was also popular because of a foldable A3 poster printed on the center pages , mostly with portraits of well-known film actors.

The editor-in-chief of Filmspiegel was Paul Thyret in the 1950s , then Klaus Lippert . In 1983 Helmut Lange took over this function. Long had previously worked as an editor and correspondent for the SED party newspaper Neues Deutschland and was deputy chairman of the State Committee for Television from 1970 to 1983 . However, many articles were also written by freelance authors. So wrote z. B. the journalist and TV commentator Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, known for his propaganda program The Black Channel, wrote a review of the DEFA film Marriage Matters Lorenz in 1959 . The authors of the Filmspiegel were also Heinz Kahlau , who wrote a humorous article about the shooting of the DEFA film Zar und Zimmermann for issue No. 21/1955 , Erika Richter and Henryk Goldberg, who was also deputy editor-in-chief of Filmspiegel from 1987 onwards. The freelance "GDR star photographer" Günter Linke worked as a picture author between 1968 and 1990, who photographed over 2000 actors, directors and singers.

Occasionally, reports on current cultural-political issues found their way into the magazine. For example, Friedrich-Karl Freyer published a contribution on the people of our time in Filmspiegel of May 29, 1968 . Thoughts on the aesthetic mastery of the socialist present in our film art . In 1970 the Filmspiegel editor-in-chief said frankly: "The decision for or against a film is made by [...] the viewer at the box office". In the same year a viewer was quoted as saying: “More films from capitalist foreign countries! It is well known that these fill the coffers, which cannot be said of ours. "

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Publishing magazines on the subject of film on the DEFA Foundation website , accessed on March 23, 2015
  2. ↑ a b Sascha Trältzsch, Thomas Wilke: Hot summer, cool beats: on popular music and its media representations in the GDR , Verlag Peter Lang, 2010, ISBN 9783631586099 , p. 18
  3. ^ Steffen Reichert: Transformation processes: the rebuilding of the Leipziger Volkszeitung. In: Medienwandel in Ostdeutschland, Volume 1, LIT Verlag Münster, 2002, ISBN 9783825844875 , p. 88
  4. ↑ Gabriele Baumgartner, Dieter Hebig (ed.): Biographisches Handbuch der SBZ / DDR. 1945–1990. Volume 1: Abendroth - Lyr. KG Saur, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-598-11176-2 , p. 460.
  5. ↑ Website of the Filmmuseum Potsdam ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed March 23, 2015  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.filmmuseum-potsdam.de
  6. ^ Frank Wilhelm: Literary satire in the Soviet occupation zone / GDR 1945-1961: Authors, institutional framework conditions and cultural policy guidelines. In: Poetica: Schriften zur Literaturwissenschaft, Volume 30, Verlag Kovač, 1998, ISBN 9783860647097 , p. 184
  7. ↑ Erika Richter: Romangestalten on the screen , Filmspiegel No. 8/1972, quoted in: Martina Thiele: Publizistische Controversen über den Holocaust im Film, Medien- und Kommunikationwissenschaft , Volume 1, LIT Verlag Münster, 2001, ISBN 9783825858070 , p. 245
  8. ↑ Henryk Goldberg: One of Us. In: Das Blättchen, issue 9/2009 ( online )
  9. ↑ www.deanreed.de , accessed on May 23, 2015
  10. ↑ Filmspiegel No. 18/1970. Quoted from Ina Merkel: DEFA feature films as a cultural and historical source . In: Pictures. Books. Bytes. On the mediality of everyday life, Volume 36 of the German Society for Folklore: Congress of the German Society for Folklore . Waxmann Verlag, 2009, p. 39.