Stefan Soldovieri

German Cinema and Cinema Studies, 20th-21st Century German Literature and Cultural Studies, Cold War Culture, Popular Culture, The Future, Tactical German Studies

Remaking the Movies in German Cinemas: Art, Industry, Globalization
The project opens up a new perspective on German cinema, examining the largely unappreciated role of the remake in the history of German cinemas from the beginnings of the medium in the mid-1890s to our multi-media and global present. Considering German reprises of domestic and international precursors, foreign reworkings of German classics, and concept films that self-consciously reflect on the idea of remaking itself, I explore the different modes of remaking as historically shifting and multivalent forms of cultural recycling. The remake phenomenon highlights the tensions between art and industry that are frequently ignored in German film studies. The project’s attention to the frequently transnational valence of the remake complicates the idea of the “national” in German film culture, placing it in its proper global context.

SSHRC Project: Cold War Diversions: Inter-German Film Relations and Popular Cinema
My work on the contentious relations between the cinemas of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has focused primarily on genre films produced at the height of the cold war during the 1950s and early 1960s. The project has uncovered an unappreciated cinematic dialogue operating on narrative, formal, ideological, and material/industrial levels. My findings have helped to re-conceive what have previously been considered as the separate histories of film in East and West Germany in terms of a fundamentally linked – if frequently diverging – history of cinematic dialogue.

Managing the Movies: Censorship, Modernisation, and the GDR Film Crisis of 1965/66
The book examines the most massive instance of censorship in the history of German cinema. It offers a framework for understanding how censorship functioned under state socialism in East Germany during a critical juncture in the country’s history as modernization efforts in many areas of society met opposition from entrenched ideologues. Whereas previous studies have seen the ideological crackdown of the mid-1960s as a convulsion of totalitarian power typical of authoritarian regimes, I show that the film crisis was not merely another flashpoint of culture and politics in the GDR’s crisis-ridden history, but part and parcel of a complex and uneven process of modernisation within GDR society that affected social, economic and cultural spheres.