Film program in cooperation with the Filmmuseum Potsdam
Filmmuseum Potsdam © Filmmuseum Potsdam, Photo: Jörg Leopold
As part of a cooperation with DAS MINSK, the Filmmuseum Potsdam shows films accompanying the exhibition Soft Power once a month from April to July 2024. Films and documentaries look back on the GDR's textile industry, focusing on the female working world and offering insight into the Potsdamer Zirkel für künstlerische Textilgestaltung (Potsdam Circle for Artistic Textile Design).
Admission to DAS MINSK is reduced with a cinema ticket of the film series; conversely, admission to a film of the series is reduced with an exhibition ticket.
Details about the program can be found in the monthly flyer of the Filmmuseum or at www.filmmuseum-potsdam.de.
April 21, 2024, 6 pm
Für die Liebe noch zu mager?
(R: Bernhard Stephan, D: Simone von Zglinicki, Christian Steyer, Norbert Christian, GDR 1974, 83‘)
The film by Bernhard Stephan from 1974 is about 18-year-old Susanne, a skilled worker in a textile company, who has to deal with the difficulties of working life in the textile industry and the challenges in her family. The film shows her struggle to find a balance between work, family and relationships.
The scenes in the textile factory were filmed in the Leinefelde cotton mill.
Für die Liebe noch zu mager © DEFA Stiftung, Photo: Uwe Fleischer
9 Variations on a Dance Theme, Hillary Harris
May 26, 2024, 6 pm
Short and experimental film program (in total approx. 70‘)
Introduction: Lucas Wolfram (curator)
Textile plays a special role in cinematic art. The sensual, haptic experience of textile is countered by the immaterial distance of shooting film. This offers the film opportunities to view textiles differently, to understand them systemically and to question them. In this way, new cinematic and sensual approaches to textiles are encouraged and promoted. The short film program shows ten positions from over a hundred years of film history that revolve around their subject matter in different ways: in some cases, sensual, with a focus on materiality, in others subversive, with a consideration of textiles as an identity-forming, cultural or industrial system.
June 16, 2024, 6 pm
Mädchen in Wittstock (R: Volker Koepp, GDR 1975, 19‘)
Wieder in Wittstock (R: Volker Koepp, GDR 1975, 21‘)
Wittstock III (R: Volker Koepp, GDR 1978, 32‘)
Leben und Weben (Wittstock IV, R: Volker Koepp, GDR 1981, 27‘)
(in total 99‘)
In 1974, Volker Koepp filmed the small märkischen town of Wittstock an der Dosse. The publicly owned textile factory “Ernst Lück” is on the outskirts of town. The first film establishes three of the employees as protagonists, whom Koepp accompanies from their first working years in the GDR through the transition years in the 1990s. This program will screen the first four parts of the film cycle, which were made until 1981. These valuable documents tell an impressive story of how the portrayed female textile workers establish themselves in working life.
Mädchen in Wittstock © DEFA Stiftung, Michael Zausch
July 14, 2024, 6 pm
Quodlibet oder Freizeit, die wir meinen
(R: Joachim Loeb, GDR 1967, Dok., 52‘)
With introduction and guests
The film portrays leisure activities at Potsdam’s "Hans Marchwitza" cultural center in an entertaining and amusing way. The center’s working groups are introduced, like the Circle for Artistic Textile Design led by Ingeborg Bohne-Fiegert, two of whose hangings can be seen in the exhibition at DAS MINSK. A dance event and a wedding ceremony at the Kulturhaus, as well as city and park shots including streetcar rides, provide captivating interior and exterior views of the late 1960s in Potsdam.