5 Music Video Clips from the GDR – Part 1: Officially-Supported Acts

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The music video is generally perceived as a phenomenon originated by capitalist, «Western» music industries. However, song or track-based short films, music clips avant la lettre, were also commonplace in socialist media ecosystems. Parallel to the West, state-run labels like Supraphon in Czechoslovakia and Amiga in the GDR commissioned musical shorts that were broadcast on television. These works used the full potential of the TV studio to enhance performances with elaborate sets, visual effects, and complex editing.

Other proto-pop promos in the GDR were produced by the documentary unit of the DEFA film studio, such as the Disco-Film series of the 1970s and 1980s. Disco-Films were generally devoted to a single act, interspersing the performance or concept video format with interviews, backstage footage, and vox pops from fans. They were screened as short subjects in cinemas as well as in discotheques.

Due to their country’s proximity to the Federal Republic of Germany, most GDR citizens received TV signals from the West (except in the region around Dresden, nicknamed «The Valley of the Clueless»). Thus, a significant part of the GDR population tuned into shows on West German public TV, including popular music programs, which broadcast clip-like presentations of hits of the day. Starting in the early 1980s, actual music videos became staples on shows like Ronny’s Pop Show and Formel Eins, West Germany’s own Top of the Pops, which was that country’s main outlet for music videos until MTV Europe became available on cable television in 1987.

Although the GDR authorities actively discouraged its citizens from watching «West-Television», even destroying antennae and jamming signals, TV executives were also acutely aware that they weren’t operating in a vacuum. (The theory that watching West German TV was covertly tolerated, as an escapist space to prevent the population’s dissatisfaction from reaching critical mass, is a topic for more in-depth research.) Thus, the influence of MTV-friendly music videos became stronger on GDR pop programming throughout the 1980s. Song-based shorts produced for popular state-supported acts lost the distinct Disco-Film style and became more formulaic. Music videos by homegrown acts (and even the occasional clip from the West) were regularly broadcast on shows like Bong, Rund and Klik. Starting in late 1989, Elf 99, the GDR’s last youth-oriented TV program, showed clips and imaginative «live studio performances» with now popular semi-underground acts, along with reports on controversial issues and frank coverage of the protests leading to the dissolution of the socialist state.

Outside the official media ecosystem, there was a close-knit underground film scene, working largely with Super 8 cameras (and the rare 16mm stock cribbed from film school or documentary shoots). Like other art scenes around the world in the late 1970s and 1980s, many filmmakers had strong ties to punk, blues (an oppositional subculture in the GDR), post-punk or experimental musicians, or themselves dabbled in several art forms simultaneously, creating multidisciplinary, intermedia works. As this artistic practice greatly influenced the development of music video in general, it’s worth taking a closer look at experimental music-based films from the GDR.

Many signature works from both officially-supported and underground contexts are not available on YouTube or Vimeo. These films are held in archives – of the DEFA studio, of AMIGA records, an archive devoted to the Super 8 underground, or those of individual filmmakers or musicians – which make their respective collections available mainly for research and carefully-curated DVD or VOD releases, of which not that much has found its way to the usual video platforms.

The following five videos were produced and disseminated within official media channels of the GDR: the documentary unit of the state-run DEFA film studio, public TV shows, or the recording label Amiga, and span the 1970s to shortly after the Fall of the Wall.

Music: Omega
Track: «Die Omegas» (GDR, 1976)
Dirs: Dieter Raue, Jürgen Rümmel (DEFA Documentary Film Studio)

An early Disco-film devoted to Hungarian hard rock/prog band Omega, hugely popular in the GDR and heavily promoted, as many acts from other socialist countries were. Omega also had significant fan bases in West Germany and the U.K. This film offers the typical Disco-Film mixture of oh-so funny vox pops, band interviews (in German, like some of the song lyrics), and performance.

Artist: City
Track: «Am Fenster» (GDR, 1978)
Dir: Otto Sacher (DEFA Animation Film Studio)

An animated short accompanying City’s worldwide hit, which earned the band gold records in West Germany and Greece. City masterfully dog-whistled their lyric leitmotifs of yearning and wanderlust (i.e. outside the GDR) and thus enjoyed state support and subcultural cred in equal measure – front man Toni Krahl was arrested for distributing leaflets protesting the Soviet-bloc occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and continued to speak out, spearheading a resolution of rock musicians in support of the Neues Forum civil rights group in the autumn of 1989. This short film’s circular structure and symbolic imagery evoke a dead-end situation and the desire to escape.

Artist: Silly
Track: «Tanzt keiner Boogie» (GDR, 1981)
Dir: Christian Klemke (DEFA Documentary Film Studio)

One of the last Disco-Films, featuring the pop-rockers Silly. Front woman Tamara Danz, ready to rock in a ballet school, laments why no one else wants to boogie, intercut with found-footage of ballroom dancing through the ages. Later, Silly became the voice of the GDR’s «lost generation», thanks to moody, metaphor-laden lyrics by Danz and rock bard Gerhard Gundermann (whose young adulthood collaboration with the Stasi and unflinching analysis of betrayed socialist ideals were somehow two sides of the same coin).

Artist: Rockhaus
Track: «Mich zu lieben» (GDR, 1988)

Rockhaus began life in the early 1980s as a funky new wave outfit (credited with one of the first German-language rap songs, «Disco in der U-Bahn»), then went supernova later in the decade with a harder rocking style. This video for the chart-topping song (determined by listener requests and airplay), is a latter-day plea of understanding for the «wayward» East Berlin punks – the song’s lyrics decry unloving parenting as the root cause of a youth subculture that by then was no longer as persecuted as it was five years earlier.

Artist: Petra Ziegler
Track: «Das Eis taut» (GDR, 1989)

Popular pop-rocker Ziegler documents in this clip the opening of the Berlin Wall and the sense of relief and hope on its Eastern side; the song title means «the ice is thawing».

Biography

Natalie Gravenor is a Berlin-based festival organizer (Soundwatch Music Film Festival), curator, and cultural worker. Her focus topics are music and audiovisual media, urban development, and underground and experimental film in Central and Eastern Europe. Follow her on LinkedIn.

Links

Sophie Grobler: «Our Homeland» (Norient)

Natalie Gravenor: « 5 Music Video Clips from the GDR – Part 2: Underground Bands » (Norient)

Published on July 29, 2021

Last updated on August 18, 2021

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5 Music Video Clips from the GDR – Part 2: Underground Bands

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by Natalie Gravenor

With the GDR’s almost year-long demise in 1989/90, the official mediascape became open to music videos by bands which, a few years prior, would have enjoyed only limited visibility, or rather audibility (primarily via the GDR radio’s indie music show and illegal or semi-legal gigs). These five music-based shorts explore the possibilities of marrying sound and vision and are artefacts of the transition period.

Artist: AG. Geige
Track: «Zeychen & Wunder» (GDR, 1989)
Dir: AG. Geige

A leading light of the electronic tape music scene in Karl-Marx-Stadt (the 1953–1990 name of Saxonian city Chemnitz), AG. Geige took pages from the gesamtkunstwerk playbooks of Western counterparts such as The Residents and Der Plan by integrating absurdly humorous costumes and visuals (on 8mm and 16mm) into their performances. The band cultivated a respectable audience, despite eschewing application for a public performance permit – unusually lenient local cultural authorities allowed them to play anyway, and the punk/new wave show Parocktikum on state youth radio DT-64 featured AG. Geige regularly. In «Zeychen & Wunder» (translatable as «signs and wonders»), various communist, capitalist, and religious symbols flash, intercut with performance footage.

Artist: Electric B
Track: «In My Neighborhood» (GDR, 1990)
Dir: Gabor Steisinger

This short’s director, Gabor Steisinger, worked at the DEFA Studio’s animation unit in Dresden and was part of that citys hip hop scene. «In My Neighborhood», featuring hip hop by Electric B, combines reportage about life in the hood with graffiti-inspired animation.

Artist: Herbst in Peking
Track: «Movie Stops Tomorrow» (GDR 1990)
Dir: Petra Tschörtner

The indie rock (later more dub, psychedelic, and electronic) Herbst in Peking was originally named after a Boris Vian novel (Autumn in Peking), but fell afoul with authorities in the aftermath of the June 1989 crackdown against Chinese pro-democracy protesters, when at a concert, singer Rex Joswig called for a moment of silence to honor the victims. HiP (the band’s ironic acronym) dropped the anthemic «Bakschischrepublik» in mid-1989, decrying the GDR’s decrepit gerontocracy. However, that song’s most widely available music video-like rendition is an April 1990 performance on Elf 99, with haphazardly hung portraits of Erich Honecker, who by then was long gone, as was the Socialist Unity Party (the first free elections in March brought the conservative Christian Democrats into power, forming the last GDR government before accession to West Germany).

More interesting is this vignette in Berlin: Prenzlauer Berg, Petra Tschörtner’s definitive documentary about East Berlin alternative culture in the temporary autonomous zone between the Fall of the Wall and the introduction of West German currency. The music video-like segment sees the band performing a rare English-language song (a comment about conforming to a newly privatized, globalized music market?) near the former border strip. The sequence ends with footage of protests against rampant capitalism and neo-fascism, which many progressives feared reunification would yield.

Artist: Sandow
Track: «Invasion» (GDR, 1989)
Dir: Monika Groth

Sandow from Cottbus, southeast of Berlin, were barely out of their teens when they dropped «Born in the GDR», for which the 1988 East Berlin concert of you-know-who was less the inspiration than the perceived hypocrisy of the authorities who had invited the Boss to curry favor with East German youth. Too little, too late – members of Sandow and many contemporaries had already mentally (and physically) checked out.

Made in the transition year 1989, «Invasion» is likely the band’s first «proper» music video. While it sometimes falls prey to MTV-style excesses of surrealism for its own sake, «Invasion» manages to create moments of genuine dread, not to mention the appearance of masks two decades before the Anonymous and Occupy movements.

Artist: Feeling B
Track: «Langeweile» (GDR, 1980s/2007)

Feeling B were pillars of the East Berlin underground. Singer Aljoscha Rompe also milked the privileges of a Swiss passport (from his biological father) and his mother’s and stepfather’s party connections. Feeling B and Rompe in particular supported the 1980s East Berlin punk and post punk scenes, which he found more creative than what he was able to witness on the other side of the Wall. The anarchic, cheerfully hedonistic and prankishly non-conformist band was eventually granted an amateur public performance permit. In 1988 they released tracks on state label Amiga and in 1990 a debut album followed, after a year of red tape. Rompe revved up his political activism in 1989/90, championing a more democratic GDR as well as squatting, pirate radio, and communal living. Feeling B split in 1993, with Rompe exploring «medieval» indie rock and remaining politically active (until his death in 2000), while other members formed Rammstein.

This music video (song title means «boredom»), featuring solely lo-fi 1980s and 1990s footage of the band, accompanied the 2007 CD Grün & Blau with previously unreleased 1980s recordings alongside well-known songs.

Biography

Natalie Gravenor is a Berlin-based festival organizer (Soundwatch Music Film Festival), curator, and cultural worker. Her focus topics are music and audiovisual media, urban development, and underground and experimental film in Central and Eastern Europe. Follow her on LinkedIn.

Links

Sophie Grobler: «Our Homeland» (Norient)

Natalie Gravenor: «5 Music Video Clips from the GDR – Part 1: Officially-supported Acts» (Norient)

Published on August 05, 2021

Last updated on August 18, 2021

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5 Video Clips from Argentina: Female Empowerment

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by Ailín Grad

The pandemic-driven lockdowns have worsened the conditions for those who share a household with abusers. Since March 2020, there have been 368 femicides in Argentina and a lot of transfemicides that are not as accurately recorded, making the situation even worse. What’s most disturbing, though, is that in a lot of cases the murderers had already been reported to the police by the victim, several times.

What does this say about the ability of institutions and politicians to listen? It would seem as if our system was deaf, but I don’t consider that to be true; we cannot underestimate the meaning of silence coming from the people who should give an answer and protect us. So, as we say here, «my friends take care of me, not the police». That’s why I wrote about the lyrics and sometimes the video's visuals & context, but not about what's explored sonically. I wonder if there are aspects that peak YOUR ear, that draw your attention. Thanks for listening.

Music: Las tesis
Track: «Un violador en tu camino» («A Rapist in Your Path») (Chile, 2019)

Las tesis is a collective of four women from Valparaíso, Chile. Their goal as activists is to put feminist agendas and theories into action, to use them as forms of protest in the streets. This chant, or shall I say anthem, as it has become, is a powerful work that has been performed all over the globe, going viral and showing the potency of taking action in public space. It’s taken from the theories of Argentinian anthropologist Rita Segato, which tackle the structural violence of patriarchal capitalism. It was first conducted in Chile in 2019, amidst a wave of protests against the right wing government. The lyrics go:

Patriarchy is our judge
That imprisons us at birth
And our punishment
Is the violence you DON’T see
Patriarchy is our judge
That imprisons us at birth
And our punishment
Is the violence you CAN see
It’s femicide.
Impunity for my killer.
It’s our disappearance.
It’s rape!
And it’s not my fault, not where I was, not how I dressed.

Music: Benjamín Felice
Track: «Exhumo Pun» (Argentina, 2020)

Benjamín Felice is an artist from Tucumán, Argentina. In this piece he explores the ideas of denial, speculation, and fallacies in art and death using an HD walkthrough. This piece is made up of uncertain fragments of a speech that seek to address our most primordial ghosts and to falsify the veracity of objects and images. These ghosts, in my opinion, are connected by simple yet omnipresent experiences: fear of death, of the dark, of loneliness, of the violence we all come from and keep inside as a bloody witness of life and death. (Aren’t musical instruments, in their origins, sacrifices made in order to create order out of chaos? Stretched skin, bones and guts...) This walkthrough shows the power of simulation to make us experience and engage in subjects such as death, sickness, solitude, and uncertainty (the first sign we see in the walkthrough is a graphic joke: grim reaper knocking on a man’s door, saying: «Don’t worry, it’s just a sore throat»).

«Who do you really trust?», reads the first sentence with a lilac background. Can I trust the police? Can I trust my husband, my boyfriend, the judges? No, we can’t, and this I say fully convinced as a shout of anger and nonconformity, because we live with a constant death threat. The video states: «I wonder, who am I to be dead?» Let the dead travel fast and come back as a collective of angry ghosts who’ve fallen victim to these abusers and politically-endorsed murderers.

Music: AGF
Track: «Insisting to remember» (Finland, 2020)

Watch «Insisting to remember» on the website of the collective ⇋ REC-on ↭.

AGF is a feminist-activist-poet-soundartist-teacher-and-friend. Having met her was life-changing for me. We are currently working on a project together, about femicide and social injustice, 13,673 km away from each other. This piece is a tribute to the many murdered women and LGBTQ+ activists from the past years (check her investigation), people who were a potent part of working collectively to speak out and change things together: «This is my lament against the culture of silence», AGF says. Here in Argentina a femicide happens every 29 hours.

Veronica Gago, an Argentinian activist, writer, and political scientiest states in her book The feminist potency, or the desire to change everything: «(...) Listening generates proximity, where the rhythm of thinking also gives a beat to breathing and the gestures of being together». When I first read this phrase from Gago, I immediately remembered something AGF wrote for her album Commissioned Work: «Thanks for listening; listening is a political activity and is the groundwork for justice».

This amazingly simple statement blew my mind: listening is the key to start learning again how to live together. This takes me back to recent events in my country where violence was exerted upon the act listening: from 1976 to 1983, Argentina experienced the worst and most violent military coup in its history, which translated to state terrorism and the systematic «desaparicion de personas».

Imagine it’s 1977 in Argentina and the military have been in power for a year now. Clandestine torture centers are everywhere, and some are purposely not so hidden: there are doors and walls, but neighbors can hear the sounds of horror filling the silence that people have been forced to mantain in order to try to stay out of the regime’s radar. What is this if not a way of sowing fear that leaves no option but to be the recipient of what is imposed through violence? There is NO choice but to listen; a system based on acousmatic repression.

Returning to the present, we can be grateful to each and everyone who has worked so unsparingly to regain the ability to listen; choosing what to listen to and when. This gave us back the chance to listen to the unheard and silenced stories.

Music: Susy Shock y Lola Bhajan
Track: «en San Marcos Sierra» (Argentina, 2018)

Susy Shock calls herself «artista trans sudaca»; she’s a poet, writer, singer, teacher, actress, and more. Lola Bahan introduces herself: «I am an actress, writer, singer, photographer, model, what else.» Both explore the voice as an expression and intersection of subjectivity and collective activism.

These two Argentinian artists join voices to sing a folkloric chant from the Northwest of the country called «Canto con caja» («box singing»). This kind of music actually cuts across borders, since it’s a tradition from all the Andean region, which includes Bolivia, the Andes of Peru, the mountains of Ecuador, Northwestern Argentina, Northern Chile, the Andean region of Colombia, and the Andes of Venezuela. Its characteristic feature is the sound of the drum, which represents the earth, and the voice, which connects to the sky. Its melodies are not well-tempered as other Western music is, and it always carries a kind of spontaneous messiness. It’s a pre-Columbian practice that takes place mostly among women, and it’s part of a collective ritual gathering, a magical moment, a collective foundation of an order that emerges out of the ever-flowing chaotic existence of the universe.

In this video, Lola and Susy’s lyrics talk about the right to feel and share pleasure and to get rid of old religious and cultural impositions regarding love. It was filmed during the vigil of 2018, when the abortion bill was being debated in the Senate. Unfortunately, the law wasn’t sanctioned. But last year, thanks to the tireless work and protests that took place among the intersectional feminist movements, the law was finally passed and we have now expanded our rights to include the voluntary termination of pregnancy.

Music: Violeta Parra (performed by Mercedes Sosa)
Track: «Qué he sacado con quererte» (Argentina, 1993)

This video is older than the rest. Violeta Parra needs no introduction. She embodies the voice of class, feminist, and military coup resistance. She was an artist born in Chile in 1917, and her work ranges from archivism, poetry, composition, instrumental, and plastic arts.

Mercedes Sosa, who performs this beautiful song in the video, was also a key figure in our history and one of the most important figures of Argentine folklore music. She defined herself as a «cantora» rather than «cantante», although both translate as «singer» in English. That meant she was interested in not only the beauty but also with the political duty of having the potential to be heard.

She was persecuted and arrested during the military coup in Argentina, her records were forbidden, and she had to go into exile. Her music was considered subversive, a term which the military dictatorship used to name anyone who didn’t support the regime or spoke against it. Mercedes was a popular voice of resistance through her songs and she was part of the Communist Party, which was more than enough to pose a threat in the eyes of the violent, murderous authoritarian regime.

Her version of this lament inspired by Mapuchean tradition (a native culture and people from Argentina and Chile), is a beautiful intersection of Violeta Parra’s and her own sensitivity.

Biography

Ailín Grad aka Aylu designs audio spaces from Buenos Aires and is mostly known for potent psychotropic juke and footwork experiments. Aylu takes ordinary objects and sounds and pieces them together into electro-acoustic systems: slender gears feathering in complex geometries. Aylu’s works are a small system of electroacoustic pieces. Gears, geometries, instruments, and designs of a fuzzy and unexpected space. She tries to explore different materials and their textures, seeking to resignify sounds that belong to our daily listening and to the soundscapes surrounding us.