'Movement is Power': Aesthetics and Politics of Motion in East German Experimental Cinema

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My proposed project aims to interrogate how experimental and avant-garde cinema fulfilled a political function within the German Democratic Republic. Specifically, I shall consider the phenomenon of motion as an aesthetic and discursive device within GDR experimental cinema. Filmmakers frequently experimented with different ways of making things move (animation, screendance, experimental soundtracks), and many pertinent political questions in the late stage of the GDR are framed through metaphors of motion, such as the progress (or stagnation) of history and memory work, bodily agency and activity as a means towards resistance, and the dichotomy of matter and motion which lies at the heart of Marxist-Leninist metaphysics. My hypothesis is that GDR experimental filmmakers used their experiments into (para)cinematic motion to frame politically subversive and polemical critiques of GDR society. This work would contribute both to Film Studies and German Studies. In Film Studies, I aim to provide a rigorous analysis of how experimental cinema is embedded in political discourse not despite, but through its formal experimentation, a model which applies to the GDR and beyond; and in German Studies, I aim to diversify current scholarship on German avant-garde culture, which contains a notable gap in consideration of East Germanexperimental cinema.