From Everyday Life to the Crisis Ordinary : Films of Ordinary Life and the Resonance of DEFA

Abstract

This chapter examines Wolf’s Solo Sunny (1980) and Dresen’s Summer in Berlin (2005), two films that chart the transformation of ordinary life across the period of neoliberal intensification in eastern Germany. Emphasizing the transition away from—as well as the enduring influence of—DEFA and socialist realism, this chapter also attends to the affective dimensions of the neoliberal turn by focusing on women characters who figure as seismographs of political and cultural re-orientation. This chapter and the next chapter operate in tandem to analyse films that break with conventional forms of representation to signal disaffection with prevailing circumstances. I argue that this disaffection becomes retrospectively legible in the earlier films through the pointed critique of neoliberalism developed by their later intertexts.