Event

The Land Beyond the Rainbow

Red Renewal: Seattle's Socialist Spring
SCMS at NWFF!

Mar 21

(Herwig Kipping, East Germany, 1991, 35mm)

New 35mm print!
Introduction by author Reinhild Steingröver!
Co-presented with DEFA, the East German Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Friday, Mar 21 at 08:00PM

In this new director's cut, renegade East German filmmaker Herwig Kipping set out to explore the roots of the socialist society that he grew up in. Consciousness about pressing social-political issues of GDR life, in his opinion, would not be raised through didactic socialist realist films, but by re-introducing the poetic element into film.

Kipping calls his approach "magical idealism," emphasizing the need to elevate visuals, metaphorical elements and poetic language over conventional narrative structures and language. Only after the collapse of the GDR regime was Kipping able to realize his script for The Land Beyond the Rainbow, which takes place in the fictional town of Stalina in 1953, and depicts a place that lies "beyond the rainbow."

Representing a radical departure from the East German cinema of the time, Kipping's influences included Buñuel, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Hölderlin, Tarkovsky and Rilke.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

Reinhild Steingröver teaches German and film studies at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester and focuses on contemporary German and Austrian film and literature. She co-edited After the Avant-garde: Engagements with Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film.