Between 1946 and 1990, the only production company in the German Democratic Republic was the astoundingly prolific DEFA (Deutsche-Film Aktiengesellschaft). Based in Potsdam at Filmstudio Babelsberg, where the legendary production company UFA had made films throughout the Weimar and Nazi periods, DEFA made it its mission to reclaim the studio from its fascist past. In addition to numerous biopics of illustrious figures in the history of German class struggle, from Martin Luther to Ernst Thälmann, the studio also produced a series of Westerns, known locally as Indianerfilme due to their principle of portraying Native Americans as the heroes in a centuries long struggle against Euroamerican colonial rule. There were twelve such films, all produced between 1965 and 1983, and shot in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the USSR, and Cuba. Most of them were produced by the Arbeitsgruppe Roter Kreis, a collective that included directors Josef Mach, Richard Groschopp, and Gottfried Kolditz, who are responsible for the three titles in this series: THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR (1965), CHINGACHGOOK: THE GREAT SNAKE (1967) and APACHES (1973).

The history of portrayals of Native Americans in cinema does not give much cause for pride. James Fenimore Cooper established the canon of Native American stereotypes in his 1823-1841 series of frontier novels, and Hollywood adopted them wholesale for the classic “taming of the frontier” storylines of its Westerns. From the 1920 adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans onward, through 1956’s THE SEARCHERS all the way to the 2013 remake of THE LONE RANGER, starring Johnny Depp as Tonto—complete with mystical inclinations, reduced grammar, and an impenetrably impassive demeanor—the image of the mysterious and vicious yet sage and holistic Indian has thrived in Hollywood. DEFA’s Indianerfilme are certainly not free of stereotypes (especially in the case of the white settlers, who comprise a largely undifferentiated mass of sweaty, sunburned, whisky-guzzling racists), but their portrayal of various American Indian tribes are well-researched and sympathetic. Whereas American films tend to liberally mix various aspects of the dress, dwellings, and rituals of widely differing tribal cultures into completely invented tribal identities, the East German Westerns each focused on a different tribe—the Delaware, the Dakota, and the Apache in the case of the three films in this series.

American Indian scholar and activist Ward Churchill has pointed out that one of the ways in which Western narratives achieve their reduction and flattening of the history and contemporary reality of Native Americans has been by restricting the period and geographical area they cover to the Great Plains between roughly 1825 and 1880. DEFA’s Indianerfilme sometimes break away from this mold, but most often fit into its chronological bracket. THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR takes place in 1876 and APACHES in 1837, but CHINGACHGOOK: THE GREAT SNAKE takes place significantly earlier, in 1740. The only film out of the three to portray Plains Indians is THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR, while the other two take place in New Mexico and the Northeast. Undermining the East Germans’ achievement somewhat is the fact that these films still fit well into the established mold of portraying Native American life only in relation to the Euroamerican presence, never granting them a pre-colonial existence.

In much the same way that the Revisionist Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, and Arthur Penn were Hollywood’s autocritique of its own conventions, the Indianerfilme were a response both to Hollywood and to West Germany’s brand of the Western. Hugely popular in the 60s, these films were based on Karl May’s novels, which themselves constituted a cultural legacy shared by both the East and the West. Gerd Gemünden has pointed out that the Indianerfilme themselves adopt the “noble savage” stereotype relied on by May, and that their critique of primitive accumulation stems from May’s romantic anticapitalism. This shared legacy is one of the things that points to a dialogue between East and West German cinema—one that is too often dismissed based on the perceived isolation and ideological blindness of East German culture. Eastern and Western productions often used the same Yugoslavian locations and extras, and East German audiences could see West German Westerns by traveling to Prague. The Indianerfilme have even been described as the East German equivalent of the New German Cinema, insofar as they were a reappropriation of a popular prewar form that had until then been used for reactionary or conservative purposes. Much in the same way, then, that Fassbinder adopted the melodrama to remove provocative themes from the exclusive purview of a difficult, rarefied, and elitist art cinema, so the Indianerfilme demonstrated that an effective critique of the logic of capital can be mounted through a form that is engaging, heroic, and naïve. A dramaturg at DEFA, Günter Karl, said that even though the Indianerfilme had to set themselves apart from capitalist films of the same genre, they would have to “use at least part of the elements that make this genre so effective, elements which are not devoid of a certain attraction and—as far as the Indians are concerned—a certain romanticism.”

With this series, Spectacle hopes to contribute to an understanding of the Indianerfilm as a form of radical cinema that—despite having been financed by a massive bureaucratic state—articulates a critique of industrialization and the myth of “progress” in general, whether in their capitalist or socialist form. By programming further series of East German films with the help of the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst, Spectacle will continue to battle against Western triumphalist notions of Eastern Bloc culture as more ideologically determined than its liberal capitalist counterpart.

Special thanks to the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR
a.k.a. Die Söhne der großen Bärin
Dir. Josef Mach, 1966
German Democratic Republic, 92 min.
In German with English Subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 30 – 7:30 PM

Opening on the Great Plains in 1874, THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR is the only of the three films to take place within the temporal-spatial framework of the “traditional” Western, with the U.S. government encroaching on the lands of the Dakota people. After gold is discovered to be in the possession of Mattotaupa, the chief of the Bear Clan, the unscrupulous settler Red Fox (not of Sanford and Son fame) murders him for refusing to reveal its source. His son, Tokei-Ihto (played by the prolific Gojko Mitić), then launches a series of skirmishes against the white settlers, which culminates in a proposal of negotiation from the local authorities. With the guarantee of diplomatic immunity, Tokei-Ihto agrees to meet with them. Though guaranteed their ancestral lands by treaty, the local government proposes to relocate the Bear Clan (of the Dakota tribe) to a barely arable stretch of land within a reservation. After rejecting these new treaty terms, he is imprisoned and his clan is attacked and forcibly relocated. After escaping from custody, with the knowledge of what treaties mean to the white man, Tokei-Ihto then leads what remains of his clan north, to the fertile areas beyond the Missouri.

In a speech, delivered during a 1998 screening of the film in Seattle, Ojibway tribe elder Richard Restoule said, “After everything that has been done to my people, also through bad films, it is good to know that already 30 years ago, people in East Germany began to think seriously how to do things differently.”

CHINGACHGOOK: THE GREAT SNAKE
a.k.a. Chingachgook, die große Schlange
Dir. Richard Groschopp, 1967
German Democratic Republic, 86 min.
In German with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 6 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 25 – 10:00 PM

Based on The Deerslayer, the last installment in the frontier adventure pentalogy that James Fenimore Cooper wrote between 1827 and 1841, CHINGACHGOOK: THE GREAT SNAKE once again showcases the talents of Gojko Mitić, the Serbian phenomenon who conquered the collective heart of East Germany with his chiseled looks, his athletic physique, and his moral rectitude. The son of a Yugoslavian partisan who fought against Hitler’s troops, Mitić had already acted in some West German Karl May adaptations before moving to the East. Cinema professionals moving from the West to the East was rare enough, and with his antifascist lineage, Mitić had the makings of a great popular idol. Like the chieftains he played, Mitić was also a staunch teetotaler. As a dedicated athlete, he didn’t have to be told about the corrupting effects of European alcohol on the Native Americans to publicly renounce it. As Gerd Gemünden puts it, Mitić was “a role model for children, the dream of teenage girls, … and model citizen.”

CHINGACHGOOK takes place in the years leading up to the French and Indian War of 1854-1863, when the Delaware tribe was allied with the English against the French and the Hurons. Chingachgook, “the last of the Mohicans” (Cooper’s Mohicans are a mixture of Mahican and Mohegan influences), has saved the life of the chief of the Delawares, and has been promised his daughter’s hand in marriage. Following a not-unheard-of narrative device, Chingachgook’s betrothed is kidnapped by the Hurons, and he swiftly slings his rifle over his shoulder and sets off in a canoe. Over the course of his adventure, Chingachgook discovers that allegiance with any of the European powers is foolish, since they all view the Indians as an obstacle to territorial control and stand to profit greatly from their extermination. After British troops attack a Huron encampment, Chingachgook makes it his task to convince the Huron leadership that their true, shared enemy is the European invader.

Not only does CHINGACHGOOK: THE GREAT SNAKE give us the satisfaction of seeing a slew of arrogant, bewigged lobsterbacks get the civilization knocked out of them with rifle butts, but it also subverts European domination on a formal level by relegating James Fenimore Cooper’s white protagonist, Leatherstocking, to Chingachgook’s sidekick, reversing the original power relation between them.

APACHES
a.k.a. Apachen, a.k.a. Apachen: Blutige Rache
Dir. Gottfried Kolditz, 1973
German Democratic Republic, 94 min.
In German with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 10 – 5:00 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 7:30 PM

Gojko Mitić returns as Apache chieftain Ulzana, bent on “bloody revenge” (as suggested by the German DVD title) against a band of white industrialists and their henchmen. Although the events of the film suggest that Mitić’s character is actually based on Mimbreño chief Mangas Coloradas, Ulzana was also a famous chieftain who led raids through New Mexico and Arizona in the 1880s, famously portrayed in Robert Aldrich’s unsympathetic (i.e. “complex”) 1972 Revisionist Western, ULZANA’S RAID.

Whereas the action of THE SONS OF GREAT BEAR starts with the discovery of gold, this time, the coveted mineral is copper. Near Santa Rita, New Mexico, the local Mimbreños have enter into a contract with a Mexican mining company that promises them continued use of their hunting grounds in exchange for safe passage for the company’s convoys. This arrangement has already robbed the band of its self-determination (“Remember the tales of life before the White Man? We lived well without relief flour”), and in any case it can’t last. An American mining company wants in on the profits, and the Mexican government has put a price on Apache scalps: $100 for a brave, $50 for a squaw, and $25 for a child. The “White Eyes” arrive in Santa Rita to arrange the total subjugation of the Apaches with the help of the local administration. As the mining company’s engineer explains to Santa Rita’s meek collaborationist sheriff, “There is no doubt that the directors want more copper and fewer Apaches.” The atrocity that sets Ulzana and his band on the warpath takes place during the annual distribution of relief flour, when 400 Mimbreños are collected in the town square. An army cannon is suddenly uncovered and fired into their midst and the survivors are systematically massacred by grinning, whisky-swigging Americans who callously tally up their scalp totals. Ulzana witnesses this bloodshed and, narrowly escaping, swears to his companion, “The revenge of the Apaches is as the course of the sun.”

APACHES is satisfying both as a tale of indigenous vengeance against an imperialist invader and as a well-crafted adventure film. Mitić’s horseback acrobatics and dextrous archery are a delight to behold, and the Mimbreños’ lamentations over their lost way of life are sure to make all but the most hardened hearts yearn for a life before—or after—capitalism.

Spectacle is thrilled to present four films by inimitable director Paul Morrissey: the trilogy consisting of FLESH, TRASH, and HEAT, and the superb WOMEN IN REVOLT.

Morrissey assembled a cast of fascinating New York personalities including Joe Dallesandro, transgender icons Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn, Andrea Feldman and Jane Forth and proceeded to shatter bourgeois sensibilities with unrestrained sex, nudity, and drug use, free-floating expressions of gender and sexuality and spot-on satirization of high society, among other things. Yet these films are no mere provocation. Writing, directing, photographing and editing the films himself with small budgets, Morrissey transposed his visions into anarchic, free-wheeling works of genius.

Morrissey’s approach to filmmaking involved shooting piecemeal over time, on weekends or at night, and coming up with new scenarios as he went along. There is improvisation within scenes among the actors, but the fact that Morrissey himself improvised his own writing process, using what he’d just filmed to inform the material he would shoot next, resulted in films which are remarkably alive, full of chaos, humor and “reality”. His actors play themselves (or their public personas), and he shapes the loose, episodic material into works which possess their own internal cohesion and bear his remarkable style. Morrissey succeeds in doing much more than others who merely captured or regurgitated an idealized cultural milieu; he created truly great and fitting art from the downtown underground scene itself.

FLESH
Dir. Paul Morrissey, 1968
USA, 105 min.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 7 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 22 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 31 – 5:00 PM

Featuring Joe Dallesandro, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Patti D’Arbanville and Geri Miller.

In FLESH, the first of Paul Morrissey’s trilogy which also includes Trash and Heat, Joe Dallesandro is roused out of bed to go and earn money prostituting himself, so that his wife can pay for her girlfriend’s abortion. He visits clients, teaches a new guy the ropes and feeds his (real life) baby crackers on the floor, completely naked, of course. Coming full circle, he ends up back in his bed trying to get some sleep while his wife and her girlfriend have sex.

The first several minutes of FLESH feature Joe Dallesandro sleeping, and they’re captivating. Dallesandro (Little Joe never once gave it away. Everybody had to pay and pay…) became a sex symbol for the gay and straight alike, with Vincent Canby writing, “His physique is so magnificently shaped that men as well as women become disconnected at the sight of him.”

TRASH
Dir. Paul Morrissey, 1970
USA, 110 min.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 7 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 17 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10:00 PM

Featuring Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn, Andrea Feldman and Geri Miller.

In TRASH, the second film in Paul Morrissey’s trilogy, Joe Dallesandro is a heroin addict and burglar who can’t get it up thanks to junk. Holly Woodlawn makes her screen debut as Joe’s sexually-frustrated girlfriend/roommate. Woodlawn collects garbage for their ratty basement room in the Lower East Side, tries to get welfare by faking a pregnancy and preys on a teenaged boy from the suburbs who stops in to buy some grass. Meanwhile, Joe breaks into Jane Forth’s upscale apartment and surprises her there, and she can’t wait to see a real live junkie shoot up.

Upon the release of TRASH, George Cukor (a Lower East Side native) petitioned the Academy to formally nominate Holly Woodlawn for best actress for her role in the film. Needless to say, this went nowhere.

Warning: contains scenes of actual IV drug use (and simulated overdose).

HEAT
Dir. Paul Morrissey, 1972
USA, 102 min.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 1 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 23 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 28 – 7:30 PM

Featuring Joe Dallesandro, Sylvia Miles and Andrea Feldman. With music by John Cale.

For the third film in Morrissey’s trilogy, the filmmaker takes his coterie to Los Angeles for a sun-drenched parody of SUNSET BOULEVARD by way of Avenue B. Joe Dallesandro plays a former child star who lives in an LA motel and hustles to get by, pleasuring his repulsive landlady in exchange for a rent discount. Chain-smoking Sylvia Miles is a past-her-prime star with four ex-husbands and a big house in the hills who would love to keep Joe as her pet, except that her crazy daughter (Andrea Feldman) keeps getting in the way.

Feldman’s character is erratic and emotionally volatile, a role for which she was unfortunately well-suited. After having a smaller role in TRASH, she both anticipated and dreaded the fame she expected would follow the release of HEAT. Three weeks before the film’s premiere, she summoned a group of friends and ex-boyfriends to the living room of her parents’ 14th floor apartment and then proceeded to jump out the window in what she called her “final starring role.”

WOMEN IN REVOLT
Dir. Paul Morrissey, 1971
USA, 97 min.

MONDAY, AUGUST 4 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 14 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 23 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 28 – 10:00 PM

Featuring Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Jane Forth. With music by John Cale.

What do you mean “Come down off the trapeze and into the sawdust”? That’s circus talk.

Three of the most indelible transgender icons of all time play militant feminists in this incredible film which is so much more than parody. Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn have had it with men and their foul ways, so they join a militant feminist organization called PIG (Politically Involved Girls). Candy Darling is a wealthy socialite from Park Avenue (or Long Island – they can’t keep it straight) who they draw into the group to give it legitimacy, but it turns out that she’s having an incestuous relationship with her brother. Regardless, the three quickly become enemies: “I could just plunge a knife right into her back.” “Oh no, it’s too bloody!” “Well, I could do it and just not look.” Holly Woodlawn becomes a Bowery bum and Jackie Curtis can’t stop hiring male prostitutes, while Candy becomes a famous actress: “I’m sick of incest and lesbianism. I’m ready for Hollywood.”

After WOMEN IN REVOLT previewed on 59th Street, it was protested by a feminist organization, who mistook the film for a caricature of feminism rather than a caricature of the popular discourse around feminism, not to mention a caricature of traditional gender roles. Candy Darling reportedly declared, “Who do these dykes think they are anyway? Well, I just hope they all read Vincent Canby’s review in today’s Times. He said I look like a cross between Kim Novak and Pat Nixon. It’s true – I do have Pat Nixon’s nose.”

Trigger Warning: This film contains depictions of sexual assault.

THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN
a.k.a. Die linkshändige Frau
Dir. Peter Handke, 1978
West Germany, 119 min.
In German and French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM

Peter Handke, one of the most celebrated Austrian writers of the post-war generation, was primarily a playwright and a novelist, but he also tried his luck in the cinema. Between 1971 and 1992 he directed four feature films and worked on the screenplays for THE GOALIE’S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK (1972), THE WRONG MOVE (1975), and WINGS OF DESIRE (1987), all for Wim Wenders to direct. THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN is Handke’s second self-adaptation, this time directed by himself and produced by Wenders.

Despite boasting an international cast, THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN is an understated and unadorned portrayal of a single mother’s quotidian life, comparable in its sensibility to some of the work of Margarethe von Trotta, Helke Sander, and Helma Sanders-Brahms. Edith Clever (the star of Eric Rohmer’s Kleist adaptation, The Marquise of O) plays Marianne, a German living in Paris with her young son, Stefan. Her husband Bruno Ganz (WINGS OF DESIRE, THE AMERICAN FRIEND, DOWNFALL) returns from Helsinki, where he has spent several months and learned only one word in Finnish: olut (‘beer’). After a night of luxurious squandering in a hotel restaurant—where Bruno admires the centuries-old feudal tradition that headwaiter Michael Lonsdale (Truffaut’s STOLEN KISSES, Marcel Hanoun’s SPRING) represents—Marianne tells Bruno they should separate. The film is thus framed as a chronicle of this new turn in Marianne’s life: she resumes working as a translator, oscillates between resentment and tenderness toward her son, dreads Bruno’s increasingly aggressive visits, and becomes closer with Franziska, a German expatriate elementary school teacher played by Angela Winkler (Schlöndorff’s THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM).

Like the films of another part-time-cinéaste author, Marguerite Duras, THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN is characterized by very deliberate pacing and precise, measured dialogue. But unlike Duras, Handke’s film is punctuated with sight gags, like Marianne in high heels walking on stilts in her living room and a cameo by a europunk Gérard Depardieu. There is also a walk-on part for Rüdiger Vogler (Wenders’ ALICE IN THE CITIES, von Trotta’s THE GERMAN SISTERS) as a milquetoast actor. In all its sparseness, THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN is an exceptionally moving film about escaping from oppressive relationships, reactivating stagnating ones, and becoming open to new ones.

LUMINOUS PROCURESS
Dir. Steven Arnold, 1971
USA, 73 min.

THURSDAY, JULY 3 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 25 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 30 – 10:00 PM

Two young men wander into a building on the shore, where they have heard they can see the most elaborate sexual fantasies performed, like a smutty Locus Solus, in Steven Arnold’s definitely West Coast take on the psychedelic film as practiced by Jack Smith, Ira Cohen and Kenneth Anger. Meandering among a series of decadent tableaux, deeper and deeper into a world where identities and sexualities merge and split, well performed by none other than the Cockettes and scored by synth guru Warner Jepson, until the two young men finally realize they’re not just spectators, they’re to become the new additions. Trying to sum it up as a plot, however, misses the point of a film like this: it’s a phantasmagorical vision, a Symbolist paean, taking inspiration from butoh theater to Erich Von Stroheim to form a shabbily glamorous vision.

ELEVATOR GIRLS IN BONDAGE
Dir. Michael Kalmen, 1972
USA, 56 min.

THURSDAY, JULY 3 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 16 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 30 – 7:30 PM

Cockettes fans will find many similarities between Elevator Girls In Bondage and the live Cockettes shows of the late 60s and early seventies, combining psychedelia, slapstick and political critique into a film both of its time and unlike anything else.

Starring Spectacle favorite Rumi Missabu along with fellow Cockettes Pristine Condition, Hibiscus and Miss Harlow, the film gleefully subverts and exploits genre tropes, Marxist rhetoric and folks songs as the employees of a hotel decide to get revenge against poor wages and mistreatment as led by elevator girl Maxine (Missabu).

Fans of 70s underground cinema, queer cinema in general, and goofy satire mixed with sharp critique will definitely want to come out and see it for themselves.