Presentation of a commited State Party secretary at the Chemicals Combine in Buna. A former miner and small farmer rises to a leading political position.
Böttcher made his graduation film about young people who had become delinquent in a youth work yard in Thuringia. Already here a striking feature of his later films becomes apparent: Jürgen Böttcher gives his protagonists a lot of space; he approaches them without prejudice, empathetically and...
A cinematic visit to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The camera usually observes the visitors and paints their views on scenes of the ensemble of figures. The amazement at the beauty and grace of the antique sculptures is reflected in the faces of the viewers and emotion is palpable. The visitors...
Documentary accompanies the great DEFA film director and painter Jürgen Böttcher, alias Strawalde, detail through his biographical and artistic life: from his childhood as a Nazi boy, his career and his struggles in the GDR under the SED regime, to the opening of the Wall and his international...
With films including the 'rubble woman' portrait Martha, the three-part experimental film cycle Potter's Stier, Venus nach Giorgione and Frau am Klavichord, the portrait of the artist Kurzer Besuch bei Hermann Glöckner, and also the documentaries Rangierer and Die Küche, noted for their...
Sculptor Makolies is filmed working on a sculpture in the middle of a quarry in Swiss Saxony. The quarry workers go about their work around him. Both the work in the quarry and the work on the large figure in sandstone require strenght and conscientiousness. This film observers both types of work,...
History and art in Berlin's new center. Like a fossil, the Marx-Engels-Forum, a large, ambitious monument project of the GDR, adorns a central historical spot in the middle of Berlin. Boettcher's experimental documentary transforms footage he shot of the creation of this monument in the 1980s into...
Impressionistic East German documentary filmed mainly in the Georgian countryside in 1986-1987. The director, a painter, wanted to see if similar scenes to those found in the work of Georgian painter Niko Pirosmanishvili still existed there.
This documentary follows a group of women on a typical workday as they prepare meals for a dockyard in Rostock. The viewer never learns their names - there are no interviews. The women are presented simply as workers: cooking, cleaning, hauling, and serving dishes amid clanking pots and hot steam.
A shunter's job is to slow down, link, and unlink train wagons at a central station. The film documents - without any commentary - the working hours of few shunters at the shunting-station Dresden-Friedrichstadt, which was the largest such station in all of the former German Democratic Republic....
In this film about apprentices of the Rewatex laundry, Böttcher once again turns to the focal concern of almost all his films the attempt to report as truthfully and impressibly as possible on the life of workers. Böttcher takes the audience into the midst of a seemingly unknown environment only...
