Collective subjectivity in 'The Children of Golzow' vs alienation in 'Western' interview documentary
Panse, Silke (2008) Collective subjectivity in 'The Children of Golzow' vs alienation in 'Western' interview documentary. In: Rethinking documentary: new perspectives, new practices. Open University Press, Buckingham, UK, pp. 67-81. ISBN 9780335221912
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This chapter is part of my ongoing research into the relationship between the protagonists of a documentary and their conceptual and material context.
The essay explores differences in approach to the documentary interview in opposing ideological systems via a case study of Winfried and Barbara Junge's The Children of Golzow (1961–2006). The longest running documentary series in film history, this chronicles the lives of the first generation brought up according to socialist ideals in the German Democratic Republic. Starting when the Berlin wall had just been erected, it follows the life-stories of a class of pupils from their first day of school. The series started as expository and observational, but over the course of 20 films, continuing after the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989, the style of filmmaking became progressively self-reflexive. With the transformation from a socialist to a capitalist system, the process of individualization extended into the filmic representation, generating biographies about individuals instead of group portraits. My chapter argues that the interviewees under socialism react differently from the interviewees who had become used to a market society and I investigate the differences in what might constitute documentary subjectivity and objectivity under both systems. I also argue that the Golzow chronicle differs intrinsically from the British television series Seven Up (1964–) to which it is often compared. Both long-term documentary projects portray their subjects in a manner converse to the apparent ideologies of their political systems. In the British series (set in a capitalist system that seeks change as necessary for market growth), change is merely represented through static interviews where the protagonists represent what happened in the last seven years; whereas the GDR serial (set in state socialism, where change, like everything else, was rigidly planned) reflected progressively more change in unstructured, observed impressions.
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