Slatan Dudow’s Christine (1963/1974) and the Social Comedy of Character

Abstract

Comedy provided the Bulgarian-born East German film director Slatan Dudow with an approach to realism that was distinct from, and ran counter to, simplistic versions of socialist realism of the time and was central to his unorthodox, practical understanding of socialist political aesthetics. It is this thinking that I propose to reconstruct in this article, discussing its emergence in the montage technique of Dudow’s first film, Kuhle Wampe (1931/1932), its development in published and unpublished writings in terms of what he called the “social comedy of character” (soziale Charakterkomödie), and its enactment in his final, unfinished film, Christine (1963/1974).