Three meetings with films by Jürgen Böttcher, accompanied by one small exhibition at the Institute of German Culture with drawings, collages and biffures by Strawalde. It is up to the public to perceive and recognize the artistic identity of Böttcher-Strawalde. Three evenings of film, one feature film, one long documentary and four short films. Six of the more than forty films directed solely by Böttcher or in collaboration with others.  Jürgen Böttcher‘s cinema is not a finished work. It is a series of pieces from a continuously interrupted, and continuously renewed, confrontation with reality – German reality, realityof the GDR in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. The disjointedness his art was condemned to by politics, is also determinant of its quality. Jürgen Böttcher was born in 1931, son of a teacher sent into early retirement by the Nazis. He grew up in Strahwalde, a town in the Brandenburg region. Fascism and the bloody end to the Second World War made a profound impression upon him. He became a Communist. He attended the Academy of Art in Dresden and then, seeing no future for his painting in socialist realism, attended the Deutsche Hochschule für Filmkunst in Potsdam. He held much enthusiasm for films by Dovjenko, Rossellini and De Sica. He finished his film studies in 1960, and his first documentary made for Defa was immediately banned. He received awards at various festivals in 1962 and 1963 for Ofenbauer, an industrial reportage, and for a film, having the programmatic title Stars, on female laborers. Böttcher‘s career alternated between banning and recognition until the disappearance of the GDR. As punishment for films judged as pessimistic and “intimist”, Böttcher was forced to make films about laborers and even party secretaries. The results were paradoxical. He dealt with his characters with great fondness, and  his portrayals were so original and individual that they were often found embarrassing by those who commissioned them. Abroad and at festivals, Böttcher’s films brought honor to the GDR – though they were often never shown there.

Enno Patalas