Abstract
FWO Junior Postdoc -- This project examines a crucial yet neglected chapter of transnational documentary history: the Chile cycle (1974–1986) by East German filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann (H&S). Comprising twelve films and eight companion books chronicling Chile before and after the 1973 coup, the cycle was East Germany's most widely circulated film project, yet remains under-studied. While earlier criticism dismissed H&S as mere Cold War propagandists, this project argues that their Chile films operate as complex sites of aesthetic, political, and intercultural and multimedia mediation. The cycle is treated not as an ideological relic but as an active node in global networks of image production shaping the Cold War's visual imagination. Combining close audiovisual analysis with archival and transnational research, the project examines how H&S's cinematic strategies translated revolutionary struggle into a language of global solidarity. In its analyses, the project integrates Laura Mulvey's concept of "delayed cinema", a multilayered notion of circulation, and Aby Warburg's idea of the Schlagbild. By offering the first comprehensive study of the Chile cycle through films and books, this project repositions H&S within a transnational modernist documentary tradition linking Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Latin America. It thereby contributes to debates on Cold War media, visual ethics, and global cinema's role in shaping political imagination.
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