The Films of Thomas Plenert
Programmed by: Danny Pinto
“Nobody else could photograph people, landscapes, and oceans in motion with such tenderness as our friend Thomas Plenert. A great cameraman. Now he has left us unexpectedly.” – Helke Misselwitz
East German cinematographer Thomas Plenert (1951-2023) was a linchpin of the “lost generation” of East German filmmakers, a wave of youthful and innovative artists whose careers were severely curtailed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the state film studio DEFA. Trained at Poland’s prestigious Łódź Film School and East Germany’s Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, Plenert was as much known for his signature style — warm, composed, and evocative, yet unobtrusive, minimal, and spontaneous — as for his intense, long-lasting collaborative relationships. “Tommy,” as the titans of late East German cinema called him, was known to exert an equal creative force to his directorial collaborators. His creative impulse is tangible across his filmography, which indexes the most interesting films produced in East Germany’s waning years.
Ranging from straightforward Socialist Realist narrative drama and mature, long-shot East German documentary; through Plenert’s illicit work, smuggling underground footage onto state-owned editing tables and shooting uncredited from behind the wall for Wim Wenders; to his ambitious work after German reunification, this retrospective provides a survey of Plenert’s achievements for the first time outside of Germany, exhibiting impulses of rebellion, experimentation, and style within late East German cinema and its aftershocks.
All films courtesy of DEFA Film Library.
Apprehension (1982)
Lothar Warneke · 96m · 35mm
Thomas Plenert’s narrative debut Apprehension was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with director Lothar Warneke. In a nod to Cléo from 5 to 7, the film follows a self-possessed East Berlin psychologist and divorcée, Inge, over the course of 24 hours, as she anxiously and reflectively awaits a breast cancer diagnosis. Plenert’s beautiful compositions contributed to Apprehension’s reception as a crowning achievement of East Germany’s male-dominated Frauenfilm (women’s film) genre.
Tuesday, September 29 7:00 PM
Shunters / Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman? (1984 / 1989)
Jürgen Böttcher / Helke Misselwitz · 21m / 52m · DCP / 35mm
A meditative cinéma vérité-inflected portrait of railyard workers, Shunters was the product of a mature, visually precise, years-long creative partnership between director and painter Jürgen Böttcher and Thomas Plenert. Shunters’ clever subversion of socialist realist norms continues with a psychological bent in Helke Misselwitz’s Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman, which follows outcasts of East German society as they deliver coal for one of the few private enterprises in East Berlin.
Tuesday, October 6 7:00 PM
Wings of Desire (1987)
Wim Wenders · 128m · DCP
Wim Wenders’s iconic Wings of Desire, immortalized by Peter Falk’s star power, is set against striking landscapes of Berlin — improbably, from both sides of the Wall. Though he remained uncredited to avoid the ire of the East German state, Thomas Plenert illicitly captured footage of East Berlin for Wenders, passing off the contraband footage to actor Hanns Zischler to be smuggled to the West.
Preceded by a 35mm trailer for AFTER WINTER COMES SPRING, which plays October 20.
Tuesday, October 13 7:00 PM
After Winter Comes Spring (1982)
Helke Misselwitz · 116m · 35mm
A bittersweet chronicle of a rail journey across East Germany one year before its collapse, narrated by a medley of artfully shot, moving, vulnerable interviews with women across the country. Helke Misselwitz’s Winter Adé, created in close collaboration with Thomas Plenert, is a landmark in the rich East German documentary tradition; the two were touring the film through the US with Plenert’s wife Gudrun when the Berlin Wall collapsed in November 1989.
Tuesday, October 20 7:00 PM
The Wall (1991)
Jürgen Böttcher · 99m · 35mm
East Germany’s finest dissident cameraman (Thomas Plenert) and documentarist (Jürgen Böttcher) metabolize the fall of the Berlin Wall from inside. In a 2026 interview, their collaborator Gerd Kroske underscored Plenert’s obsessiveness while making the film, describing him “emerg[ing] from the eyepiece as if returning from a deep-sea expedition… to find a fixed point of reference again, as if he had just returned from another world.”
Tuesday, October 27 7:00 PM
Herzsprung (1992)
Helke Misselwitz · 87m · 35mm
An allegorical tale of a Black West German arriving in an economically declining East German town in the wake of reunification. Produced three years after the fall of the Wall by DEFA — by then a state film studio without a state, in the throes of privatization and dissolution — Helke Misselwitz’s Herzsprung is a cunning transposition of her mature documentary style into narrative form, supported by Plenert’s cinematographic stylings.
Preceded by a 35mm trailer for BLOND TANGO, which plays November 10.
Tuesday, November 3 7:00 PM
Blond Tango (1986)
Lothar Warneke · 120m · DCP
A rare glimpse into the life of foreigners in East Germany, Blond Tango is Plenert and Warnecke’s adaptation of a novel of the same name by the Chilean author Omar Saaveda Santis, who was among some 2,000 Chilean political refugees welcomed by East Germany after the reactionary coup of September 11, 1973. Blond Tango, restored in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup in 2023, is a fascinating attempt to reconcile magical realism with socialist realism.
Tuesday, November 10 7:00 PM
Homage to La Sarraz / First Leipzig Autumn Salon / Dürer’s Heritage (1981 / 2008 / 1996)
Lutz Dammbeck · 12m / 22m / 59m · DCP
The East German underground artist and dissident Lutz Dammbeck met Thomas Plenert in 1978. Plenert quickly became a close collaborator and ally of Dammbeck and the wider artistic underground of East Germany, “borrowing” cameras and stock from the state film studio DEFA and smuggling underground materials into DEFA’s editing facilities. This three-film shorts program explores the relationship between the legitimate East German artistic establishment and the often-illegal underground.
Tuesday, November 17 7:00 PM
The Net (2003)
Lutz Dammbeck · 121m · DCP
A wide-ranging, media-theoretically ambitious account of the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski), cybernetics, and the history of the Internet, The Net is one of the final collaborations between Dammbeck and Plenert. The film’s mixture of travelogue, interview, and documentary was borne of a lengthy research project which included correspondence with Kaczynski himself and resulted in the publication of a new edition of Kaczynski’s manifesto in Dammbeck’s accompanying book.
