16mm propaganda films (East Germany)

[Caligula81]

The following snippets are cuts from 16mm propaganda short films produced by the DFF, the east german television company. The movies mostly were shown to school classes and workforces. As I have heard the studio worked exclusively with tape reels and operated with an own archive, based in potsdam, close to berlin. The composers are most likely from east germany, poland and czechoslovakia. Some of their work maybe were released by Apollo Sound and Mozart Edition. But all that is not sure, because the archive is virtually locked for the public and maybe the large part of the tapes is already destroyed.

Can anyone identify some of the tunes?

AIRFORCE 1 - 5

PEOPLESPALACE  1 - 4

CUSTOMS 1 - 5

MARINE&HELICOPTER 1 - 4

[Lord Thames]

Track 4 on 'Customs' is a version of 'Reach Out I'll Be There' - not sure who's performing it, though.  Maybe Jurgen Hermann and the Grosses Tanzstreichorchester Des Deutschlandsenders? 

The Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv holds a considerable number of light orchestral recordings from East German radio, so I'd bet they have it - the good thing about German broadcasters is they very rarely get rid of anything, so there's a reasonable chance it's there somewhere.

[Caligula81]

Thanks a lot!

Yes, some of the melodies sounds really familiar to me. In some others cases I would bet on Günther Gollasch. But honestly I'm most interested in the "Airforce" tunes.

"the good thing about German broadcasters is they very rarely get rid of anything"

But was this also the case as the archives of the DFF and DEFA was closed and integrated in the DRA? Do you worked already with the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv? The procedre seems really complicated and expensive to me. I'm hoping to find another source to some of the tunes or a connection to an employer of the former DFF archive for more informations about their production methods. 

I have still countless poor VHS or YT rips of unreleased GDR soundtracks and themes I like to listen in good quality.


Best regards

[Lord Thames]

I would certainly be interested in hearing more of this kind of thing, and seeing if I recognise anything - please post some more!

As far as the DRA goes, I think a friend of mine was considering making contact and exploring their light music collection for her own research, but I don't know whether she got anywhere with them.

[Caligula81]

Ok, I will upload some more stuff soon.

[stackjackson]

What year(s) are these?

[Domi55]

Thanks for posting these, Caligula. The opening track on ‘MARINE&HELICOPTER’ is actually a part of “Ouvertüre” by Stern-Combo Meissen
h**p://youtu.be/3TFctdyo6X0?t=211