WHERE ARE REFERENCE POINTS, senses of belonging, and the loci of memory anchored in the liquidized maps of global neoliberalism? The placeholder of national identity, the nation state, rapidly loses power to supranational entities. Political and economic developments thereby extend into the cultural sphere, as the increasingly globalized commercialization of the image economy renders the national a media affect. In turn, national institutions are eager to project a competitive image in the global market. As they use the formulas of global media for their purposes, they further dissolve the coordinates of the local. Supranational marketization redefines the national by way of global media aesthetics, narrative conventions, and amortization-driven politics. As a result, culture loses its local specificity and its capacity to offer alternative histories and, with that, alternative projections of the future.

Andreas Dresen's 2018 feature film about the East German singersongwriter Gerhard Gundermann, simply titled Gundermann, is one of many examples for the neoliberal paradigm shift. While it ostensibly promotes a local, minority culture, it sidelines that very culture for the chance of an “Oscar.” At the same time, it also pivots Dresen's career from locally specific artistic legacy and its implied political program to a commercially driven cinema that aims at the widest market reach possible. Affecting the grammar of the filmic language itself, it turns a formerly art-driven medium into a marketing device. Gundermann thus highlights with particular salience what is at stake in the globalized financialization of the film industry. Contrary to Dresen's original intentions, the project turned into an Orientalizing biopic over the course of the twelve years he had to fight for funding. As it evolved into a piece that the German state and industry eventually promoted, winning the 2019 German Film Award in six categories, the film has, to turn Dresen's own words on their head, more to do with Hollywood than Hoyerswerda.

Dresen's Gundermann follows a series of successful mainstream films set in East Germany. Starting with Leander Hausmann's Sonnenallee (Sun Avenue; in English as Sun Alley, 1999), followed by Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2009), they span the twenty years that have brought, according to Martin Scorsese, the death of cinema as a film art.