From Film Censorship to Sponsorship : Cinema: Wolfgang Kohlhaase, East Germany’s leading filmmaker, and his contemporaries are emerging from years of artistic oppression. His challenge, he says, is to adjust to the trade-offs of a free market.

From censorship to freedom, from darkness to light. The transformation of East German society--and the impact on artists--since the dismantling of the Berlin Wall has been painted for Western audiences in black and white.

But Wolfgang Kohlhaase, a scriptwriter in East Germany’s DEFA studio almost since its inception in 1949, knows enough to see the shades of gray as the nation’s filmmakers prepare to trade the constraints of state control for the new challenges of the free market.

“It’s a very mixed picture,” Kohlhaase, 59, said this week during an interview in Los Angeles. “There was, of course, a sort of censorship, and our adventure now is to come from censorship to sponsorship, and nobody”--he added with a laugh--”knows if it is any better.”

Kohlhaase, who will speak Sunday at UC Irvine before a screening of his 1979 film “Solo Sunny,” is considered East Germany’s most prominent living filmmaker by Eric Rentschler, head of UCI’s film studies program and a specialist in German film.

“He is without doubt the most important scriptwriter in the German language right now,” Rentschler said.

The state-owned DEFA studio turns out about 15 films a year. While they span a variety of genres, many are reality-based examinations of East German society, “films that, by and large, are seen as vehicles of social development,” Rentschler said. While they can be somewhat provincial and formally uninventive, some of the films, Rentschler added “are actually quite good,” and Kohlhaase “was never what we would call someone to toe the party line.”

Censorship was a fact of life, especially in the mid-1960s when 10 films, including some of Kohlhaase’s, were shelved, not to be seen in public until they were unearthed recently for the Berlin Film Festival. Overall, though, the censorship was largely “indirect,” Kohlhaase said, adding that he was able to make accommodations that allowed him to pursue his vision.

“In a way, you could live with it. I didn’t do all the films I had in mind, that’s clear, (partly) for reasons of censorship. But I didn’t do any film I wouldn’t like to do, the other way around. So it was not . . . that you were forced to do a film that you were not interested in. Nobody could give you an order.”

In one sense, Kohlhaase said, “you are forced by censorship to think very exactly and write very exactly, because you want to come through, even if you compromise.

“On the other hand,” he added, “compromise is part of the movie business. I don’t know the sunny and funny place where you meet a person in the movie business who would say, ‘Take my money and don’t tell me what you are going to do.’ If you know this place, I come over immediately.”

The DEFA studio employs large numbers of filmmakers--30 directors alone are on full-time contracts--which is at once a blessing and a curse, Kohlhaase said. “It started with the good idea of social security for artistic work, but it came out with a very, very immobile and, in a way, counterproductive situation. Because a lot of people took money but didn’t work.”

But “however it was, now it’s over,” Kohlhaase said.

“There will no longer be state-owned film production and we will face similar problems as our West German colleagues. . . . Now we face the same conditions, and some of them are hard conditions. Because, you know, the market is very dominated by American movies.”

Whatever its faults, the East German film structure, with its state-owned distribution, allowed each film a chance to find an audience. “The main problem (in a free-market system) is not to get money and produce films; it’s to get a place and a fair chance at distribution. A lot of films don’t make it,” Kohlhaase explained.

“I’m not saying this because I want to tell you wonderful things about East Germany. I just tell you because it’s strange. It was narrow-minded, but on the other hand you had money for culture. . . . Maybe it was not a comfortable place for art, but it was a place where art was needed. People looked for art.”

The rapid changes in East Germany will take time to absorb--not only intellectually, but emotionally, Kohlhaase said.

“I won’t do a story about all those spectacular things in a direct way,” the lifelong Berlin resident said. “I think about a new story in Berlin and I try to find out what will change and what will not change. Because, you know, the constant moments in life in a way are as important as the changes. Something will be constant. Social reality will be constant in a way.”

Kohlhaase said he has no plans to alter his approach as a writer. “I have to talk about my own experiences and I won’t change my attitude. You don’t choose your time, you don’t choose your country, you don’t choose your parents. . . . Your freedom is not outside those conditions, it is inside those conditions. . . .

“So if you ask me what I will do as a filmmaker--and you don’t ask me on the practical level, how will you get your money--I’m forced to be very modest in my answer. I would say I try to understand, I try to keep my eyes open and to find just a glimpse of truth in all this.”

Wolfgang Kohlhaase will introduce “Solo Sunny” at 7 p.m. Sunday in the McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium at UC Irvine. Admission: $2-$3. Information: (714) 856-5386. Kohlhaase will also take part in a series of film screenings at the Goethe-Institut in Los Angeles Monday through Wednesday. Information: (213) 854-0993.