by bcblessing | Aug 5, 2014 | Benita Blessing, Education, Films, GDR, History
What would you do if a creepy man in a bar claimed that he had sold your guardian angel – but could get it back to you for a price? If you are Mick, the older of the two boys living on the street, you might be wise to this trickster “Landolfi” and...
by bcblessing | Jul 9, 2014 | Benita Blessing, Films, GDR, History, Uncategorized
In the 1985 delightful East German children’s film Operation Violin Case (Unternehmen Geigenkasten, dir. Gunter Friedrich), young Ole finds himself in a hospital bed with a broken leg after crashing during an attempt to fly using a kite as wings. His father...
by bcblessing | Jun 14, 2014 | Education, Films, GDR, History, Uncategorized
Once upon a time, or rather 1955, after a few attempts in the first postwar years to make animation films in Babelsberg – whether silhouette, puppet, or what we think of as animation films – the DEFA Studio for Animation opened in Dresden. The film short A Fairy Tale...
by bcblessing | Jun 3, 2014 | Education, Films, GDR, History, Uncategorized
You don’t need to trot out Red Riding Hood or Snow White to find tropes of erotic desire and deception in fairy tales – look East, or at least East of the Iron Curtain. There you will find the 1961 East German and Mongolian co-production Die goldene...
by bcblessing | Apr 18, 2014 | Education, Films, GDR, Languages, Uncategorized
Few tales provide a better staging for a “good versus evil” post-socialist fairy tale film than Herwig Kipping’s 1991 Land Beyond the Rainbow. Set in an imaginary village, Stalina, in the days leading up to and after the GDR’s brutally repressed 17 June 1953 uprising,...
by bcblessing | Mar 31, 2014 | Benita Blessing, Education, Films, GDR, History, Uncategorized
In the East German (DEFA) 1962 fairy tale film Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen, dir. Götz Friedrich), we meet some of Red Riding Hood’s friends – and enemies. Her best pals are the ever-worried Rabbit and the clumsy and rather childish Bear. The Big Bad Wolf...
