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 | 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...
by bcblessing | Jan 23, 2014 | Benita Blessing, Education, Films, GDR, History, University of Vienna
The phrase “Nazi fairy tale films” seems like either a bad joke, or else yet another area that Nazis turned into propaganda. Yet, Nazi film adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales represent important examples of children’s films in...
