Tag Archives: media pedagogy

Food, Love, and Fairy Tale Films

Posted on by
Reply
Screenshot, "How to Marry a King"

Wedding Banquet, “How to Marry a King”

This still is from the East German fairy tale film How to Marry a King (Wie heiratet man einen König) from 1968, directed by Rainer Simon. It is a good example of the Janus-faced approach that the German Democratic Republic had regarding its films, especially those guaranteed to attract a young audience: On the one hand, the Ministry for Culture praised this film’s attention to detail, from the medieval castle and court set to the division between royalty and “the people.” On the other hand, socialist functionaries complained that young people would miss the subtlety of a king and queen struggling to make sense of love and passion as a means of making sense of the world around them. What particularly worried the powers-that-be was the lengthy banquet scene – reports before the premiere insisted again and again that children would be bored watching the couple eat.

How wrong the critics were – a good feast was and is a treat for the eyes and imaginations of young and old audiences alike. The sheer variety of the dozens upon dozens of dishes, from stuffed pig to exotic fruits make for mouth-watering scenes, must have provided audiences in a country not known for its abundance of food a hint of what could be. Before the Happy Ending comes, a fairy tale must stop several times along the way, and a good banquet for royalty is a satisfying test of the couple’s ability to get along. Does one need to understand the erotic undertones of the King (played by the theater actor Eberhard Esche) placing a cherry on a point of the Queen’s (Cox Habbema) crown to smile at their playfulness? Would a child not be able to laugh at the Royal Couple teasing each other with food?  It is not quite a scene from the cafeteria lunch room, but the use of mealtimes to grab the attention of a cute girl or boy is hardly an adult invention. How much more satisfying – for adults and children – to watch a couple begin a relationship by trying not to spill wine on each other than to see them kissing (too obvious and boring for the grown-ups; too icky for youngsters to suffer through).

Perhaps, though, socialist functionaries were more worried about the food on the Royal Couple’s table than about viewers’ attention spans. Nowhere in the film is there a suggestion that the Royal Couple is evil for having access to seemingly all the food in the world. Nor do any peasants watching the banquet appear to harbor ill-well towards those with more of, well, everything. After leaving the darkened cinema with its sense of magic and possibility, would East German audience members be able to imbue their rather more modest evening meal with passion, fun, even flavor? Love in the time of socialism was certainly attainable – but for most East Germans, it would not be accompanied by a wedding banquet of excess. The film’s popularity and the Ministry for Culture’s dissatisfaction with it might have been two sides of the same Royal Coin: the East German population watched a utopia that still seemed within reach, while the modern-day rulers knew that such dreams, even in 1968, would never come true. How to Marry a King, then, offered the wrong rewards for a socialist Happy End. Exotic foods would never be part of even the most ambitious five-year plans.

A History of the Future that Never Was, but Should Have Been

Posted on by
Reply

interkosmos_posterThis past week I had the opportunity to watch the 2006 fake documentary Interkosmos, part of  Jim Finn’s “Communist Trilogy”. How could one not be taken with the idea of a GDR-sponsored cosmonaut program that got buried when the spaceships went missing? Even better, the female cosmonaut’s codename was “Seagull,” the same codename of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. Tereshkova made it back to Earth and the USSR in 1963, but Interkosmos and its many allusions to the (lack of a) woman’s space program were uncomfortably close to being accurate. After being hailed by Khrushchev as his daughter and proof that socialism was the only system in which women and men had equality, Tereshkova lived to see the USSR’s women’s space program dismantled and her own role changed to being a spokesperson for the destined role of women as mothers and wives. The U.S. did not even bother competing with the Soviet Union on that space race metric.

Fake documentaries call into question the definition of a documentary, authenticity, fake, mocumentary…. the list grows. In the end, I saw Finn’s work as an extension of the German cabaret tradition, or perhaps the medieval court jester, in which the “fool” makes the rest of us laugh with his silliness. But the entire point of being a court jester is to undertake a balancing act of making the court (or the film audience) realize that the fool has told us an uncomfortable truth, without resulting in the death of the messenger. As we laughed at Finn’s imaginary “Seagull,” we also were lamenting her only possibility of resurrection – as a fictitious character on the Big Screen. Tereshkova, after all, had hoped to go to space once again, even as an elderly woman, but was never a serious candidate for any country’s space program. Therein lies one truth of Interkosmos: Seagull was as much a figure of the public imagination as was a film caricature.

Documenting Education

Posted on by
Reply

This semester I taught a grad student seminar called “Documenting Education” at the University of Vienna in the faculty of Philosophy and Education. I had planned on discussing the long-term documentary Die Kinder von Golzow (dir. Winfried Junge; later Barbara Junge and Winfried Junge, 1961-2007), about a school class in the German Democratic Republic. The department then asked that I teach the course in English, and I suddenly needed a new syllabus. I decided to keep the general theme of the course and expand it to ask questions about how media, and movies in particular, portrayed education (broadly conceived) and how people learn in a society. We read standard literature from how movies function pedagogically to whether advertisements on TV do anything but convince people to buy things to the issue of violence in video games and violence in society. We watched movies and clips from productions like The Blackboard Jungle (1955, dir. Richard Brooks), Lady Gaga music/commercial videos, and parts of Michael Apted’s Up-Series (1964-2012).

blackboard jungle movie poster

I had expected students to enjoy the mixture of media pedagogy theory with applying these ideas to films and other media of their choice, and that the use of visual material would help encourage them to read and write with confidence in a foreign language. I had not expected the intensity of our sessions, or the eloquent conversations they conducted on-line throughout the week, or that I would find myself so engrossed in reading their seminar papers that I lost track of time (birdsong is a good indication that the dawn has approached). What surprised me most was the variety of lessons that the students took from the class. Anthropomorphism in Disney films as an extension of Aesop’s fables, comparisons of teaching philosophies in films about the Vietnam War vs. about a school, the evolution of portrayals of lesbianism in the many versions of Mädchen in Uniform, including the 1931 Sagan/Froehlich and 1958 Radvanyi (starring Romy Schneider) versions and the play by Christa Winsloe that the films were based on, and so many more topics than I could have hoped for when I started the course. Every few years the combination of students and topic make for a dream team of a class, and this was one such semester. My only regret? That we did not document our own education during the course.