There is a saying among boat owners that a boat is a “hole in the ocean you throw money into.” Suffice it to say, boat owning can be an expensive proposition. In The Solo Sailor (Die Alleinseglerin), a young woman named Christine learns first-hand the joys and sorrows of owning a boat. She has just …
Category: Feminism
Don’t Cheat, Darling!
In 1975, director/screenwriter Jim Sharman, along with co-author Richard O'Brien, had a huge hit with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 1981, they decided to try again with Shock Treatment. It had the same writers, same director, and some of the same cast, but it failed miserably. It was like trying to catch lightning in …
Street Acquaintances
Films about sexual hygiene and the dangers of promiscuity have a grand old tradition in cinema history, going back at least a century with D. W. Griffith’s 1914 film, The Escape (currently lost). Most of the feature films on the subject—at least in America—were made for the exploitation market. The subject afforded a neat way …
Until Death Do Us Part
Until Death Do Us Part (Bis daß der Tod euch scheidet) is the story of a couple whose mad love for each other smashes headlong into the husband’s patriarchal value system. It’s an old story. Throughout history men have been telling women it’s “my way or the highway,” usually with bad results. According to some …
Today is Friday
By 1989, Nina Hagen was well-known in West Germany, but few people there knew anything about her past. She was the operatic, punk demon lady from the far side of the moon spouting mystic mumbo-jumbo and singing like nobody else. Then the Wall fell (Mauerfall) and we Westerners saw a whole other side of her—the …
My Wife Wants To Sing
Excessive seriousness has never been a problem for Hollywood. Designed for the sole purpose of making money, Hollywood films only give us something to think about when it looks like that approach will improve the bottom line. In stark contrast, DEFA was all about making thoughtful, serious films. An approach that led to some criticism, …
All My Girls
As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the communist countries were way ahead of the West when it came to women’s rights. At the time of the Wende, over half the judges in East Germany were women, as were at least a third of the doctors. However, there were certain areas where women were decidedly underrepresented. …
Destinies of Women
Feminism, as a common topic of conversation, didn’t take off in the United States until the late sixties, so it may come as a surprise to some that DEFA tackled the subject in 1952, with Destinies of Women (Frauenschicksale). Communists were early adopters of the principle that everyone should have the same rights, be they …
The Dove on the Roof
In the early 1970s, the East German authorities made yet another U-turn in their attitude toward the arts. Honecker had replaced Ulbricht as the General Secretary, and he wanted to demonstrate that as long as a film “proceeds from the firm position of socialism, there can be no taboos.”>1 Artists, writers, and filmmakers took him …
Divided Heaven
East Germany’s history is surprising, paradoxical, and weird. Just when you thought things were going to lapse into a bleak recreation of 1984, the government would make a U-turn on some policy and relax the rules. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film community, where periods of creative freedom were followed by vicious …
East German Cinema Blog 