I forward the following announcement at the request of Barton Byg, an off-list colleague. For more information about the workshop and screenings noted below, please contact Barton at <[log in to unmask]>. thanks, Marty Norden ------------------------------------------------------------------- Colleagues in the Washington DC area may be interested in the events announced below, December 7 - 8, 2000. Two films will be screened at the Goethe Institute Washington in connection with the AICGS Harry and Helen Gray Humanities Workshop "Moving Images of East Germany: Past and Future of DEFA Film." See below for screening information on Black Box December 7 (With director Tamara Trampe present) and Council of the Gods December 8 (Dir. Kurt Maetzig). Speakers at the December 8 AICGS workshop on the cinema of East Germany include film director Tamara Trampe, East German film scholar Christiane Mueckenberger, Sean Allan (University of Reading, UK), Barton Byg (DEFA Film Library, UMass), Stefan Soldovieri (Northwestern University), and Katie Trumpener (University of Chicago). Contact information for AICGS is below. Thanks, Barton Byg The Goethe-Institut Washington, the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts, and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies cordially invite you to two DEFA film screenings in conjunction with the AICGS Harry and Helen Gray Humanities Workshop Moving Images of East Germany: Past and Future of DEFA Film For film reservations, please call 202-289-1200 x 168 Both screenings will be shown at the Goethe-Institut Washington Goethe-Institut, 814 Seventh Street, NW, Washington, DC Thursday, December 7, 6:30 p.m. Black Box (Der schwarze Kasten. Versuch eines Psychogramms) Germany 1992, 90 min., with English subtitles, Director: Johannes Feindt and Tamara Trampe This landmark film confronts the complex phenomenon of the Stasi legacy in East Germany through the portrait of a psychologist who helped train agents for the state security service. Tamara Trampe, who will be present at the screening, also creates an innovative film structure by interweaving visual documents with aspects of memory and everyday life, idealist socialist aspirations, and the pressures on artists and intellectuals to serve the powerful. Friday, December 8, 6:30 p.m. Council of the Gods (Rat der Goetter) GDR 1950, 105 min., with English subtitles, Dir. Kurt Maetzig (Scenario by Friedrich Wolf; Music by Hanns Eisler) Presented at a regional premiere of the ICESTORM video release just prior to the 90th birthday of the director Kurt Maetzig, the sole surviving member of the "Filmaktiv" that founded the DEFA studios in 1946, Council of the Gods is an outstanding example of the DEFA studios' promising and problematic situation at the outset of the Cold War. Written by the renowned doctor, playwright, and anti-fascist Friedrich Wolf, the film confronts the horrors of the concentration camps, but centers around the complicity of intellectuals, industrialists, and international (including U.S.) corporations. Filmed with impressive talent in the style of "high Socialist realism," the film promotes the Marxist view of Nazism as a result of capitalism, which remained central to the Cold War ideology of the GDR. At the same time, its historical narrative relates to contemporary issues of institutional responsibility for Nazi crimes and claims for restitution. DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the state-owned studios of the former German Democratic Republic, produced over 750 feature films in nearly all genres and thousands of documentaries between 1946 and 1992. Located in the former UFA studios in Babelsberg, DEFA makes up a significant segment of German film history, as the former UFA studios of Babelsberg aspired to the status of a national cinema in their own right. The successes and the failures of this enterprise include works by such major directors as Slatan Dudow, Wolfgang Staudte, Kurt Maetzig, Frank Beyer, and Konrad Wolf. Spanning the periods from expressionism and film noir to postmodernism, with battles over new wave modernism, neo-realism and socialist realism in between, the history of DEFA is also a unique and refreshing window to everyday life in "real existing socialism" in East Germany. For more information on the workshop, please e-mail AICGS at [log in to unmask] ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite