Directing feature films in the GDR was largely a male-dominated profession. One of the few female directors was Iris Gusner, whose films explored issues working GDR women faced in their everyday lives. A close reading of her 1984 feature film Kaskade Rückwärts, in particular the focus on sound and on...
This paper explores the benefits of a poetry workshop with first-year Latin@ students at Oregon State University. Over the course of nine weeks, participants met once a week for fifty minutes to analyze and discuss culturally relevant poetry as well as compose and revise their own work. Drawing from critical...
This article examines the strategies used by directors of the East German film monopoly Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) to voice their disapproval of the Berlin Wall.1 My aim is to show how it was possible, despite universal censorship in East Germany, to create films that addressed the wall as an inhumane...
For more than a decade, feature films produced by the GDR film company DEFA have been popular items in Germany. I analyze these films as commodities, arguing that this success by DEFA cinema needs to be read in conjunction with clever marketing strategies employed by the nonprofit foundation DEFA-Stiftung and...
Poetry in the People's Republic of China during the past 30 years has been dominated by works intensely political in nature – a kind of poetry known by the name zhengzhi shuqing shi (political lyric). The function of this poetry was to eulogize current political movements and to generate public...
This translation consists of excerpts from a book on Jiao Juyin, who was a distinguished director of Chinese spoken drama. The selections translated here highlight Jiao's two principal theories: the Theory of Mental Images and "On Nationalizing Spoken Drama." The first represents his adaptation of the Stanislavsky system; the second...
In 2002, a group of Qiang in China's Sichuan Province performed an ancient ritual combining the sacred and the secular. This ritual remains an integral part of the Qiang people's religious and social lives.
Yutian (Cry to Heaven) is the third Chinese stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin between 1907 and 2007. The first, Heinu yutian lu (Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven) by Zeng Xiaogu, was staged by Chinese students in Tokyo in 1907; the second, Heinu hen (Regret of...
Directing feature films in the GDR was largely a male-dominated profession. One of the few female directors was Iris Gusner, whose films explored issues working GDR women faced in their everyday lives. A close reading of her 1984 feature film Kaskade Rückwärts, in particular the focus on sound and on...