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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Politics of Magic: Defa Fairy-Tale Films

The Politics of Magic: Defa Fairy-Tale Films

Shen, Qinna

Paperback

Series: The Donald Haase Fairy-Tale Studies

Literary CriticismMythology & FolkloreFilm & Video Art

ISBN10: 0814339034
ISBN13: 9780814339039
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: Jun 15 2015
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

From Paul Verhoeven's The Cold Heart in 1950 to Konrad Petzold's The Story of the Goose Princess and Her Loyal Horse Falada in 1989, East Germany's state-sponsored film company, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), produced over forty feature-length, live-action fairy-tale films based on nineteenth-century folk and literary tales. While many of these films were popular successes and paved the way for the studio's other films to enter the global market, DEFA's fairy-tale corpus has not been studied in its entirety. In The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films, Qinna Shen fills this gap by analyzing the films on thematic and formal levels and examining their embedded agendas in relation to the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic.

In five chapters, Shen compares the films with earlier print versions of the same stories and analyzes revisions made in DEFA's film adaptations. She also distinguishes the DEFA fairy-tale films from National Socialist, West German, and Disney adaptations of the same tales. Her archival work reconstitutes the cultural-historical context in which films were produced and received, and incorporates the films into the larger narrative of DEFA. For the first time, the banned DEFA fairy-tale comedy, The Robe (1961/1991), is discussed in depth. The book's title The Politics of Magic is not intended to suggest that DEFA fairy-tale films were merely mouthpieces of official ideology and propaganda. On the contrary, Shen shows that the films run the gamut from politically dogmatic to implicitly subversive, from kitschy to experimental. She argues that the fairy-tale cloak permitted them to convey ideology in a subtle, indirect manner that allowed viewers to forget Cold War politics for a while and to delve into a world of magic where politics took on an allegorical form.

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