PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Arts and Sciences: Germanic Languages and Literature

When writing on cinema in the two Germanys during the Cold War scholars have tended to focus on either the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) or the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Within that binary, there is an additional tendency to focus on either fiction or nonfiction film. This has resulted in a set of surprisingly isolated “quadrants” that research can be sorted into: West German fiction, West German nonfiction, East German fiction, and East German nonfiction. Few individual works have attempted to address more than one of these quadrants at the same time. This dissertation connects the two nonfiction quadrants of German Film Studies by placing the nonfiction work of two sets of East and West German filmmakers in direct comparison with one another. The results of these comparisons challenge a number of assumptions about East and West German nonfiction cinema. The first comparison pairs West German Werner Herzog with East German Gerhard Scheumann, along with his longtime codirector Walter Heynowski. The comparison reveals the striking similarities between Herzog's and Scheumann's intensely negative reactions to the cinema verite and Direct Cinema movements in Western nonfiction film and how those positions are expressed in both their writing and their filmmaking. Specifically, I look at Herzog's texts Minnesota Declaration and Vom Absoluten, dem Erhabenen und ekstatischer Wahrheit in comparison with Scheumann's contributions to the East German film trade journal Filmwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen, and I look at the films How much wood would a woodchuck chuck... by Herzog and Meiers Nachlass by Heynowski and Scheumann. All of these works establish cinema verité–style filmmaking as an impediment to revealing “deeper” or “hidden” truths through film. Herzog and Scheumann both reject it in favor of their own styles which allow them to present their own truths to their viewers. The second pairing places two films by West Germa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Harold Herzog Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Valerie Weinstein Ph.D. (Committee Member); Tanja Nusser Ph.D. (Committee Member); Evan Torner Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2023, Germanic Languages and Literatures

In this paper, I argue that the two DEFA-Indianerfilme, Todlicher Irrtum (1969) and Blauvogel (1979), raise questions of Indian-settler coexistence. Through topographically driven analyses of the films that also pay special attention to their racially-mixed and culturally-mixed protagonists, I demonstrate how Todlicher Irrtum suggests that Indian survival hinges on the success of a coexistence founded on enlightenment ideals, and how Blauvogel simultaneously problematizes coexistences under settler colonial and Indian societies, championing instead a third way. My readings of these films are preceded with an introduction to the DEFA-Indianerfilme, briefly touching upon the genre's literary and cinematic roots, and capped by a conclusion suggesting the relevance of these films as didactic guides for contemporary questions of coexistence.

Committee: John Davidson (Advisor); Matthew Birkhold (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Germanic Literature; Native American Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2010, Music

On November 25, 1949, only seven weeks after the official establishment of the new German Democratic Republic (GDR), the German Film Studio DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft) released Figaros Hochzeit, a new film adaptation of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, written and directed by novice filmmaker Georg Wildhagen. This is but one of many transpositions of the Figaro text, however, as Mozart and Da Ponte's Le nozze di Figaro was itself a transposition of Beaumarchais's play. Wildhagen's setting must be viewed as a reinterpretation of the opera, transposed both for the medium of film and for the context of the new, and frighteningly unstable, Soviet Zone of occupation. Within this context, the aristocracy must be eliminated as a positive force; thus Count Almaviva is made more villainous and his wife Rosina is recast as a duplicitous schemer. Meanwhile, Figaro's characterization is significantly altered, and only Susanna remains as a wholly virtuous individual. In Wildhagen's hands, Figaros Hochzeit creates a new text, one that reflects the ideals and anxieties of the postwar Soviet Zone.

Committee: Lois Rosow PhD (Advisor); Danielle Fosler-Lussier PhD (Committee Member); Andrew Spencer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Motion Pictures; Music