简介

PhD University of Minnesota—Twin Cities Creech is currently revising a manuscript for publication, entitled Mothers, Comrades and Outcasts: East German Women’s Films 1965 and Beyond, which addresses political filmmaking in the former East Germany from the period of the “freeze” (1965) to the fall of the Wall (1989). At a time when the East German film studios (DEFA) suffered from strict political and aesthetic censorship, filmmakers retreated from narratives of overt political critique into the safety of domestic narratives. Creech’s work considers the location of DEFA’s so-called “women’s films” within the context of the freeze, suggesting that during these decades in particular, representations of personal desire and disappointment were used strategically to assert a more covert political critique of real existing socialism. Her work draws on feminist theories of the private/public divide, the male gaze, the female voice and maternal desire to illustrate how these films negotiated viewer needs and desires, state expectations and censorship, as well as artistic goals of creating a critical socialist cinema.