The cinema of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), that is, the cinema of its state-run studio DEFA, portrayed gender and sexuality in complex and contradictory ways. This collection addresses the treatment of gender and sexuality in the productions of DEFA across genres (from shorts and feature films to educational videos, television productions, and documentaries) and in light of social, political, and cultural contexts. It also investigates subjects, including films and directors that have received little scholarly attention and nonconformist representations of gender and sexual embodiments, identifications, and practices. Contents: Introduction: Sex and Socialism in East German Cinema - Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart: Hypnagogic Mothers: Gender, Amateur Film Labor, and the Transmissive Materiality of the Maternal Body - John Lessard: Powerless Heroines: Gender and Agency in DEFA Films of the 1960s and 1970s - Henning Wrage: Jutta Hoffmann and the Dialectics of Happiness: A Socialist Star in Close-Up - Victoria I. Rizo Lenshyn: Who Is the 'Third'? Homosociality and Queer Desire in Der Dritte - Faye Stewart: Volatile Intimacies and Queer Polyamory in GDR Film - Evan Torner: Interracial Romance, Taboo, and Desire in the Eastern Counter-Western Blutsbrüder - Heidi Denzel de Tirado: The Desire to Be Desired? Solo Sunny as Socialist Woman's Film - Larson Powell: Ambivalent Sexism: Gender, Space, Nation, and Renunciation in Unser kurzes Leben - Muriel Cormican: Dealing with Cancer, Dealing with Love: Gender, Relationships, and the GDR Medical System in Lothar Warneke's Die Beunruhigung - Sonja Klocke: Reimagining Woman: The Early Shorts of Helke Misselwitz - Reinhild Steingröver: Shame and Love: East German Homosexuality Goes to the Movies - Kyle Frackman: Gendered Spectacle: The Liberated Gaze in the DEFA Film Der Strass - Jennifer L. Creech and Sebastian Heiduschke.
The Danish director Lars von Trier is one of the world's most controversial filmmakers, and arguably so because of the depiction of women in his films. He has been criticized for subjecting his female characters to unacceptable levels of violence or reducing them to masochistic self-abnegation. At other times, it is the women in his films who are dominant or break out in violence.