Simone Signoret performing Jeanine in the French part of The Compass Rose

Recently two articles were published about Ivens` The Rose Compass / Die Windrose (1957) in the Newsletter of the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This institution houses an extensive collection of [East] German films. Last year the Summer Film Institute (SFI) featured screenings of little-known and rare films on the topic COLD WAR/HOT MEDIA: DEFA and The Third World. One of the selected films was Joris Ivens’ The Compass Rose (Die Windrose, GDR, artistic Dirs. Joris Ivens, Alberto Calvacanti; Dirs. Wu Kuo-Yin, Yannick Bellon, Gillo Pontecorvo, Alex Viany, Sergei Gerassimov).Dennis Hanlon and Günter Jordan wrote about it.

The first essay in English is by institute participant Dennis Hanlon. He is an ACM-Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Film Studies and Emerging Media at Beloit College. His research interests are in transnational cinema, as well as politics and film; he will co-host a panel at the SCMS conference in Boston, entitled "The Shifting Valence of Verité: Documentary in Diverse Historical and Cultural Contexts," in which he discusses the Heynowski & Scheumann film I Was, I Am, I Will Be(GDR, 1974, doc.), about Chilean concentration camps during the Pinochet regime. Click here to read Hanlon’s essay.

In addition, the second article is written by documentary filmmaker and film historian Günter Jordan (Film in der DDR, 2009). He shared information about The Compass Rose that he recently found in the film`s production files, which are housed at the Bundesfilm-archiv in Germany. (NB: Jordan`s text is in German.) Click here to read Jordan`s essay.

Please note: The Compass Rose is available at the DEFA Film Library for research in the unsubtitled German version with an English dialogue list from the DEFA Film Library. It will be of particular interest to teachers and scholars engaged with the following topics: Joris Ivens; the global spread of Neo-Realism, especially where it intersects with the socialist realist tradition; cinema novo and New Latin American Cinema more generally; the representation of women and women`s issues in 1950s cinema; East German and/or Soviet bloc internationalism and solidarity with the Third World; and films that combine documentary and fiction film practices.

For more information: http://www.umass.edu/defa/

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