Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945 when the Third Reich collapsed.Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945 when the Third Reich collapsed.Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945 when the Third Reich collapsed.
- Awards
- 1 win & 5 nominations
Rüdiger Suchsland
- Narrator
- (voice)
Rike Schmid
- Voice over
- (voice)
Hans Henrik Wöhler
- Voice over
- (voice)
Hannah Arendt
- Self
- (archive sound)
Wilhelm Furtwängler
- Self
- (archive footage)
Joseph Goebbels
- Self
- (archive footage)
Hermann Göring
- Self
- (archive footage)
Adolf Hitler
- Self
- (archive footage)
Leni Riefenstahl
- Self
- (archive footage)
Susan Sontag
- Self
- (archive sound)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- Crazy credits[Quote at start of film] "Watching old movies is a means of exploring one's past" - Siegfried Kracauer
- ConnectionsFeatures Dawn (1933)
Featured review
You've Told Us What Kracauer Would Have Thought. Here's What I Think.
When the narrator started out by quoting Kracauer to the effect that cinema tells us what a nation is thinking, and then proposed to go through a dozen years of German films, from 1933 through 1945, to find proof of this, I winced. Doesn't a film tell you what the film makers were thinking?
While I have seen fewer than a hundred German films from this period, they have been a diverse bunch; certainly, you can prove any thesis you wish by cherry-picking which films you wish to highlight; and by the end, the film makers had done a lousy job of it. In any case, investigation is not to find confirmation of your theory. It's to find facts that support or disprove your hypothesis. This movie ignores the latter duty.
Even more, there are basic flaws in this view of German cinema in this period. After we discount the fact that people like Kracauer were working on old memories at the time they were writing, the view they offer of German film implies that all that German people looked at was German film. In reality, Hollywood -- America's Hollywood -- had siphoned off much of the talent and money of the industry in the 1920s and a good part of the movies that Germans saw when they went to the cinema were Hollywood movies. When they weren't, they were French and Scandinavian and even Soviet films. Movies were big International business. German film makers weren't showing their own works to a captive audience; Goebbels didn't have everything his own way. These producers were competing against Paramount and MGM and British International Pictures, and UFA couldn't distribute their movies to Chicago and Boise and Adelaide as easily as the competition.
As a result, German film makers often worked in fields that the big Hollywood studios didn't feel worth their effort. In the US, the smaller studios turned out B westerns. Those movies which the narrator claimed reflected the German zeitgeist? Could those be programmers that Louis B. Mayer thought wouldn't play in Peoria, and not worth Culver City's resources?
The movie makes a fuss of the peculiarities of German cinema, starting with their stars, all of whom seemed to me of types familiar from Hollywood or British film studios of the period; looking at clips of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL on the big screen, for the first time in a quarter century, while the narrator talked of the totalitarian use of bodies as geometric assemblies, I noticed their similarities to Busby Berkley shots from Warner Brothers musicals. Surely other people have made the connection before me! This was followed by clips from OLYMPIA. Those reminded me of Berkley's later work with Esther Williams.
In the end, this movie has interesting clips from dozens of movies, few of which I have seen. I want to see them. They look like good movies. Even with potential propaganda. We have spent far too many decades listening to what people who haven't seen them tell us what they mean, and convincing others of the same, as if every film is a unique event, every national cinema is completely walled off from every other throughout history, and this is what they mean to each and every one of us, ever and forever, amen.
No! Give us the opportunity, and we will look at them ourselves, and we will decide what they mean to us. This movie starts off talking about propaganda and mind control. The best way to control some one's mind is to slip him the 'right' answer before you ask him the question. Show me the films, not the clips. Then ask me what I think of them. If you want to tell me what you think of them later and why -- and 'why' does not mean "Kracauer says" -- we can have a bang-up argument about it. Hooray.
While I have seen fewer than a hundred German films from this period, they have been a diverse bunch; certainly, you can prove any thesis you wish by cherry-picking which films you wish to highlight; and by the end, the film makers had done a lousy job of it. In any case, investigation is not to find confirmation of your theory. It's to find facts that support or disprove your hypothesis. This movie ignores the latter duty.
Even more, there are basic flaws in this view of German cinema in this period. After we discount the fact that people like Kracauer were working on old memories at the time they were writing, the view they offer of German film implies that all that German people looked at was German film. In reality, Hollywood -- America's Hollywood -- had siphoned off much of the talent and money of the industry in the 1920s and a good part of the movies that Germans saw when they went to the cinema were Hollywood movies. When they weren't, they were French and Scandinavian and even Soviet films. Movies were big International business. German film makers weren't showing their own works to a captive audience; Goebbels didn't have everything his own way. These producers were competing against Paramount and MGM and British International Pictures, and UFA couldn't distribute their movies to Chicago and Boise and Adelaide as easily as the competition.
As a result, German film makers often worked in fields that the big Hollywood studios didn't feel worth their effort. In the US, the smaller studios turned out B westerns. Those movies which the narrator claimed reflected the German zeitgeist? Could those be programmers that Louis B. Mayer thought wouldn't play in Peoria, and not worth Culver City's resources?
The movie makes a fuss of the peculiarities of German cinema, starting with their stars, all of whom seemed to me of types familiar from Hollywood or British film studios of the period; looking at clips of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL on the big screen, for the first time in a quarter century, while the narrator talked of the totalitarian use of bodies as geometric assemblies, I noticed their similarities to Busby Berkley shots from Warner Brothers musicals. Surely other people have made the connection before me! This was followed by clips from OLYMPIA. Those reminded me of Berkley's later work with Esther Williams.
In the end, this movie has interesting clips from dozens of movies, few of which I have seen. I want to see them. They look like good movies. Even with potential propaganda. We have spent far too many decades listening to what people who haven't seen them tell us what they mean, and convincing others of the same, as if every film is a unique event, every national cinema is completely walled off from every other throughout history, and this is what they mean to each and every one of us, ever and forever, amen.
No! Give us the opportunity, and we will look at them ourselves, and we will decide what they mean to us. This movie starts off talking about propaganda and mind control. The best way to control some one's mind is to slip him the 'right' answer before you ask him the question. Show me the films, not the clips. Then ask me what I think of them. If you want to tell me what you think of them later and why -- and 'why' does not mean "Kracauer says" -- we can have a bang-up argument about it. Hooray.
helpful•4420
- boblipton
- Apr 15, 2018
Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Official site
- Language
- Also known as
- Hitler's Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda 1933 - 1945
- Filming locations
- Berlin Siegessäule, Großer Stern, Berlin, Germany(on location)
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $43,766
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $8,634
- Apr 15, 2018
- Gross worldwide
- $43,766
- Runtime1 hour 45 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.78 : 1 / (high definition)
- 16:9 HD
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