![]() ![]() Meanwhile, there seems to be no end to hagiographical biographies and self-serving memoirs, including recent films about filmmaking during the Third Reich, that depict the 1930s and 1940s as the golden age of German cinema and offer up its main players as embodiments of film heritage.ĢFilm scholars on both sides of the Atlantic continue to publish theoretically informed accounts on the period. 1 Recent German-language research, which tends to be more archive-oriented, has focused on studio histories (most famously Klaus Kreimeier in The Ufa-Story), the cultural film and animated film, German-American trade relations, Nazi film activities in France, Austria, and Switzerland, as well as the careers of individual actors and directors (Kreimeier, 1996). ![]() Inspired by genre studies, star studies, as well as feminist, psychoanalytical, and poststructuralist theories, more recent works on the star system (Antje Ascheid, Erica Carter), women (Jo Fox), and melodrama (Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Laura Heins, Astrid Pohl) have further enriched our understanding of a national (and nationalist) cinema surprisingly similar to classic Hollywood. Eric Rentschler’s The Ministry of Illusion (1996), Linda Schulte-Sasse’s Entertaining the Third Reich (1996), Lutz Koepnick’s The Dark Mirror (2002), and my own Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (2002) set out to develop a more nuanced understanding of the Nazi entertainment industry, assess generic convention and filmic styles within the continuities of German film history, reconstruct the complicated relationship between Babelsberg and Hollywood, and tease out the contradictions of popular cinema between mass deception, fantasy production, and cultural consumption. 1 For the main book publications in English, see Rentschler (1996), Schulte-Sasse (1996), Fox (2000), (.)ġWhat can still be said about the cinema of the Third Reich that does more than add historical details or refine critical approaches? The 1990s saw a wave of research that effectively did away with the simplistic entertainment-versus propaganda-model and introduced important revisions to the film-as-ideology model prevalent during the 1970s under the influence of the Frankfurt School.
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