Hitler's Hollywood

Documentary on a fascinating subject dealt with a great deal of humanity and intelligence. It comes across to me as an homage to the artists and craftsmen and indeed the moviegoers of the cinema of of the Nazis, not the criminally insane behind the productions. The narration is gentle and enthuses over performances... (maybe too quiet on the soundtrack as the movie sound mix is off ....so Nazi music will burst out at twice the volume!). The commentary with the situation of the absolute lack of any true, honest beauty, or real humour leaves it all so open to derision now. British movies even then despite being propaganda for instance were much more easy going and self-effacing at the time. Most documentaries teach you a thing or two you didn't know but this was much more profound. It took me something I think more about the very nature of human evil. For things to meditate on, there is for instance the crazy toxic glow and melting polychromatic fantasies of the work of the studios at the very point of the nemesis of the third Reich.

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.

I thought that this was very interesting but nothing like as good as Rudiger Suchsland's first documentary, From Caligari to Hitler (2014) which covered the first part of Siegfried Kracauer's book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film published in 1947. There were some of the propaganda films good but there is only so much that you can watch and the rest of the films are rather tiresome with silly comedy, romantic and sci-fi or musicals which were considered my Goebbels as 'entertainment' although maybe they were all for propaganda. I loved the idea that in Nazi Germany 'horror' was not allowed and Goebbels hated the idea that it told of the truth.

Between the years of 1933-1945 approximately 1000 feature films were produced in Nazi Germany. And, considering who was in full control of that country at the time, it's actually surprising to find out how few of these films came even close to being overt Nazi propaganda in their subject matter.

From comedy, to romance, to fantasy, to musicals, and to so much more - This intriguing historical documentary takes a close-up look (through hundreds of film clips) at German cinema as it existed during the reign of terror of the Third Reich in Germany.

(*Note*) - As one closely watches this endless stream of film clips it is difficult to view any of them as being just "harmless entertainment" without wondering whether there existed some sort of insidious hidden message in the stories that were being told.

While the basic subject is interesting, the analysis provided in this documentary is ultimately superficial. Much of the runtime simply functions as a clip show of Nazi-era films with the occasional biographical detail added for a director or actor. The sound mixing is way off at points, with a film's music or dialogue drowning out the voiceover (or voiceunder in this case) narration.