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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
Nibehtngen appeared on a gigantic scale : an ocean of flags and people artistically arranged. Souls were thoroughly manipulated so as to create the impression that the heart mediated between brain and hand. By day and night, millions of feet were marching over city streets and along highways. The blare of military bugles sounded unremittingly, and the philistines from the plush parlours felt very elated. Battles roared and victory followed victory. It was all as it had been on the screen. The dark premonitions of a final doom were also fulfilled/
These are the final words of Dr. Siegfried Kracauer' s From Caligari to Hitler : A Psychological History of the German Film,1 which Paul Rotha has praised in his preface. I share his admiration for this remarkable book, and it is therefore with no apology that I shall refrain from retracing again the course of the German film from 1929 to 1933 because Dr. Kracauer has already done it so well.2 What follows here is some account of the use made by the Nazis of the immensely efficient film plant and personnel which they inherited from the Weimar Film Industry. This report is, for obvious reasons, fragmentary. I venture to present it only because Dr. Kracauer does not deal with the Hitler period since 1933, and because while serving in the U.S. armed forces I had an opportunity to see many captured films not possibly available to film connoisseurs in the Allied countries.
In thus by-passing the films of the last years of the Weimar Republic and referring the reader to Dr. Kracauer, I do not intend to imply that either the films or the period are unimportant to a survey of The Film Since Then. Quite the contrary. The films themselves, the inspirations which brought them into being, and far from least their reception within and without Germany, are of the utmost consequence to the student of the role of film in contemporary life. They cannot be dealt with briefly
1 Princeton University Press, 1947.
2 Vide also, Fifty Years of German Film, H. H. Wolleniberg (The Falcon Press, 1948).
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