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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
1933. To the German cinemagoing public (increasingly cut off from foreign films as the years went on) things might have seemed to change very little, for the old cycles and motifs were resumed and carried on, or seemed to be carried on, in the familiar manner. Veidt, Pabst, Kortner, and Fritz Lang might be missing but Wegener, Krauss, and Jannings continued familiar roles in familiar vehicles, and story content differed surprisingly little. World War I dramas and military musical comedies, full of barracks humour, held first place in popular favour, but so they had under the Weimar Republic. Outmoded theatrical pieces provided starring roles for the eternal Lil Dagover, the returned Pola Negri, the new star of the Third Reich, Zarah Leander, and for occasional importations. Multilingual films with international casts such as had found favour in the first years of sound were occasionally produced, and French and other European production units continued to employ the matchless technical facilities of the Nazi sound studios. No new styles or story fashions were introduced, although there were occasional revivals or flashes of Caligarisme, as exemplified in the 1936 remake of The Student of Prague. Nationalist semihistorical films, such as those of Luis Trenker and Arnold Fanck continued, but were no more virulent than before. The expected wholesale onslaught of all-out Nazi film propaganda never materialised. It all must have seemed very much the same as before.
This impression can hardly have been accidentally conveyed. By 1938 Bavaria, the last of the independent production companies, had been absorbed into the State trust, and since considerably before that time the content and execution of all German films had been wholly under the control of Goebbels. In part, the policy of producing routine entertainment films derived from the fact that motion pictures had become a factor in the export aspect of Nazi economy; they were used as a means of peaceful penetration, as well as of obtaining foreign credits, particularly in France and South America, and therefore could not
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